If anyone should see the big picture clearly, it should be those in the financial community. Readers understand that growth is not necessarily uniform on all timescales - the S&P 500 grew in value by 2,400 percent from 1975 to today. No one disputes this, even though an investor at the peak in 2000 would have seen no real gains until 2013. During that "pause," sometimes called the Lost Decade, investors weren't all saying that economic growth had stopped for all time and that further investment in stocks was futile.