“I Blame Human Nature. We All Have a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold Urge Residing Within Us. The Primary Job of Investment Advice Is to Help Us Overcome That “Something for Nothing” Urge.”

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

So you want to blame Shiller for your problems.  Got it.

I blame human nature. We all have a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge residing within us. The primary job of investment advice is to help us overcome that “something for nothing” urge. Shiller helped me to understand that. And, yes, by doing that he caused me to get in trouble with the members of the various Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads.

I believe that there will come a time when we will as a nation be entirely united on the issue of permitting honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. At that point, no one will be blaming Shiller. We will be celebrating him, as we would have been all along if we had been thinking clearly.

Hang in there, my old friend.

Rob