Do Stockholders Look Forward to a Decade of Very Low Returns?

In spite of completely missing the crash of the stock bubble in 2000-2002 and the housing bubble in 2007-2010, people tend to think that the big actors in the stock market have great insight into the economy’s prospects. While I won’t claim to have a crystal ball that predicts the future of the economy (I had warned of both of those crashes), I did learn arithmetic in third grade.

There are some simple and important statements we can make about future stock returns, based on nothing more than...