One big reason for the meteoric rise in the DOW since the early 1980s-IRAs. People weren't satisfied with the returns given by banks (and with good reason). As a result, they flocked to the stock market big time, mutual funds sprang up, in time questionable investments like CDOs and hedge funds also did. We all know the rest. IRAs aren't going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, there will probably medical IRAs and other things available soon. The government started IRAs because they knew Social Security was in trouble. They'll probably do something similar with medical IRAs because Medicare is in even worse trouble. Long term the market may well start another meteoric rise. Fact is people have no place to put their money now. My savings account is giving 0.02%! The trick next time around will be to either get out before the bubble bursts again, or take advantage of market volatility by buying and selling frequently. IRAs and other tax-deferred vehicles make this much easier. You don't pay taxes every time you trade, and more importantly your tax situation doesn't become ridiculously complicated due to all those taxable trades (the reason I personally stayed out of stocks except for my IRAs).
As for when things will start to get better, I'd say we're in for a rough ride until 2020 at least. The last depression lasted that long, and it took WWII to pull us out. Of course, there are a lot of other factors here which didn't exist 80 years ago. A revolution in robotics, which is in essence very low-cost slave labor, could well make capitalism more or less obsolete.
