Can the market economy still deliver prosperity?

That may seem an odd question to ask when the United States is more than eight years into a sustained expansion and the world’s major economies are finally following suit. Unemployment is at its lowest since the end of the dot-com bubble at the end of the Clinton administration. The stock market’s sugar high, fueled by juicy profits and falling taxes, is being tempered only somewhat by fear that the Federal Reserve will take the punch bowl away.

And yet a broad sweep of statistics reveals a peculiar weariness spreading through the economy. Belying breathless headlines about the fabulous opportunities that technology is about to bestow on society, it suggests that many rich market democracies have lost much of their dynamism. Their companies are getting old, and their labor markets are getting stuck. Productivity growth has slumped. And many workers in their prime are peeling off from the labor force.

The pattern is particularly striking in the United States, where the share of adults with a job remains well below its peak at the end of the 20th century, and productivity growth has trundled along over the last decade at the slowest pace since the end of World War II.

But signs of lethargy are showing up elsewhere in the industrialized world. Productivity is at a crawl in most rich economies. Though not as intensely as in the United States, men in their prime, 25 to 54 years old, are leaving the labor force across the nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. While women have picked up some of the slack, the labor supply across the O.E.C.D. as a whole has flattened.