This time, the country never suffered 25 percent unemployment or nearly the same amount of misery — thank goodness — but it has endured years of weak growth following the crisis. You can see this weakness in the relatively flat yellow line.

By 2019, G.D.P. per working-age adult is likely to be only 11 percent higher than when the crisis began (barring an unexpected growth surge or a recession). That’s a miserable growth rate over an extended period. Yes, the economy has done fairly well for last year or two, but not nearly well enough to make up for the long slump, especially because growth was also mediocre in the early 2000s. No wonder so many Americans are angry and frustrated.

In their paper, Blanchard (a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund) and Summers (a former Treasury secretary and White House adviser) argue that it’s time for the country to take its long malaise more seriously. How? Economists should question long-held assumptions, as they did after both the Depression and the 1970s stagflation. The Federal Reserve — which has repeatedly underestimated the economy’s weakness — should consider bolder policies, like raising inflation. Congress and the White House should consider spending more money to create decent-paying jobs, despite legitimate concerns about the federal debt.

Instead, many policy makers and economists continue to operate as if the Great Recession never happened and their prior beliefs still hold. They grew up believing that the big economic risk was an overheated economy, because that was the great problem of the 1970s. As a result, many are obsessed with the dangers of high inflation and large budget deficits. And those dangers are real — but they’re not the main dangers facing the economy now.