Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Why can’t anyone else find evidence of these crimes? Why doesn’t anyone else see an error in Greaney’s work? Why did your wife stop believing your stories and get a divorce? Why don’t you have any fans on this board? Why don’t you see that you are the common thread (problem)?
The common thread is the failure to correct the error in the Greaney retirement study (it lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. Say that there is only a 1 in 100 chance that I was right in what I said in my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, that the Greaney study truly does lack a valuation adjustment. If there is a 1 in 100 change that that is so, it is something that we should be discussing at every discussion board and blog on the internet. The purpose of the investment advice field is to help people plan retirements. Get the numbers in a retirement study wildly wrong and you have undermined the entire investment advice project.
My only involvement is that I pointed out the error in a public way and I have not backed down. If it weren’t for the 42-year cover-up, the Buy-and-Holders would be united in insisting that Greaney correct the study immediately. But that would expose the entire cover-up, in which everyone who works in this field is involved to at least a small degree (everyone who works in the field has a responsbility to stay up to date with the peer-reviewed research).
It’s not going to help things to have the cover-up continue for another year or another month or another day. How could it? Extending the cover-up will make things worse.
My sincere take.
Rob
To be a the coverup you allege, it would have to be on a massive scale without one single dissenter. That would involved thousand upon thousands of people without one single person cracking. Not possible.
Thousands of people have cracked. Every community member who has expressed a desire that honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research be permitted has cracked. Every person who bought Shiller’s book has cracked. Every person who agreed that Shiller should be awarded a Nobel prize has cracked. Every site owner who included language in his published site rules prohibiting death threats and acts of extortion has cracked. Every academic researcher who has spent 16 months looking into these matters only to conclude that “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!”
We don’t have any lack of people cracking. The problem we have is a difference in levels of intensity. Most normal people are fine with hearing the case for research-based strategies and are inclined to adopt them once they hear about them. But almost no one is willing to express opposition to Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick once they see what the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads do to people who try to talk about the peer-reviewed research. The next big test will come in the days and years following the onset of the Next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. Either that will cause people to work up the courage to stand up to you Goons and free millions of people to live richer and fuller and freer and better lives or it will not. We will just have to wait a bit to see how things go.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event
Rob
They have cracked? Okay, tell us who agrees with you that there is a cover up. Give us some names or links other than your unsupported allegations.
Open up every site to honest posting re the research and within six months you’ll have thousands of people posting in support of research-based strategies every day. That’s the world that I want to live in. I wish that I had worked up the courage to speak up in support of it sooner than I did.
Rob