Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Anonymous was right. All of the pressures on the market over the next decade will be blamed (rightly so) on Covid-19. There won’t be any New York Times article on you and there won’t be any $500 million windfall.
You may be right. I don’t think so. But it is possible.
What you are saying is that progress is impossible. Once humans come to believe in something, that’s the end of the story. There is never any consideration of new ideas. If we happen to make a mistake in our initial efforts to understand something, then that mistake will continue to do us harm until the end of time.
I find that idea depressing. If it is not possible for us ever to learn anything about how stock investing works that we did not know in 1980, why do we still have people going to school to earn Ph.D.’s in Economics? Why not just close the schools on the grounds that we knew everything that we would ever need to know in 1980?
I think that we have learned important things over the course of the past 39 years. So I think that we can do better. And I know that I am not the only person who believes that. If everyone agreed that we can never learn anything that we did not know in 1980, Shiller would not have been awarded a Nobel prize. The fact that we awarded him a Nobel prize shows that we see value in his work.
It’s only 10 percent of us today. We are not getting much benefit from Shiller’s amazing research because only 10 percent of us buy in to it today. That part is unfortunate. But I sure don’t see how I am going to make that situation better by agreeing to say that Greaney’s study contains a valuation adjustment. It seems to me to be a much more positive approach for me to continue to post honestly. I think that we will be able to get some more people to join the effort after a massive price crash because people will be less complacent then and more open to hearing about new ideas.
I sure hope that that is what happens. We’ll see.
Hopeful Rob
We have these schools and people getting PhD’s so that they can teach uneducated people like you. You might actually want to spend time listening instead of making a fool of yourself.
I am a fool because the retirement study posted at John Greany’s web site really does contain an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins after all. He just has not once in 18 years offered a screen shot of the page in the study containing the valuation adjustment because — reasons.
Makes sense!
Please take good care, my dear Goon friend.
Rob the Fool