Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“ I would say that they do not believe that I will receive a $500 million settlement. We never discussed that particular aspect of things directly. But their skeptical attitudes certainly suggest that they do not believe that there is a $500 million settlement coming. My priest once suggested that, if I thought that this work was going to bring in millions, I should go to a bank and see if the bank would be willing to lend me millions. I think that suggestion reveals where his head is at re this matter.”
I am guessing that your wife and priest have continued to pressure you to get a job, but you really don’t want to do so. Instead, you have told them that you have to finish your book first. Oddly enough, the book has taken way longer than expected, so the job search has had repeated delays. Have I got that right?
You’ve got it essentially right. My oldest boy (Timothy) is probably the person who is most supportive of me. But even Timothy has lost patience with my failing to meet self-imposed deadlines for finishing the book. If this project is so important, then I should buckle down and finish it, you know? I get it. I see the logic. There’s no good reason that I can advance for why the book is not finished after all this time. I kick myself for it.
But….
I also forgive myself. The reason why I have not finished the book is the reason why millions of us have not acknowledged that the Greaney retirement study gets the numbers wildly wrong. On the surface, that doesn’t make any sense either. We all have to invest in stocks. We all should want the retirement studies that we use to get the numbers right. Why is there even one person (including Greaney himself) who is reluctant to acknowledge the error in the study (it lacks a valuation adjustment)?
That’s the problem that we need to solve to advance in our understanding of how stock investing works. The answer is that we all possess a Get Rich Quick impulse and tending to it is very important to us. Permit honest calculation of the numbers and Get Rich Quick strategies are no longer viable and the only money in our retirement accounts will be money that we have actually earned either through our labor or through true economic gains on our invested earnings. Yucko! Who wants that, you know? Can’t we just banish these people who try to report the retirement numbers accurately and honestly?
I told the truth re safe withdrawal rates on the morning of May 13, 2002. It took me three years to work up the courage. But that’s done. So you might think that my fear of doing that is in the past and I am free now to just move on into the future. To some extent, that’s so. I say that the Greaney study is in error all the time. So, yes, that one has gotten pretty easy. But there are lots of other related truths that I tell in the book. The purpose of the book is to explain how it is that as a society we have kept the error in the Greaney study covered up for 19 years now. One of the explanations is that we have as a society ignored the criminal acts that you Goons have engaged in for 10 years now. When I talk about that in the book, I am not just finding fault with Greaney and the members of his Goon Squad, I am finding fault with every member of our society, ever human on the face of Planet Earth really.
That’s hard. I am separating myself from all of my fellow humans when I do that. It needs to be done. It is important that as a society we advance in our understanding of how stock investing works. So this book very much needs to be written. But I am turning myself into a pariah by writing it. And on some layer of consciousness I am aware of that. A good writer works on his sentences until he gets them just right. That way they are more powerful. But the clearer I make my sentences,the more I turn myself into a pariah So there is a little voice in my head that says “don’t go there, don’t make the words more clear, leave it sort of weak, maybe people won’t hate you quite as much that way.” Being a good writer endangers me. So part of me resists doing the things I need to do to make this a good book.
That’s why it has taken so long. The intellectual work involved in writing the book is nothing special. If that’s all there was to writing this book, I would have completed it years ago. The struggle is an emotional one. Emotionally, this is a very, very, very, very difficult book to write. So don’t write it, right? Find another topic that is less emotional that you can get down on paper in a reasonable amount of time, write that book instead. You have a better chance of making money from your efforts if you write that book.
That’s what all others have elected to do. Shiller wrote an amazing book. He makes money. So one can write at least some important truths about stock investing and survive to tell the tale. Good for Shiller. But I think that all the truths that Shiller ducked (Shiller did not write about safe withdrawal rates, for example) need to be told as well. That is the project that I have taken on, to tell the truth that Shiller dared not touch, the IMPLICATIONS of Shiller’s amazing research findings. It is more emotionally difficult to tell the truths that Shiller dared not touch than to just repeat the ones that he advanced in his book.
It is telling the truths that Shiller dared not touch that makes my book valuable. So I absolutely must go there. That’s the entire point of the project. But it is very, very, very hard work to go there. Anyone who hasn’t tried to do it has no idea how hard. But that’s also the value of the project. Pull it off and you have changed the world for the better by climbing that mountain. It is my intent to climb that mountain. If it takes a long time, it takes a long time. It is what it is. But I believe that someone needs to climb that mountain for the good of our entire nation and it appears to me that the universe has elected me to be the person to do it.
A lot of things that Freud said were embarrassing to many people. He talked about family members having sublimated sexual desire for each other and all this sort of thing People don’t like to talk about that stuff. So a lot of people told him to just shut up. But he didn’t. And the reason why we all recognize his name today is because other people found value in what he said and built on his insights. I think it was good that Freud gave voice to truths that some people very much did not want to hear. Martin Luther King was killed because he told truths that some people very much did not want to hear. I admire him for what he did. The fact that what he did made him a social pariah in some circles does not cause me to dismiss him. All I look at is whether the difficult truths he advanced really were true or not.
It’s not wanting to be a social pariah that holds me back.It is my belief that we all need to know the accurate retirement planning numbers that pushes me forward. The conflict between those two goals causes me a lot of anguish. But I don’t stop. I do some work on the book every day. I’ll get there. The catch phrase that I have been using going back to the early days is: “I can do no more and I can do no less.”
I hope that helps a tiny bit.
Rob
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