Scott Sumner describes the Even Greater Stagnation. It's interesting to try to square the reality of very slow growth in developed economies with the widespread notion that we are living in a time of rapid technological change. My intuition is that there really is a lot happening in science and technology, but a combination of supply side and demand side problems are preventing new discoveries and technologies from becoming marketable products. It's also probably true that overall scientific and technological progress is slower than it used to be (hard to measure objectively, I think.)