Most of those people are still relying on the stock market to sustain exponential growth. If my investment strategy is based purely on dividends, then it's tru

Most of those people are still relying on the stock market to sustain exponential growth. If my investment strategy is based purely on dividends, then it's true I do not require share prices to grow. But if I am going to grow my portfolio be reinvesting my dividends, then I need more shares that I don't already own to be created so that I can buy them, which means the total market cap of companies will have to have increased. And, after I've grown my portfolio, I'll be looking to reinvest a correspondingly larger quantity of dividends, so that market cap will need to have grow by a correspondingly greater amount. If you want compounding returns, whatever form those returns take, you need sustained exponential growth in the economy.