“If As a Society We Want to Know How Stock Investing Works, We Will Know. If As a Society We Do Not Want to Know How Stock Investing Works, We Will Not Know. We Are Going to Decide This Matter As a Society. It’s Hard For Us to Do That at a Time When Stocks Are Priced at Two Times Their Fair Value. Our Get Rich Quick Urge Interferes With Our Ability to Think Clearly, Just as Drinking Large Quantities of Alcohol Interferes With Our Ability to Drive a Car Properly.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

I see you have corrected your typo

“John Walter Russell did the math to determine what the true safe withdrawal rate was at the top of the bubble and showed that it was 1.6 percent.”

Do you have a link for that?

When I go to his website http://www.early-retirement-planning-insights.com/index.html I see “Even before the October 2008 meltdown, my latest research had lifted the Safe Withdrawal Rate to 6%.”

I am confident that, if I looked for a bit, I could find a link. But I don’t think it serves a good purpose for me to do that. We need to have John’s work available at every investing site on the internet. And we need to have the work of hundreds of people doing follow-up work available at every site on the internet. The obvious thing to do is to open every site on the internet to honest posting and then just reap all of the benefits that would obviously follow from doing so. That’s all upside and zero possible downside.

If as a society we want to know how stock investing works, we will know. If as a society we do not want to know how stock investing works, we will not know. We are going to decide this matter as a society. It’s hard for us to do that at a time when stocks are priced at two times their fair value. Our Get Rich Quick urge interferes with our ability to think clearly, just as drinking large quantities of alcohol interferes with our ability to drive a car properly.

I believe that the next price crash, as horrible as it will be in terms of bringing on vast amounts of human misery, will help more of us to see the downside of following a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold approach. We’ll see. In the interim, I am going to do what I can to help us all make the transition. I am going to continue to speak in favor of the idea of opening every discussion board and blog to honest posting. About 10 percent of us have shown the ability to appreciate the dangers of Buy-and-Hold even at a time when stocks are priced at two times their fair value. So it is obviously possible for more of us to do so if the 10 percent who appreciate this today work up the courage to share our honest thoughts despite the huge amount of resistance they encounter. And I am going to finish work on a book that I believe will help us all to come to terms with what we have done to ourselves when we are as a society more open to the idea of coming to terms with that portion of our history.

I hope that that helps a small bit. We all want the same things deep down. We are all on the same side.

My best wishes to you, Evidence.

Forward-Looking Rob