The immediate macroeconomic problem is how to cure the hangover from the housing bubble in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century – the still-incomplete recovery in the United States and the non-recovery in Europe. But even a straightforward success that restored the growth rate experienced in the 1990s would not restore the world as we thought we knew it.
Do we also suffer from Bernanke's global savings glut, produced by ill-coordinated national policies toward recovery? His prescription is reform that gives governments better incentives to pull together in harness. Or is it the hangover from Rogoff's supercycle of imprudent debt accumulation that can only be remedied by painful deleveraging while building an effective macroprudential regulatory framework to prevent a repeat performance? Or, as Krugman counsels, is the deeper problem our reluctance to use the full panoply of monetary policy and fiscal tools that Keynes and his disciples developed? Or, à la Summers, are our problems more fundamental, requiring a paradigm shift in the means and ends of economic policy?
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Finally, however, there are signs that economists (the smart ones, anyway) are learning that past shocks doesn't tell us much about future ones. They are instead painting possible "if these trends continue" scenarios of major transformations.
Thus, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics speculates about a scenario in which wealth inequality brings about the end of the social democratic era that began at the start of the 20th century. Robert Gordon of Northwestern looks toward the likely end of the buoyant GDP growth brought on by the second industrial revolution in the late 19th century and Eric Brynjolfsson of MIT projects a future in which our principal economic problem is not scarcity, but finding useful and meaningful work to do.