We all interact with our physical world to produce services and obtain services. Usually those are for and from other people, so that we can focus on what we're comparatively better at. Money is just a easy way of trading those services. Sometimes we need tools made by others to do what we do best, so we trade a portion of the services we produce (in exchange for our use of those tools). Then the guy we get the tools from can just trade his portion of those services for some other stuff he wants instead.

Here's a concrete example: Suppose I'm a heck of a fisherman, but I have no net. You give me a net, I promise to give you some of my fish that I catch with that net. That's stocks. If you say, "Hey, just give those fish to Shirley--she gave me a few sheep," then the "line" has been created. Secondary equity markets.

So the way I look at it, it's not a big deal. Hardly anybody should really care about the DJIA's value on a day-to-day basis because it's so volatile that one day's movement carries hardly any signal but a lot of noise. Until the tech bubble of the 90's made stock-watching fun for the populace as a whole, nobody really cared, just as they shouldn't.

I'm not sure if the DJIA really says anything about "carrying capacity" either. It's just a price, like the price of macaroni. Really it should've been put in logarithmic scale and adjusted for inflation.

I guess all I'm saying is that the DJIA might look and sound scary and weird, but it's just a normal natural part of human life. You find something like the DJIA in nearly every human society that has existed (just not at this level of sophistication). I don't think anybody seriously uses it to compare our standard of living of today with that of the past, so that's a bit of a straw man.

This post reminds me of this lady:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c6HsiixFS8

The other alternative is the "S-curve", where the growth is logarithmic but plateaus at carrying-capacity. This is the result of populations that recognize their sustainable levels and actively seek to reach it.

It's curious to notice that the proliferation of Internet usage strongly correlates with the growth curve. But looking at the progress of "the line", it's hard to say if we're headed for an "L-curve" (boom-bust) or an "S-curve" (at some carrying capacity).

I personally don't own any stocks (although as cheap as they're getting, I may consider it!) so this really doesn't directly affect me at all either. But anyone who reads my blog knows my feelings on the whole matter ;P