The rise of indexing parallels the cutthroat, winner-take -all nature of the post-2008 stock market and economy where winners like Google, Amazon, Visa, and Facebook, for example, are bid higher and higher to no end and companies that show slightest weakness are culled quickly. Even blue chips are not immune to this. Walmart stock crashed 30% in 2015 in an otherwise flat market due to some minor weakness in store sales. In the 80's and the 90's, large funds were more willing to put money in sub-par stocks & sectors, investing indiscriminately, but post-2008 capitalism has gotten much smarter and discriminating. That means lots of losing stocks and few winners, leaving investors with one of three choices: be lucky or skilled enough choose the handful of winning stocks, choose index funds, or choose active management, the latter which tries to beat the first two but almost always fails and has really high fees. The second choice is the most viable.