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Comment by chrismealy | Hacker News Reader

The stock market isn't some immutable thing. It's the product of economic and social forces, the share of income given to capital and labor, international politics, etc. Basically stocks are a convenience for rentiers that the little people are allowed to access. There's no reason to expect the social forces that underly market returns will deliver the same returns in the future.

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Not sure why you're being downvoted, I agree. One hundred and a bit years of human history is a small sample size. Capitalism and the explosion of the human population has unleashed explosive and rapidly transforming forces, there's no reason to assume that those forces will continue to exhibit the same characteristics 40 or 50 years from now.

>There's no reason to expect the social forces that underly market returns will deliver the same returns in the future.

Except human nature is the same, economics is the same.

Except that people didn't live under a capitalist economic system with stock exchanges, shares, and private property for the 10000 years of settled urban existence before the 18th century, so, yeah -- apparently "economics is the same" isn't true.

I suggest you read A Splendid Exchange. Although humanity didn't have the exact same economic system as today's, it's a mistake to think there weren't complex systems in place in the past.

I never said anything of the sort that there were not complex systems in place. Precisely because I can see that I can say that the system we have now is not inevitable, immutable, or eternal.

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