Considering the devaluation of the USD (QE I,II, Twisting and soon to be III), inflation including food/energy, and decline in wealth in Silicon Valley via falling property values, I would say yes.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-04-25/tech/31396730_1_housing-market-housing-values-zillow-home-value-index
Except that, as the article notes, in the areas with the big companies (and these being some of the biggest companies
in world history,) they're actually
rising. (I'd be interested in seeing some more recent data, though, now that Facebook's "looming IPO" has suffered hilarious performance issues.)
You say that the commoditization of humanity is tied to poor economic health and impeded growth, but I'm just not seeing that. US-based companies have led the way in this for years, and we're certainly not among the poorest nations, flagging though we are. And for two examples, Google's creeping dominance of the information-trafficking business and Facebook's out-and-out commoditization of human relationships both started
long before the 2008 crash (I don't know exactly when you could point to for Google, but the launch of GMail could be seen as a starting point, and that and Facebook both launched in 2004.)
In any case, your premise (if I'm reading it correctly) basically boils down to the idea that greed is a function of lack, which I think is essentially contrary to all observed behavior in
all of human history. If people and companies only sought to acquire more than they have because they don't have enough, then we should see people and companies above a certain level of wealth (not necessarily subsistence-level, maybe more like what you could call "luxury-level") being by and large content with what they have, while anybody below that line would be, as a rule, striving to reach that point.
That's not what we see. That's not what we've ever seen. What we see is that a lot of the people who have well more than enough strive to acquire
even more, and a lot of the people who are below "luxury-level" (but above subsistence-level) are more or less content to remain where they are, even if they might theoretically
like to have more. It's the exact
opposite of that premise.
Now, I'm not the kind of person who's going to say that trying to get more than you need is necessarily a
bad thing. I think it can be pathological and unhealthy, but maybe not always. What I
do think is that it's not inherently
good, either* - which means we must judge a person so doing individually, on the basis of
what they do in pursuit of that. Throwing venture capital at a company because you have cash to spare and think their product is going to pay off? Nothing wrong with that (assuming it's not a company manufacturing baby-chippers or something.) Building a company designed to
commoditize human friendship, so that you can
sell relationships to advertisers? No. No, that's some supervillain-level crap, and we just plain don't need that.
* (this is where I differ from modern-day Republicans, who seem to be caught up in a blind, Randian worship of success irrespective of its motive or means)
