“Learning That Valuations Affect Long-Term Returns Is Like Learning How to Harness Electricity. We Should Have Enhanced Our Lives in Hundreds of Ways Over the Course of the Past 39 Years As a Result of What We Learned From Shiller’s Nobel-Prize-Winning Research.”

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

“ But I don’t whine about it. ”

Yes you do. You keep talking about what goons, John Greaney, Wade Pfau, Mel, etc have done to you. You have posted about this thousands of times.

That comment reminds me of what Rob Arnott said to me during our e-mail conversation. He said that he thought that my work was “solid,” he had no concerns re the substance. But he said that I sounded like I thought of myself as a “victim.” I address this in a section of my book.

I 100 percent think of myself as a victim re these matters. The clarification that I make is that it is not only me. Arnott is a victim. Bill Bernstein is a victim. Wade Pfau is a victim. Heaven help us all but you Goons are victims. Everyone living in the United States is a victim.

Learning that valuations affect long-term returns is like learning how to harness electricity. We should have enhanced our lives in hundreds of ways over the course of the past 39 years as a result of what we learned from Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research. And instead we have been arguing for 18 years whether the Greaney study contains a valuation adjustment or not? What’s wrong with this picture?

You Goons have done a lot of damage to a lot of people. I am not whining about it but I am certainly pointing it out and trying to bring attention to it. That’s what journalists do — we uncovered abuses and try to get them corrected. I certainly do not apologize for doing my job. But the purpose is not to complain. The purpose is to open up the possibility for millions of people to live richer lives in the future than they have been able to live in the past. The story has some negative elements to it but the purpose of telling it is a very positive one.

Goon!

Rob