“If Greaney Had Corrected His Study on the Afternoon of May 13, 2002, We Would Today As a Nation of People Be 20 Years Ahead of Where We Are in Our Development of the Valuation-Informed Indexing Concept. If We Wait Until the Close of Business on Wednesday, That Would Be One More Day of Delay. To What Good Purpose?”

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

Since this is Shiller’s work, he should determine if other website need to do discuss it more.  He should also be the one getting any proceeds based on his work, not you.  You haven’t done a thing.

What happens to our economic system and to our political system affects all of us, Anonymous. Every last one of us should be doing everything in our power to get every site on the internet opened to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. There shouldn’t be an iota of controversy re that one. Yet there has been a great deal of controvery for 20 years running now. The controversy is not going to die down by me agreeing not speak out. That would make things worse. We need more people speaking out, not fewer.

Shiller deserves all the credit in the world. Obviously. But Shiller didn’t point out the error in Greaney retirement study in a post that he put to a Motley Fool discussion board on the morning of May 13, 2002. That wasn’t nothing. There were people who used that study to plan their retirements. And I was the co-author of the Bennett/Pfau research, which I think can fairly be characterized as the most important research published in this field in 30 years. You Goons didn’t go after Wade for no good reason. And I created five unique calculators with lots of help from John Walter Russell. John and I discovered that the correct safe withdrawal rate for those who retireed in January 2000 was 1.6 percent. Shiller didn’t do that. I wish he had. He would have saved me a lot of abuse had he done that. I think it would be fair to say that the reason why he didn’t do it is that he did not want to be put through that sort of abuse.

We all need to do what we can, Anonymous. Working together, we can make the world a much better place than any of us imagined it could be back in the Buy-and-Hold days. If we were all thinking clearly, we would get to work at the close of business Tuesday, if not a good bit sooner. If Greaney had corrected his study on the afternoon of May 13, 2002, we would today as a nation of people be 20 years ahead of where we are in our development of the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. If we wait until the close of business on Wednesday, that would be one more day of delay. To what good purpose?

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Rob