You realize that the scenario you describe is equivalent to "the entire collapse of global civilization that will make previous dark ages look like candy and unicorns."
I'm serious. If the overall economy is "stagnating or even deflationary" for any significant period of time, all of the wheels are going to come off.
(Really want a dark thought? You realize that we've dug up and used all of the easily-available oil, right? When Some Later Generation Gets Its Act Together, they aren't going to have a convenient, cheap source of energy.)
Yes, parent poster said that index funds "seen as this wonderful thing that cannot go wrong." But nobody who knows anything about investing sees them that way. Index funds invest in stocks and bonds, a broad index fund will pretty much mirror the market. But the market, even the market as a whole, is far from safe.
What an index fund does guarantee is that holders of the fund will do better than the average of the "active" investors, who try to pick and choose the best stocks in the index (which for a broad index is basically "the market"). This is because the active investors, as a whole, receive the "market return", but they do so only after investing resources in researching the companies (which index funds don't do) and because the active investors trade a lot, relative to the index fund, so the active investors incur much greater transaction costs. An index gets the market return, but without incurring the costs active investors do, so the index is certain to have a better net return than the average of all active investors. This doesn't mean that index funds are "a wonderful thing that can never go wrong". It's certainly possible for the market to tank, in which case it's little solace for index fund holders that they beat the performance of the average active investor.
> (Really want a dark thought? You realize that we've dug up and used all of the easily-available oil, right? When Some Later Generation Gets Its Act Together, they aren't going to have a convenient, cheap source of energy.)
Plenty of nuclear fuel still around, on earth (uranium, thorium, hydrogen) and in the sun (solar power, wind, etc).
Digitized data is replacing physical storage, and that makes it ephemeral.
How would you read a DVD without a player? Can you rebuild the player, without specs? Can you rebuild the filesystem, or the decoding?
There is plenty of cheap energy that isn't oil--unfortunately, the exploitation of it without oil reserves to bootstrap with may prove impossible. That's the point being made here.
I would argue that while information can't die, expertise and built up production capacity certainly can, and I think that's even more important. I could read all the books I wanted about how to build a plane, but I highly doubt that I'd have the first clue where to start.
Medieval villages didn't use oil either. Have to get past that point. Have some oil-seed crop, sufficient population, trade with large cities. Then - buy antique samples of thorium and uranium, put in a pot - they melt and give off heat. Not too complicated really.
I'm serious. If the overall economy is "stagnating or even deflationary" for any significant period of time, all of the wheels are going to come off.
(Really want a dark thought? You realize that we've dug up and used all of the easily-available oil, right? When Some Later Generation Gets Its Act Together, they aren't going to have a convenient, cheap source of energy.)