as the economic success of the 1990's largely an illusion? Was it all little more than an elaborate stage set propped up by a speculative bubble in technology, by cheerleaders for the new economy who wildly overestimated the potential for growth and by phony accounting that only temporarily hid huge losses at companies like Enron and WorldCom, which have since gone bankrupt?

To many people, in retrospect, it certainly looks that way.

But just as Americans fell victim to "irrational exuberance" in the late 1990's, exaggerating the underlying strength of the economy, today's equally fashionable pessimism appears overdone as well. And that means there are still plenty of good reasons to be confident about the health of the American economy over the next decade.

"The 90's were not quite as good as people thought in 1999," said Peter R. Orszag, a Brookings Institution economist who was co-editor of a new book, "American Economic Policy in the 1990's" (MIT Press). "But the vitality of the U.S. economic system remains intact. It is very dangerous to extrapolate from a temporary economic downturn to assuming that we are facing a dismal decade ahead."

These days, it is easy to forget just how much the economy accomplished in recent years.

Even after the latest revisions shaved earlier estimates, the annualized rate of productivity growth — which measures our ability to improve the nation's standard of living by producing more in each hour of work — appears to have been a robust 2.6 percent from 1995 through 2000. And despite the usual tendency to fall sharply in a recession, those productivity numbers are holding up well through the current slowdown.

Contrast that with the meager annual productivity growth of just 1.4 percent from the early 1970's to the early 1990's. Under relentless pressure from highly competitive markets and with the help of continued advances in technology, American business can be expected, most experts now agree, to continue to achieve average productivity gains of at least 2 percent a year.

Those gains have translated into real benefits for nearly all Americans. The official unemployment rate fell below 4 percent in the late 1990's for the first time since the 1960's, reaching the state of economic nirvana that experts call full employment, in which essentially any working-age person who wants a job can find one. The unemployment rate has since risen, but it remains considerably lower than at comparable stages in past economic cycles.

Wage increases for the average worker, whose income had stagnated in real terms for two decades, easily outpaced the low rate of inflation from 1993 through 2001. Poverty fell sharply as those at the bottom of the income ladder shared in the gains for the first time in a generation. Many more people became homeowners and, yes, investors, enjoying improvements in personal wealth that even with falling stock prices remain far above the levels of a decade ago.

"The 90's still look like quite a good decade," said Alan Blinder, a former top official at the Federal Reserve who was co-author of "The Fabulous Decade," a chapter of a book published this year by the Russell Sage Foundation, "The Roaring Nineties: Can Full Employment Be Sustained?"

"Not as fabulous as some thought at the time," added Mr. Blinder, who teaches economics at Princeton University, "but fabulous nonetheless."

There is no reason to expect a repeat of the runaway boom of the late 1990's, in either the real economy or the stock market. But the lessons to be drawn from the achievements of the decade suggest that the American economy is capable of considerably more than most experts thought only a few years ago.

"The 90's showed that full employment is an achievable goal without running the risk of higher inflation," said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the labor-supported Economic Policy Institute in Washington, who is co-author of a new book on the subject. "There were a lot of mainstream economists who didn't think we would ever be capable of doing that again."

In tight labor markets, the benefits of economic growth are more broadly shared, particularly among lower-skilled workers who suddenly become a lot more attractive to employers.

The best thing about the market's collapse is that it turns attention back to the things that really matter in the economy.

"The big illusion about the 90's was in the stock market, which came to believe its own hype," Mr. Blinder said. "But for the essentials — for jobs, wages and productivity — it was very real indeed."