The Year of the Simpler Gadget
The National Bureau of Economic Research hardly stunned the nation this month when it announced that the United States had been in recession since December 2007. And, as it turns out, the buyers of consumer electronics could very well have been a leading economic indicator. Over the last year, they chose to buy two inexpensive and simple products, the Wii and the Flip, over competing gadgets bristling with more features.




