Looking for relief from the doom and gloom surrounding the fall of dot.coms on Wall Street? A couple of new books might revive your optimism about the Internet age. MetaCapitalism promotes the idea that the long economic expansion of the 1990s was merely the prelude to a longer hyper-growth era that will make businesses more productive and create a prosperous worldwide middle class.

Mr Grady Means, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers wrote the book with Mr David Schneider. The two contend a Moore's Law of economics will create geometric rather than arithmetic growth, allowing the world's wealth to increase tenfold in less than a decade.

Their view dovetails with that espoused in Digital Capital, a book released in May in which consultant Mr Don Tapscott says emerging online business networks are creating a new kind of "intellectual capital" that will be to the digital economy what money, land and physical resources were to the industrial and agrarian economies.