During the last 150 years, the majority of people had the opinion that there will be no more growth and no more jobs and no more possibilities. Because of the current move into automatisation and artificial intelligence, many boring jobs will be obsolete in the next few years but many new possibilities and jobs will develop. I'm extremely bullish for the world, for my kids and also for the US. Nowadays people can, for example, make more money with a blog than as a director in a big corporation. That means valuable information and knowledge will be paying extraordinary well. We are living in the best moment of the history of mankind and the US is on top of that still one of the very best countries to be.
Again, what another poster sees as a huge positive, I see as a negative, at least
for stock prices. Maybe a lot of the jobs that have been lost were in fact boring, but with a broad base of well-paying jobs there were many millions of people that had discretionary income to spend. When interest rates fell dramatically in the early 1980s and stocks took off, a lot of those people jumped on the investing bandwagon and we had the sensational performance of stocks in the 1990s. Since then stocks have done fine if you were able to average in over time. In that case years like 2001-2002 and the late 2008/early 2009 period allowed one to grab shares at a discount (assuming your job wasn't lost in those recessions).
But let's take my situation. I'm almost 58 and easing into early retirement/working part time. My ability to make money in my chosen line of work has been severely diminished by technology (more accurately it has been diminished by the
culture that widely-available technology has created). I have no legitimate gripes about that because I had my moment to make and save money and I did a decent - if not spectacular - job of it. Anyway, here I am on the cusp of living off my nest egg and I see the general outlook for stocks as poor. Not everyone is in the position of having a job with a massive salary for years to come. The underlying fundamentals of the stock market
right now are important to people in my position.
To my mind the main driver of stock gains since 2009 has been super low interest rates, but that driver has now used up most of its power. Rates may indeed stay low for a long time but flat & low rates are not going to drive stock market gains by themselves. We'd have to see tremendous growth in productivity and profits for stocks to do great over the next 20 years or so.
FWIW, I do have a portion of my investments in stocks. I think that's always prudent just in case I am wrong and they are the best performing investment option over the next 20-30 years.