Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Clearly your responsibility to the world (as you see it) is equal or higher priority than your family responsibility. This is a point of view that we ordinary family guys just cannot grasp. If people in Syria are suffering, that’s a shame. But I can’t help them and it doesn’t directly affect me. If my wife is suffering (for an hour, let alone 15 years) that is my immediate top priority.
Could you try to explain your position in terms that we simpletons can understand?
I’ll offer a somewhat briefer response coming at it from a somewhat different angle.
My mother grew up in the Great Depression, brought on by an earlier try at seeing whether doing the opposite of what the peer-reviewed research (which wasn’t available at the time) teaches us we should do. She had to leave school when she was in eighth grade so that she could work in a factory to put food on the family table. My mother loved school. That hurt her a great deal. She talked about that pain until the day she died.
Does that matter? Do the experiences of the millions of children who will have to be taken out of school in the Buy-and-Hold Crisis matter? What can of world will my wife be living in following the next price crash if it causes a Second Great Depression greater than the first one (the P/E10 level went much higher this time around). What sort of world will my boys and my grandchildren be living in if we do not find some way to provide access to accurate and honest reports on what the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research says to millions of people? What if our political system collapses as a result of this massive act of financial fraud? Does that change the calculus at all?
I don’t feel comfortable posting dishonestly about these matters. That’s the bottom line. I could write a book going through all the reasons why. The bottom line is that it feels wrong because it IS wrong. There is no justification for a ban on honest posting re a matter so important to so many. None whatsoever. Someone had to step up to the plate. I was elected. So I have given it my best shot.
I care about my wife. And I also care about my mother. And about my boys. And about my unborn grandkids. And about the millions of other wives and mothers and kids and grandkids. I care about all of it. The same force inside me that makes me care about my wife makes me care about all the others too. I wouldn’t want to have to walk past a burning building with kids inside it because I was too afraid that if I ran in to help I might get hurt and not be able to earn as much for my wife. There are things that you cannot do and the still be able to live with yourself afterwards. This is one of those things.
Rob
Anonymous says
I suggest you actually read about causes of the Great Depression. Try some of Bernanke’s works.
Rob says
I’ve read Shiller’s work, Anonymous.
Shiller showed that valuations affect long-term returns. As valuations return to fair-value levels (they always do — there has never yet been an exception), trillions of dollars of spending power disappear from the economy. We saw one of the highest P/E10 levels in the history of the United States prior to the Great Depression. The only time we saw a higher P/E10 level was in the late 1990s.
Are you saying that we somehow could have gotten through the loss of trillions of dollars of spending power in 1929 WITHOUT sinking into a depression? How would that work exactly? I am not able to imagine any way that it could happen.
The way to stop depressions is to stop bull markets before they develop. The way to stop bull markets before they develop is to open every discussion board and blog to honest posting on the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.
My sincere take.
Rob
Anonymous says
As I said, educate yourself. The origins of the Great Depression are complex – Keynesian vs monetarist schools, etc. Know anything about such things?
Rob says
I know a little bit that I was exposed to in economics classes in college.
But I also know that Shiller did not publish his “revolutionary” (his word) research findings re how the stock market works until 1981. So no book written before 1981 could possibly discuss the effect of stock valuations in an effective way. You can’t discuss what you don’t know and as a society we did not discover the missing piece to the stock investing story until 1981. Prior to 1981, most economists believed that the market is efficient. If the market were efficient, there is zero chance that stock overvaluation could cause an economic depression. So people who have not yet come to a full understanding of the implications of Shiller’s revolutionary findings could not possibly address the question in a completely informed way.
It is theoretically possibly that someone could have written about the matter in an informed way since 1981. But please remember that there is a Social Taboo in place that prohibits the discussion of the realities of stock investing as revealed by the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research because it hurts the feelings of the Buy-and-Holders to know that they made a mistake that caused so much human misery. How many books have you seen that discuss the millions of middle-class lives destroyed by the demonstrably false claims advanced in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies? If we have not seen books discussing that question, what would make you think that we would be seeing books discussing the much more important question of how Buy-and-Hold causes economic recessions and depressions?
We certainly need books of the nature that you are suggesting we should already have. And we certainly will have them in the days following the next price crash. Wade and I spent some time discussing the effect that the promotion of Buy-and-Hold has on causing economic recessions and depressions. That is one of the topics that we intended to bring up with the reporters for the New York Times to be written up on the front page had you Goons not threatened to send defamatory e-mails to Wade’s employer in the event that he continued doing honest work. So that one remains “too controversial” for now.
There are lots of things that will happen only following the next price crash. Shiller’s 1981 research truly was “revolutionary,” just as he said. We need to be discussing every aspect of it. All of that starts happening big time once you Goons are placed in prison cells, where you belong.
Does all of that not make good sense?
Rob