We looked to historical long-run returns for support
of this intuition, but in fact, Figure 2 reveals a striking
result: Since 1900, the correlation between long-run economic growth (as measured by real GDP growth
per capita, a standard proxy for a country’s productivity
growth) and long-run stock returns across 16 major
markets has been effectively zero.3 The slope of the
line in Figure 2 is actually slightly negative.