Set forth below is a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:
It is a simple question Rob. If you lack sufficient funds to last through your entire retirement, why don’t you get a job?
The answer is that the work that I am doing is important work. The fact that I am not able to make money today doing this work is trivial given how important it is that this story be told. I am confident that I will make plenty of money on the other side, after we all reach agreement that the implications of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) findings must be explored in great depth by the many thousands of people who work in this field.
The big problem that I have, Sammy, is my claim that the story has been covered up for 34 years. That claim can easily be verified by anyone who cares to check it out. But it sounds implausible. We live in a free society and there is a mountain of money to be made by anyone who offers a better approach to stock investing. So it is just not believable that something like this could be covered up for so long. The way that you Goons often put it is that people would have to believe in a massive “conspiracy” to accept what I say.
I watched a movie Monday night that shows how such “conspiracies” really do happen in this world when authority figures say something and ordinary people feel intimidated into not speaking up about the absurdity of what the authority figures are saying. The story told in this movie is every bit as crazy as the story I tell about how the implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research have been ignored for 34 years. The movie is titled “Compliance.”
Set forth below is a link to an article on the movie that calls it “the most disturbing movie ever made.” I agree with that assessment. I came within an inch of turning the movie off halfway through because the events that transpire are so insanely implausible. I rented the movie because it is “inspired” by true events. But it was obvious to me that the people making the movie took great liberties with their “inspiration.” At least I thought that until I checked it out. There was a 20/20 episode made about the events that are the focus of the movie. The events took place in a McDonalds and everything portrayed in the movie was captured in a surveillance video. One of the characters in the movie in real life was sentenced to prison for five years because of the role he played (he had zero intent to commit a crime when he was asked to drive to that McDonalds that night to assist in a law enforcement action). Every one of the many shocking events portrayed in the movie happened in real life.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
The humans are strange creatures, Sammy. We are NOT 100 percent rational beings, as Buy-and-Hiold presumes. We are not. We get ourselves into a lot of trouble when we try to flatter ourselves by pretending that we are. We need to start telling the truth about what we have learned in the past 34 years about how stock investing works in the real world. That’s my sincere belief, in any event.
The strange and unfortunate events that transpire in the movie came to an end when one man took a stand and said that he just wouldn’t go along with the insanity. His sanity caused the manager of the McDonalds to place the phone call that revealed the entire pretend police investigation as a sham. Someone has to take a stand to bring these sorts of things to an end. Most people don’t want to be the one. Most people are scared. I am scared. I get it why other people are scared. But I am even more scared of what we are going to see if no one stands up. So I work up my courage each day and do what I can do. I can do no more and I can do no less.
I hope that helps a bit.
My best wishes to you and yours.
Rob
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