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CarlShulman comments on Prediction is hard, especially of medicine - Less Wrong
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The big story of our times is Great Convergence - formerly dirt-poor 90% of human population rapidly increases their wealth, health, political freedoms etc. This is accompanied by stagnation in the formerly super-wealthy 10% of human population (and there are some models claiming to explain why these two processes are linked).
Technology progresses extremely rapidly, rich world stagnation simply means rich countries are further behind technological frontier than they used to be. That's all.
The world on average is progressing extremely rapidly. Average lag behind technological frontier is diminishing rapidly. What's the point in throwing ridiculous amount of money on saving one life of old person in wealthy country, if you can make hundreds of undercapitalized people in poor countries productive for the same price? There's no logic in doing so, so it is not done.
It will take only 100-150 years for Great Convergence to complete. By simple extrapolation adoption of new technologies should accelerate sometime before it happens.
This story would be more plausible as an explanation of slow medical progress if there hadn't been big increases in medical R&D spending and employment (on first-world diseases) over the last 40 years, and massive growth in overall medical spending relative to GDP. It doesn't explain the declining rate of drugs developed per dollar invested in pharma R&D, or the broader failure to translate research spending to health gains.