What if the 'New Normal' is the actual normal?

The US economy may have grown by 3% in the third quarter and has the best growth rate of all the developed economies in the world. But that is not the whole picture. From 1947 to 2000 the US economy grew by an average of 2.2% but from 2001 it has grown at an average rate of only 0.9%. Financier, Mahamed El Erian coined the term "The New Normal" to describe the continuing slow rate of growth following the financial crisis of 2008. Slow growth means that wages are not rising, so that 81% of people in the US are stuck with the same or falling wages, 97% in Italy, 70% in Britain and 63% in France. This has been labeled as "secular stagnation". Productivity growth is not rising as predicted despite enormous changes in technology, prompting some economists to argue that digital technology is not a 'game changer' like indoor plumbing, air travel and electricity were. A lot of the digital economy is given away free to consumers which, says Ricardo Hausmann, makes it difficult to calculate productivity. Nouriel Roubini lists 4 reasons as to why economic growth is stuck in a rut. It maybe difficult to measure productivity of technological changes, there is usually a lag between advances in technology and improvement in productivity or the aging populations in richer countries means that productivity will never improve. The danger is that people will get fed up and demand greater protection against free trade. So which is it? If stagnation is due to low demand, because people are paying off their accumulated debt, or deleveraging, then governments can stimulate demand by increasing fiscal expenditure. If improvement in technology is making little change in the way we live then its supply stagnation and there is not much anyone can do and we had better get used to permanent low growth. There is another danger. As we get increasingly connected to an internet of things, or IoT, we are also open to cyber attacks of the sort we saw on Netflix, Twitter and Paypal a few days back. This kind of attack will get more common as more gadgets get connected because it will be impossible for people to upgrade security constantly. Apparently, technology did not make much change in prosperity until 1800 when growth took off almost vertically in Europe and the US. This would also coincide with a period of colonisation of the world by European countries, which allowed them to plunder resources, and the use of slave labor in the US. That kind of bullying is not going to work in today's world, as the US and Europe discovered recently. What about India? Perhaps 7% growth is the 'New Normal' for us. But is it enough?