(This paper was produced with Bank of England typesetting equipment. I do not have a usable Postscr*pt version to distribute electronically, but the Bank of England has kindly provided a pdf version for which I thank them.)
When an economy grows, its patterns of production and consumption---those things valued by the people living there---systematically change. This paper describes one such large-scale evolution, namely, the increasing weightlessness of aggregate output across advanced economies. In all fast-growing, successful countries, growth in information technology has contributed positively both to increasing weightlessness and to economic growth. In the sample studied here, the richer the country the higher the growth contributions of information technology and services; in no country has manufacturing, traditionally construed, continued to be as important.