“Where Would We Be As a Society If Doctors Were Not Permitted to Discourage Their Patients From Smoking Because the Tobacco Companies Felt That They Could Make More Money If People Were Kept in the Dark re the Cancer Risks?”

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

You are nothing like Galileo.  We live in a world in which we have all the information that we need at our finger tips.

Having access to information and making good use of it are two different things. Smokers know that smoking causes cancer. Alcoholics know that drinking is ruining their lives. They have information coming out of their ears. What they need is to develop the emotional calm to make use of what they know.

Investors know that they are hurting themselves when they bid stock prices up to crazy levels. But they want to! Just like smokers want to smoke and alcoholics want to drink.

Shiller’s research will change the world when as a society we give ourselves permission to talk about it on every discussion board and blog on the internet. When we hear somebody say that he is thinking of failing to engage in market timing (price discipline!), we need to take him aside and show him what the research shows happens to people who travel down that dark road. If we are going to have an investment advice field, we need to permit people to do honest work in it.

Where would we be as a society if doctors were not permitted to discourage their patients from smoking because the tobacco companies felt that they could make more money if people were kept in the dark re the cancer risks? Or if there were no Alcoholics Anonymous because someone tool a survey of alcoholics and found that they possess a strong urge to continue to drink to excess? Sometimes you have to extend a hand to a struggling fellow human. I believe that we should permit honest posting re Shiller’s research.

Rob