What a lot of people are missing is "the market" can't grow faster than "the economy" over the long term. There has been a huge influx of money into the stock market as an increasing percentage of people hoping for historical returns. Causing people to chase after ever lower returns. It's gotten so distorted that the 'smart money' practically ignores growth in favor of other games.

HFT is the perfect example of this as they don't chase growth. There goal is to tax cash flows and market inefficiency. So, they leave low churn stocks like Berkshire Hathaway alone in favor of cheap stocks with a lot of turnover. If you keep your stock for an average of 10 years then HFT is meaningless to you. But, with hedge-funds often doing quite a bit of trading they can extract money without you realizing your trading.

In the end it's yet another reason 401k's are growing a lot slower than many people predict. Sort of like how people expect the economy to 'recover' when it was what there remembering is an unsustainable bubble.

PS: And of course Dividends are something of a special case in the above analysis.