Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
It sounds like Shiller is guilty of playing a large part of the cover up since he would know the truth. Will he be going to prison as well?
We’ll work out together as a society who goes to prison and who doesn’t following the next price crash, Anonymous. I would be shocked and stunned and amazed if we decided as a society that Shiller should go to prison. I get the feeling that you Goons would like everyone who did even the smallest thing wrong to be treated the same as you Goons. You see that as your protection. Shiller has not behaved perfectly. Therefore, if we Goons go to prison, Shiller must go to prison as well. It doesn’t work like that.
I have drawn the parallel to the race relations issue. If someone makes a racist comment today in a public place, there is a heavy price to be paid. The person might lose his job. There was a time when racist comments were relatively common. Do you think that, as we changed as a society to become less tolerant of racism, we went around and rounded up every person who had committed even tiny racist crimes and sent them to prison? We didn’t. We employed common sense in making distinctions between different levels of bad behavior.
Just about all of us are guilty of some bad behavior during the Buy-and-Hold Crisis. I have often noted that I failed to speak up about the errors that I knew about in the Greaney retirement study because I was afraid of what his Goon squad would do to me. I rationalized my behavior. I said that Greaney’s study was a big improvement over the safe-withdrawal-rate analysis that was being advanced by Peter Lynch not too many years before the Greaney study was posted (this is so). But I held back from expressing my concerns that Greaney’s study, while an improvement from what had come before, still got the numbers wildly wrong. I was a coward.
Shiller has behaved in cowardly manner re a number of matters. We all have. There are very few exceptions. We are not going to elect as a society to put every person who on occasion acted in a cowardly manner in prison. I believe that all of the cowardly behavior will be brought to light and that most of the people who engaged in cowardly behavior will apologize for the harm they have done to others. I believe that Shiller will be making some apologies. But I don’t believe that he will be going to prison. I believe that he is going to be playing a huge role in helping us all move from the awful place where we find ourselves today to the wonderful place where we all deep in our hearts aspire to be tomorrow.
I think that you are wrong when you suggest that Shiller “knows the truth” in an all-encompassing way. We all learn by talking things over with others. Shiller is not able to talk things over with others to the extent he could if there were no social taboo against speaking openly and honestly re these matters. So there are lots of things that Shiller has not yet learned that he would have learned a long time ago had circumstances been different.
I have no doubt but that Shiller knows much more than he has thus far been willing to say in his public comments. But I do not believe that he today knows everything. I believe that he will be enjoying an amazing learning experience along with all the rest of us in days to come. He will be teaching us all by giving voice to things that he already knows but has thus far been afraid to speak about and he will be learning by hearing what lots and lots of others think about aspects of the question that he has not yet been able to explore in great depth himself.
That’s why I describe the opening of the internet to honest posting on investment-related topics as a win/win/win/win/win. Learning is the one true free lunch. When we learn together, we all end up better off than we were before we did so. It’s good stuff piled on top of good stuff piled on top of good stuff piled on top of good stuff with no possible downside for even a single one of us. This ain’t no zero sum game we’re playing!
I hope that helps a tiny bit.
My best and warmest wishes to you.
Rob
How do you know Shiller is not saying what he wants to say? Are you a mind reader?
Shiller wrote a book on how stock investing works called “Irrational Exuberance.” The subtitle promises a “revolutionary” new approach. And the book lives up to its billing. Shiller has been awarded a Nobel prize for the research described in the book. This book is the most important book ever published on stock investing, in my view.
Why do people buy investing books? They want to know what to do with their money. What does Shiller say about that subject in the book? Nothing. Not one word. Zilch.
Huh?
You don’t need to possess an I.Q. of 140 to know that there’s some funny business going on, Anonymous.
Shiller wants to help people. But he of course does not want to be exposed to the sort of abusiveness that you Goons have been dishing out for 15 years now to every poster who has dared to “cross” you by posting honestly re their views on stock investing. So he talks about the things that he believes he can get away with talking about. And he keeps it zipped re the rest.
A good solution?
I am glad that Shiller had told us what he has told us, that’s for sure.
But I want to take things to the next step. I want to hear what he believes we should do with our money given his “revolutionary” (his word) research findings. I want Buy-and-Holders to challenge him. And I want to hear his responses to their challenges. And I want Valuation-Informed Indexers to ask him for more detail. And I want him to provide as much detail as he is able to provide in response. In short, I want things in the investing advice field to proceed just as they do in every other field of human endeavor.
I know that Shiller is not telling us everything that he believes because he doesn’t even address the how-to aspects of stock investing in his book. That’s what sells, Anonymous. That’s the first thing that an editor would look for in assessing the first draft that Shiller turned in. Yet it’s not there in the finished product. Odd, no?
It’s not there because Shiller and his editors have seen the same sorts of things that all of us in the Retire Early and Indexing communities have seen over the past 15 years. We have all seen insane levels of emotion on the part of Buy-and-Holders when they hear the practical implications of Shiller’s research findings discussed.
We are going to have to deal with this matter as a society. Millions of middle-class people need and desire access to honest and accurate information on how to invest for their retirements. We are going to have to find a way to work around you Goons and get it to them.
These are my sincere thoughts re these terribly important matters, in any event.
My best wishes to you, Anonymous.
Rob
I guess Shiller will be going to prison after he pays you his part of the $500 million.
Maybe I will be going to prison too, you know? I was afraid to speak up about the errors in Greaney’s study from May 1999 until May 2002. That was wrong. I hurt people because of my cowardice.
We will have to work it out as a society. That’s the story.
It’s not a situation that is going to fix itself. Each time one of us cowers in fear in the face of you Goons, it makes things worse for all the rest of us who love our country. And each time one of us works up the courage to insist on recognition of our right to post honestly, it makes it easier for all the others.
If Shiller has addressed all the how-to aspects of the subject in his book, Greaney would never have gotten away with what he did. So we all would be better off today. And that Retire Early board at Motley Fool would today be the #1 personal finance board on the internet. That all sounds good to me.
There is no way to solve the problems without being willing to take on fire from you Goons. Too many of us are waiting for someone else to solve the problem. And the reality is that there’s no one here but us chickens! If we don’t do it, nobody else will.
I have a funny feeling that a good number of us are going to screw up the necessary courage in the days following the next price crash, when we can see with our own eyes what our cowardice has done to millions of middle-class people’s lives. But we will have to wait a bit to find out for sure.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, my dear Goon friend.
Rob