The American dream is dying for millions of families and individuals. We are caught up in our worst economic recovery since World War II and our trading world is shrinking. Global growth has failed to return to the rate it averaged before the Great Recession. Containers pile up in the world's ports. The energy business is in deep recession. Bank stocks are hammered. Business investment is lousy. China slumps. Crude oil prices are so low U.S. and Canadian producers lose at least $350 million a day at current prices, according to The Wall Street Journal. Consumers are buoyed somewhat by lower gasoline prices but even they are boosting savings in anticipation of poor economic conditions to come. And nobody knows what to do.

Our GDP grew at just 1.0 percent annually in the fourth quarter of 2015, and the growth estimate of the first quarter of 2016 is likely to come in soft due to seasonal adjustments. For example, real growth in retail sales was only 1.4 percent because the previous bad winters had distorted upwards the estimates of perceived improvement.

The key indices wilt. The number of employed has grown by over 13 million since February 2010, but to make up for the recession and keep pace with the population growth, we would have needed 17.5 million more jobs. Manufacturing added only 30,000 in 2015 after adding more than 200,000 in 2014. Hourly pay rises of about 2.5 percent over the last half dozen years are well below the 3.8 percent before the financial crisis of 2007-08.

Steady work is no longer an assured way of life, and when a family grows concerned about future income or job prospects, it typically defers discretionary spending. It is this spending contraction that explains virtually all the wobble in the economy. It has confounded historical expectations that a very sharp recession is followed by a very sharp recovery. Not this time. As former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has noted, even with the Federal Reserve's aggressive monetary policies, "the recovery … has fallen significantly short of predictions and has been far weaker than its predecessors."

Summers calls it "secular stagnation." He calls for an expansionary fiscal policy that could reduce national savings, raise neutral real interest rates and stimulate growth. Even today, we are at a time of low real interest rates, low materials prices and high construction unemployment. He argues, with good reason, that this is the ideal moment for a large public investment program to improve our national infrastructure. The economics of it are plain especially when net government investment is lower than at any time in nearly six decades, Summers points out. We all know how that looks and feels in terms of our public infrastructure environment, which today is so worn down by comparison with competitors. However, we are not so aware of the costs of lost efficiency. We have been more concerned about deficits placing a larger burden on later generations, but as Summers says, those future generations will be better off owing lots of money in long-term bonds at low rates in a currency they can print than they would be inheriting a vast, deferred infrastructure maintenance liability. At a time when long-term U.S. interest rates are at near record lows, we should take advantage of this to initiate public investment. Business investment has been weak throughout this expansion, as CEOs seek to protect their balance sheets until they see signs of growth resume.

Summers argues that the main constraint on the industrial world's economy today is on the demand- rather than supply-side. "Measures that increase potential supply by promoting flexibility are therefore less important than measures that offer the potential to increase demand, such as regulatory reform and business tax reform," Summers writes. Without the release of energies, demand and innovation won't happen in good enough time to change the prospects for millions.

For four decades now, the American middle class has steadily declined, according to the Pew Research Center. Each decade has ended with a smaller share of adults living in middle-income households than at its beginning. What's more, according to the Census Bureau, nearly seven million people have dropped below the poverty line since 2008, to a total of almost 47 million Americans in 2014, the latest available data.

Today we have stagnant wages, rising inequality, a sinking middle class and young people crushed by debt. Their standard of living has been reduced not only by long bouts of unemployment and underemployment but by insecure employment and the long-term stagnation of wages. For them the American dream is dying. Some 72 percent of the electorate feels the economy is still in recession, according to the American Values Survey released in November, even though economic analysts date the Great Recession as having ended mid-2009. When a family grows concerned about its future income or job prospects, it cannot stop paying rent or other necessities, but it typically defers spending on durable goods such as cars, appliances, luxury items and vacations. These categories amount to about 10 percent of total household spending but they explain virtually all of its variations over time.

U.S. citizens believe that this is an exceptional country, and it is – but we have to do better for them. The U.S. ranks among the worst in the world on income inequality by any measure and appears to be getting worse.

Despite the fact that debt-to-GDP ratios have risen sharply, from 41 percent in 2008 to 74 percent in the United States today, long-term interest rates are still remarkably low, with 10-year government bond rates at around 2 percent in the United States, around 0.5 percent in Germany and around 0.2 percent in Japan, as of the beginning of 2016, according to Summers. Such low long-term rates present an opportunity for investment in the future, he argues, but the low inflation and low interest rate markets suggest "normal" conditions will not soon return. The U.S. has been doing better than Europe. As the locomotive to pull the world out of the dump, the U.S. has been running on half steam and the scary prospect is now of the U.S. being afflicted with long-term Japan-style stagnation.

Americans see the United States as a super-power but it is living on borrowed glory. It lags behind in education. The U.S. ranked 27th in mathematics and 17th and 20th respectively in reading and science, according to the OECD, at a time when the link between higher education and graduate readiness for today's rapidly changing workplace is critical. No wonder only 11 percent of U.S. business leaders strongly agree that recent graduates have the skills that their business needs, according to Gallup.

This is a time when the percentage of American adults participating in the labor force has fallen to its lowest point in nearly four decades. This suggests high levels of "shadow unemployment," that is large numbers of people who are unemployed and have stopped trying to find work, dropping out of the labor force all together, and thus no longer participating in official unemployment statistics.

The global labor force, which has been growing at 1.8 percent per year since 1960, downshifted to just 1.1 percent since 2005, according to Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets and global macro at Morgan Stanley Investment Management and author of the forthcoming book "The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World."

"The probability of an economic boom is much lower in the absence of strong population growth, and even in many parts of the developing world, population growth is slowing or reversing. Over the next five years, the working-age population growth will likely dip below the 2 percent threshold for all major emerging economies. In Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico it is expected to fall to 1.5 percent or less. And in China, Poland, Russia and Thailand, the working-age population is now expected to shrink. … Countries with shrinking working-age populations have found it nearly impossible to produce strong economic growth," Sharma writes in Foreign Affairs.

In much of the developing world population forecasts are discouraging. In the next five years, "the number of working-age people is expected to remain static in France, shrink a little in Spain and contract at the rapid pace of 0.4 percent a year or more in Germany, Italy and Japan," Sharma writes. In the U.S., the estimate is that we will have a positive working-age population growth of 0.2 percent, according to Sharma. In a world with fewer young people, economic growth will be harder to come by.

America is a country whose future always depended on shared strength, security and opportunity. But today, according to a CNN/ORC December survey, 75 percent are dissatisfied with the way our government works. According to Pew's November survey, 59 percent think their government needs major reform, putting public trust in government among the lowest levels in over 50 years, with just 19 percent saying they trust the government to do what is right; 74 percent say public officials put their own interests ahead of the nation; and 55 percent say ordinary Americans would "do a better job of solving problems" than the people whose job it is to do so.