“I Believe That We Are Fundamentally a Good People. If We Weren’t, Shiller Would Never Have Gotten His Research Published in a Peer-Reviewed Journal or Have Seen His Book Become a Best-Seller or Have Been Awarded a Nobel Prize.”

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

You never got traction with anyone, other than JWR.  If you did, you would have people posting here in support of you and your points.  Instead, people ignore you.

I got traction with lots of people. Never a majority or anything close to it. But lots of people. My May 13, 2002, post had people saying a”thanks for launching the most important discussion ever held at this discussion board!” That’s traction! And that was just the first day, before all the work I did with John Walter Russell and Wade Pfau and on and on.

Traction has never been a problem. The problem is that the advance from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is very big. They are entirely different ways of seeing what is going on in the stock market. People need to ask lots of questions to become comfortable with the new way of seeing the world. People want to ask those questions. We saw that at every site at which discussions were held. But people hate the insanely abusive stuff that the small number of Buy-and-Holders who are properly referred to as “Goons” dish out. Your willingness to go so low to suppress the discussions that people want to have had given you a veto power over what can be discussed on the internet.

Will people still permit you that veto power in the days and years following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis? I think not. I certainly hope not. I cannot guaranty anything. But I believe that we are fundamentally a good people. If we weren’t, Shiller would never have gotten his research published in a peer-reviewed journal or have seen his book become a best-seller or have been awarded a Nobel prize. If we are fundamentally a good people, we are one day going to figure out a way to overcome the Abusiveness and the criminal behavior of you Goons.

We’ll see, you know. I know which side I want to be standing on when that happens. I am on the side of the research and of common sense and on the side of the American people and I don’t apologize for it. The Goon stuff has zero appeal to me. It’s hurting everyone alive in the United States (including the Goons themselves!) in a very serious way.

Yes, people ignore me. They ignore Shiller’s research too. If they didn’t ignore it, we wouldn’t have the CAPE value that applies today. I think it is a terrible mistake to ignore Shiller’s research. I think we should be talking about it at every site on a daily basis. Ignoring Shiller’s research at a time when the CAPE value is where it is today is like ignoring a hurricane warnings on the grounds that “I’m sure it will all work out okay.” In the past, it has not worked out okay. Buy-and-Hold Crises are terrible, terrible events. The good news is that today that are 100 percent optional events. The bad news is that as a nation of people we have elected to ignore the 43 years of peer-reviewed research showing us how to avoid them. Not this boy, you know?

Where I’m coming from.

Rob