Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, Anonymous.”
See above. It has all played out. Time for you to get that job. At your age and lack of recent experience, you can’t be that picky. Take what you can get. Let us know where you land and I will try to throw a few extra bucks in your tip jar.
The tip-jar thing is quintessential Goon stuff. It’s a celebration of the fact that you have been able to deny me an income for my fine work for 17 years with your ruthlessly, criminally abusive posting.
I see things from just the opposite perspective. I believe that someone who challenges your thinking on an important subject is doing you a favor. It’s possible that the person will convince you, in which case they have improved your life in a big way. And it is possible that the person will not convince you, in which case you are certainly not worse off and in reality are at least a bit better off because your conviction in your belief is strengthened by your having seen it survive the challenge. So all good stuff and no possible bad stuff.
You obviously don’t see it that way. Your reactions are DEFENSIVE. Defensiveness is not a rational response. Defensiveness is an emotional response. The insane amount of defensiveness that we have seen from Buy-and-Holders over the past 17 years tells me that Shiller is right. It’s very strong evidence. It is my view that people should be talking about that defensiveness on every investing site on the internet. We all need to know whether it is Shiller or Fama who is right and the defensiveness that we have seen makes a compelling case that it is Shiller. The frustrating paradox, of course, is that you almost have to believe that Shiller is right to even consider that sort of evidence. If you are a Buy-and-Holder you believe that investment decisions are 100 percent rational. So how could there be any defensiveness?
Each defensive post makes me more confident of my position and more confident in my belief that it will ultimately prevail. The stuff that persuades me a bit is when my Buy-and-Hold friends engage in rational and civil debate. That always at least impresses me and creates a desire within me to look at things anew and to do my best to give the Buy-and-Hold position as much credit as I possibly can. The abusive stuff is a huge turn off and assures me that it was a good thing that I finally worked up the courage (after three years of living in fear!) to advance that famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002.
The Ban on Honest Posting is consistent with the core principle of Buy-and-Hold. If investors are 100 percent rational, a Ban on Honest Posting is not even possible. So why worry that there is one in place? But the Ban on Honest Posting is not consistent with the laws of the United States. We protect people from fraud because we know that the humans have weaknesses that cause some of them to practice fraud and that cause others to fall for the fraudulent claims and that cause still many others to tolerate both the practicing of fraud and the falling for it without speaking out.
So the bottom line here is whether or not a 50 percent price crash will be a sufficient shock to prompt another 10 percent of the population to speak up about the ban which has been keeping us all in ignorance for so many years since Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) research showing us how stock investing works in the real world. We cannot get over the ignorance until we acknowledge that we humans are capable of preferring ignorance so long as it makes the numbers on our portfolio statements bigger than they should be and we cannot acknowledge that for so long as we remain in ignorance. So we are trapped by a Catch-22. But a 50 percent price crash might be painful enough to shock us out of it and cause us to appreciate the wonderful gift that Shiller bestowed on us when he published research showing us how to make such price crashes a thing of the past.
It all comes down to whether I believer that this is a good country or not. I believe that this is a good country, I believe that we are a good people. Not a perfect people, obviously. But a good people. If we were not a good people, Shiller’s book would never have found a publisher and would not have become a best-seller. If we were not a good people, Shiller would not have been awarded a Nobel prize. If we were not a good people, Wade Pfau would not have devoted 16 months of his life to preparing research with me showing that Valuation-Informed Indexing has been far superior to Buy-and-Hold for the entire time-period for which we have good records of stock prices. We are a good people who have been held back for 17 years (or for 38 years, if you count back to 1981) by a Catch 22 that has made fools (and, in the case of you Goons, criminals) of us.
I believe in us! I believe in research! I believe in the published rules of all the sites! I believe in learning! I believe that investors are humans and that humans possess emotions!
But we’ll see, you know? I certainly never thought that it would take 17 years for us to make our way to the other side of The Big Black Mountain. I thought that it would take perhaps 17 hours. So I have something less than a perfect track record when it comes to this stuff. Reader be warned!
My best and warmest wishes to you, Anonymous.
Life-Affirming Rob (All You Need Is Love, Man)
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