Six years ago, Paul Ryan, who has since become the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and the G.O.P.’s leading voice on matters economic, had an Op-Ed article published in The Times. Under the headline “Thirty Years Later, a Return to Stagflation,” he warned that the efforts of the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve to fight the effects of financial crisis would bring back the woes of the 1970s, with both inflation and unemployment high.

True, not all Republicans agreed with his assessment. Many asserted that we were heading for Weimar-style hyperinflation instead.

Needless to say, those warnings proved totally wrong. Soaring inflation never materialized. Job creation was sluggish at first, but more recently has accelerated dramatically. Far from seeing a rerun of that ’70s show, what we’re now looking at is an economy that in important respects resembles that of the 1990s.

To be sure, there are big differences between America in 2015 and America in the ’90s. TV is much better now, the situation of workers much worse. While stocks are high and there is talk of a new technology bubble, there’s nothing like the old euphoria. There is also, unfortunately, no sign that the great productivity surge of 1995-2005, brought on as businesses adopted information technology, is coming back.