On the contrary, they are a leap forward into an age of abstraction. They address the reality that what people really want is for their capital to increase, per

On the contrary, they are a leap forward into an age of abstraction. They address the reality that what people really want is for their capital to increase, period. As such, if you can do an index fund where everything is going to increase because it's part of the index fund and everybody knows index funds beat the market, the consensus opinion is that if you're in the index fund your value is going to increase, and therefore the companies listed can go about their business because their values increase thus justifying them being in the index fund. Complete abstraction. Always has been, this is just the codification of it. The future catastrophe isn't so much the companies becoming more irresponsible than they already are, because they never particularly were. The catastrophe is more 'the concept of capital becoming meaningless', a sort of conceptual Reichsmark inflation where the numbers we talk about steadily become meaningless and absurd.