Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
You would feel bad about yourself if you had to work a job? Can you please explain that?
If I worked a job outside of my work developing and promoting the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept because I needed the money, I would not feel bad. That’s just life; you play the cards you are dealt. So long as that was the reason, I would feel perfectly good about it. I would do the VII work on the weekends and feel fine about myself.
But if I did the outside work because I gave in to intimidation tactics employed by those who don’t want others to learn about the implications of Shiller’s “revolutuionary” (his word) research, then, yes, I would feel bad about myself. I would feel that I had let my country down and that I had let my profession down and that I had let my fellow community members down and that I had let myself down because I had agreed to be less than the best person that I was capable of being solely because I was too cowardly to take on you Goons.
That’s what was going on in the days before May 13, 2002. I suspected that Greaney had gotten the numbers wrong in his infamous retirement study. I was 90 percent sure. I knew that I should be asking my fellow community members what they thought about it. But I was a coward. I knew that Greaney was an abusive poster and I didn’t want him to send his Goons after me. So I kept it zipped. I of course knew deep inside that I was a coward and I of course did not feel as good about myself as I would have felt had I had the courage to do the obviously right thing.
That’s where lots of us stand today. The owners of Morningstar know that they should have banned those who posted in “defense” of Mel Lindaurer. They didn’t have the courage to do so and they don’t feel 100 percent good about themselves as a result. Bogle knows that he should not be endorsing the book of one of the two most abusive posters in the history of the internet. But he doesn’t want to face Lindauer’s wrath. So he makes excuses for his failure to disassociate himself from Lindauer. And he dies a little inside. Rob Arnott knows that it is b.s. to tell me that the material at my site is top-notch stuff but then to add in fear that he thinks that I am being “strident” to ask that the Buy-and-Holders permit honest posting at every investing site on the internet. Arnott does not just sell me out when he does that, he sells himself out too.
We all have a Get Rich Quick urge and we all understand on some level of consciousness that it cannot possibly be so that the stock market is the only market that exists in which it is not necessary to practice price discipline when buying the thing offered for sale in that market. We suspect that we are hurting ourselves by buying into these preposterous marketing slogans. But we want to! So we rationalize our poor behavior. And we feel a little less than we would feel if we acted in a manner that satisfied our usual standards.
We are all little Goons, Anonymous. Very much including yours truly. We all sell ourselves short. That’s why we see bull markets develop every 30 years or so. That’s why we see economic crises every 30 years or so. That’s why Buy-and-Hold still exists 35 years after the peer-reviewed research was published showing us that no such “strategy” has ever worked for a single human in any market on Planet Earth. You Goons are just the quintessence of a human weakness that has been destroying our hopes for financial freedom for a long, long time. You get away with your Buy-and-Hold Lies because the rest of us enjoy hearing them; your fantasy world makes us poor in the long run but brightens up our days in the short run just like another drink brightens up the life of an alcoholic for a bit.
I pray that I will never again sell myself and all of my fellow community members and friends out in the way that I did in the days prior to the morning of May 13, 2002. If I stop doing this work full time for some reason other than being afraid of you Goons, it’s not on me and I have nothing to feel bad about. But if I pull back from doing good work because I want the attacks to stop, I am a poor excuse for a journalist and in fact a poor excuse for a human being. I hope and I believe that I will never go there again.
Does that help?
Rob
Anonymous says
“If I worked a job …because I needed the money, I would not feel bad.”
So you don’t need the money. Fair enough. But then why is your wife scared? And even if you think her fear is irrational, shouldn’t the mere fact that she’s scared obligate you to ease her fear? Last I checked, that was pretty high on the husband job description.
Rob says
She’s scared because the normal pattern is to have regular income coming in and we have not had that for a long time. I can see that. I think her fears are exaggerated because our financial situation is better than the financial situations of people who have regular income coming in but who have nothing saved. But I do get the fear. In fact, I am not entirely without fear re our circumstances myself.
It would certainly be a good thing for me to do what I can to ease her fears. In different circumstances, I would certainly do everything that I could do. But the reality is that there is another issue here that is my top fear and that SHOULD be her top fear and that should even be YOUR top fear, Anonymous.
The fear that matters is the one re what is going to happen to our economic and political system in the wake of the next price crash. I could work at a job paying a six-figure salary and put aside millions and it might not make much difference depending on what happens with the deepening of the economic crisis. That one is Job #1 for each and every one of us. I very much include my Wall Street Con Men friends in that group. A lot of people are cynical about them. They talk about them as if their sole object is to turn a quick buck. Money is a driver for them but we would all be better off if money were their sole driver. If money were their sole driver, they wouldn’t let anything happen to put the economic system that delivers such amazing awards to them at risk. And yet here we are.
That’s the one that matters. We permitted the stock market to become overvalued to the tune of $12 trillion. We now are in the process of paying back that debt to ourselves. There ain’t no easy way down. If we pull it off, all signs are that we have great days ahead. But it’s not easy to see how we are going to pull it off. There are lots of people who are already losing confidence in our political system. It is not going to help for those people to lose most of their life savings after they followed the instructions from the Wall Street Con Men re how to invest for retirement to a t.
I think the reason why people don’t like to talk about this one is that it is too big to process. We have never seen anything like this before. Even the Great Depression was only caused by a P/E10 of 33. This time we went to 44. Yea, Buy-and-Hold, you know? People don’t know what to do and so people are just frozen in their tracks talking about nonsense instead of the concerns and opportunities that should be the focus on their attention today.
My job is to protect my wife not just from the fears that she is experiencing but also to protect her from the fears that she should be experiencing. And of course I have a responsibility to try to protect you Goons too. You won’t listen. We both know that. But I’ll say this: If you were thinking clearly, you would be asking very different sorts of questions from the ones you do ask. There’s never been a bull/bear cycle that ended before we got to a P/E10 of 8. That’s a price drop of more than two-thirds from where we are today. Millions of failed businesses. Millions added to the unemployment rolls.
If you want to be scared about something, that’s the direction in which I would look. I try to focus on the positive, the amazing stuff that we will be able to do if we all pull together once we get scared enough to learn how to pronounce the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” But I won’t say that I’m not scared about what could go wrong if my optimistic scenario takes some time to establish itself.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
Anonymous says
So to distill that down to one sentence, your top priority in life is warning people about the next crash. I don’t know your wife, but most wives would not appreciate that.
Rob says
We all live in the same country, Anonymous.
My view is that we should love it and take care of it.
Whatever happens, I can go to bed at night knowing that I have given it my very best shot.
That’s pretty much all that any of us has control over. The rest we just get to see play out before our eyes.
I wish you all good things in any event, old friend.
Rob
laugh says
Actually you are wrong.
The people who still have income coming in likely have more residual human capital than you do. So in essence they are still worth more than you even though you may have some modest savings remaining.
By making yourself more or less unemployable – you have destroyed your remaining human capital.
Rob says
By working so hard to destroy this country, you have left yourself with no place to live in and spend your millions, Laugh.
Having a country to live in is basic. I will continue to post honestly re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics.
I naturally wish you all good things.
Rob