Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Will your book tell us about the death threats? Will your book tell us about how you will get the $500 million? Will your book name all the goons so we know who you are talking about?
The book will discuss the death threats. There is no way that something like this could have happened without death threats. The normal thing is for people to feel free to discuss the findings of peer-reviewed research wherever they please. The death threats and similar behavior are what messed everything up. People do not say the same things when there are death threats hanging over them as they do when they feel free to express themselves honestly.
The book will discuss the $500 million payment that I expect to receive on the other side of the next price crash. Just as we want to do away with penalties for posting honestly, we want to encourage rewards for posting honestly. The fewer penalties and the more rewards we see for honest posting, the more honest posting we will see. And the stronger our understanding of how stock investing works will grow over time.
The book will discuss the Goon phenomenon. A key theme of the book is that we all have goonishness residing within us. If we didn’t love Get Rich Quick stuff so much, the Trinity study would never have passed peer review and Greaney would never have made the error that he made in his study. We have met the enemy and he is us! Stock investing does not need to be risky. It has always been risky in the past because, prior to 1981, we did not have Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research findings available to us and, from 1981 forward, we have not given ourselves permission to discuss the far-reaching strategic implications of that research. The thing that holds us back is the goonishness within us all that so much desires something for nothing that it rejects the idea of applying human reason to the stock investing project.
The book is an extended argument for moving beyond goonishness and thereby opening up the possibility for us all to retire many years sooner while taking on much less risk with our retirement accounts. The key is saying those three magic words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” Saying those three words permits us to learn new things. And I think it would be fair to say that the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research will permit us all to enjoy the greatest learning experience in the history of personal finance once we give ourselves permission to discuss it.
Rob
“The book is an extended argument”
How extended is it?
Do you know how many words or pages you have written so far?
It’s absurdly long.
The first book came in at 84,000 words. I view 60,000 words as ideal in a day when attention spans are limited. But there were a lot of ideas set forth in that book. So I thought that it made perfect sense to go to 84,000 words.
It appears to me that this one will be double that number. It’s far too long. I am going to be trying hard to make cuts. But I am a big believer in the idea that a book tells you what it wants to be (novelists say this all the time, that their characters dictate the endings of their stories). It won;t be possible to get this one down to 100,000 words or anything close to it, as I would like.
The issue there is that I am really combining two books into one. “How stock investing really works, according to the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research” is a story that demands book-length treatment. And “How discussion of the research showing us all how stock investing really works was suppressed for 40 years” ALSO is an important story demanding book-length treatment.
The best way to go in theory would be to publish two books, But the story about the suppression of the discussion of the realities doesn’t make sense if you don’s describe the realities, And the story about the realities doesn’t make complete sense if you don’t tell the suppression story. So I don’t think that I have any choice but to tell both stories in a single book, which makes for a lengthy book.
Wish me luck!
Rob
Do you have a publisher? Will you be going on a book tour?
I expect that I will be going on a book tour in the days following the next price crash. I doubt that it is going to happen before that. But after the crash, sure. Get Rich Quick strategies are far less popular after the huge losses that they always bring on have evidenced themselves.
We’ll see.
Rob
Holding us back???? Nothing has been holding me back. If you feel you are being held back, fix your problem. Don’t keep expecting the world to change to what you want it to be.
I very much want to see the world change in a positive way. There was a time when lots of people believed that market timing was not always required or perhaps did not even work. In 1981, peer-reviewed research was published showing that that is the opposite of the truth. We have laws in place that permit us honest posting so that as a society we can correct a mistake like that. I would like the see those laws enforced in a reasonable manner so that we can all begin living better lives. I see no downside.
That’s where I am coming from, Anonymous. I naturally wish you all good things.
Rob