# lost decade (stalled)

*Ordinarily means:* a period of about ten years in which a country's economy fails to grow

A past period in which a collective self's window was narrower than its own model had it, so the time reads as taken from it.

- Computed level: L19 (depth in the emergence graph, not abstraction)
- Status: published  ·  Domain: agency

## Emergence
**Emerges from:** [past](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-past.temporal), [period](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-period.temporal), [collective self](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-collective-self.shared), [read](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-read.information), [window](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-window.range), [narrow](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-narrow.spatial), [time](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-time.dimension), [take](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-take.acquisition), [narrative](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-narrative.self-story), [model](https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-model.representation)

**Through:** The narrative measures the period not by where the group ended but by where its model said it should have been; the gap is read as time removed from its trajectory rather than as time lived.

**Novel properties:**
- a loss measured against an expectation
- time read as taken, not spent
- a period named by what did not happen

## Examples
- Japan's economic stagnation after its asset bubble burst in the early 1990s is widely called its 'lost decade'. *(economics)*

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*Canonical: https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-lost-decade.stalled*  
*Structured data: https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-lost-decade.stalled.json*  
*Every definition provably resolves to space, time, energy and pattern.*