[vanniv]

Over time, humans produce capital. Insofar as this capital is productively deployed, one should expect the total amount of capital stock to increase.

The stock market represents only a part of the total capital stock, as not all capital is owned by companies, and not all companies are public. But, on the whole, one should expect the stock market to rise over time so long as society is not dying.

[formerkrogemp]

> But, on the whole, one should expect the stock market to rise over time so long as society is not dying.

That's the rub, eh? Are there limits to the growth on a finite planet? Is climate change posing an existential threat? Has technology produced highly scalable and entirely altogether too interdependent international production systems?

[nootropicat]

>Are there limits to the growth on a finite planet?

Yes, but we are 4 orders of magnitude away from them. Adding the potential for space industry, this grows to 13 orders of magnitude. That's ~1000 years of 3% annual growth assuming no efficiency gains, but we still have about 8 orders of magnitude available in computation efficiency, which gives us about 1600 years of 3% growth until hitting 2 on the Kardashev scale. Only close to it limits to growth become a real consideration.

Anyone claiming we are hitting fundamental limits of growth now is a doomer. We may be hitting limits of growth given currently deployed technology, but that's a completely different statement.