Moving toward the fifth year of this recovery, significant shortcomings of the economy are starting to look less like a slow recovery than the effects of something larger and with greater staying power than any economic downturn, even if that downturn was reasonably called the Great Recession. The effectsof what we have called the Big Shift arestarting to become more problematic fordeveloped countries, and the shrinking of wages and salaries that has resulted from that economic shift is causing systemic problems. What will happen if another cyclical downturn occurs before the economy returns to its pre-Great Recession level? For one thing, it would be a signal of the kind of economic restructuring that the Big Shift is forcing. With this in mind, is it possible that the recent run-up in the New York Stock Exchange is another round of irrational exuberance?