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 you don’t really spend much time on your book each day and your posts only take a few minutes each day, what do you do with the vast majority of your time?
I spend it overcoming the feelings of angst that follow from the social ostracism that has been visited on me.
I don’t want anyone else ever to experience something like this. So I need to come to a deep understanding of what’s going on. I could state it simply and say “Greaney doesn’t want to correct the error in his study and there are people who are friendly to him who are willing to help him supress the discussions that thousands of people have indicated they want to have (and those thousands of course stand for millions in the larger community of investors)”. That would be a true statement so far as it goes. But it doesn’t tell the full story.
Why do site owners go along? Why don’t researchers want to make a name for themselves by showing the realities? Why don’t journalists expose the massive act of financial fraud?
That’s the conspiracy theory that you Goons often refer to. There was not a group of people who met in a room and decided to pull off this fraud. That way of thinking about it is just not believable. But people ARE acting in concert. It’s not just Greaney and Lindauer. Not by a long shot.
It’s something inherent in human nature. We have had bull markets since the first stock market opened for business. And they have always hurt us. Why have we not as a nation of people worked up the will to stop them from forming? That’s what Shiller’s research is about. That’s what my journalism is about. It’s about changing the nature of the stock investing project in a fundamental way. In the past it’s always been about pushing prices up to crazier and crazier levels and celebrating the act of doing so. Valuation-Informed Indexing is very different. It’s about reining in the Get Rich Quick urge so that prices reflect the economic realities to the greatest extent possible.
So I am taking on something fundamental to human nature with every word I write. It’s scary to do that. It’s not intellectually all that hard. It’s common sense. But it is scary emotionally to go against the crowd in a way that makes the crowd so angry. The vast majority of Buy-and-Holders are not as angry as you Goons, of course. But the majority is synpathetic to the Goon position while not approving of the Goon tactics. You Goons never could have pulled off what you have pulled off if that were not so.
It’s painful, difficult work to go against the crowd in this way. I of course believe that it is necessay work, that someone has to do it so that we never have to live through something like thus again. But it ain’t away being the one who is the target of all the hostility.
Most of my time is devoted to overcoming the anxious feelings that result from that. I might try to write about an important point and then experience some feelings of angst because I am being critical of an aspect of human nature that millions of people do not want to see esposed. Maybe I would go on a walk to quiet those feelings. Or look at a baseball game for a bit. Or surf the interest. Or talk to a friend. Anything to ease the feelings of angst that need to be quieted if I am going to get to the heart of this problem and put the words down on paper that need to be put down to solve it.
It’s not physical labor and it’s not intellectual labor. It’s primarily EMOTIONAL labor. It’s an emotioanl problem. The Buy-and-Holders are smart. There’s no lack of intelligence holding us back It’s a desire to avoid facing these painful feelings of angst at stnading up to the crowd that is holding us back. My job is to do that. I do what I can to hang in there. Someone has to do it. All of us need to see this problem solved. We are all in the same board and we all want the same thing. So I hang in there. The hanging-in-there part requires some calming activities that unfortunately tend to soak up a good bit of time.
It frustrates me that that is so. But I have been shown again and again that it is so. I sometimes feel a temptation to get down on myself for not having finished the book sooner. But then I recall that no one else has written the book that I am writing (including Shiller!) in the 42 years since he published his amazing research and I realize that no one has done it because it is such a darn hard thing to pull off. And I grant myself some relief in the form of taking a walk or whatever so that I can continue drilling down on all the stuff that I need to drill down on and not let that pain associated with doing that cause me to stop doing so.
I hope that that helps, at least a tiny bit. It’s highly fulfilling work. But it’s not fun work. Not by the longest of long shots. No sane person would choose to do with this work unless he had seen with his own eyes how many people there are out there who long to know how stock investing works in the real world and who have seen their hopes for coming to learn that smaskee to the ground in such horrible ways as we have seen them smashed to the ground during the first 21 years of our discussions.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
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