“Although the framing was deliberately provocative, it is undeniably true that index funds are free riders on the work done by active managers, which has an aggregate societal value—something even Jack Bogle admitted. If everyone merely invested passively, the outcome would be “chaos, catastrophe,” Bogle noted a few years before passing away. “There would be no trading. There would be no way to turn a stream of income into a pile of capital or a pile of capital into a stream of income,” Vanguard’s founder observed in 2017.20 Bogle rightly pointed out that the likelihood of such a scenario—where everyone was merely invested in an index fund—was zero.”