If I was counselling an individual, and my purpose was to help that individual, the most important thing would be that you should save more. Because don't expect that your retirement will follow those trajectories that some advisers are telling you.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of saving for retirement rather than relying solely on financial advice.
Robert J. Shiller's quote highlights the critical role of personal savings in financial planning for retirement. He advises individuals to take a proactive approach to their finances, suggesting that one should not depend entirely on the trajectories proposed by financial advisers, which may not align with personal circumstances or economic realities. This underscores the need for individual responsibility in financial matters.
In practice
During a financial planning seminar, I referenced this quote to stress the need for personal savings.
Those on the downside of rising economic inequality generally do not want government policies that look like handouts. They typically do not want the government to make the tax system more progressive, to impose punishing taxes on the rich, in order to give the money to them. Redistribution feels demeaning. It feels like being labeled a failure.
Speculative markets have always been vulnerable to illusion. But seeing the folly in markets provides no clear advantage in forecasting outcomes, because changes in the force of the illusion are difficult to predict.
That's the world we live in: when it comes to economics, people have emotions; it's not like chemistry or physics.
Money management has been a profession involving a lot of fakery - people saying they can beat the market, and they really can't.
We should not be focusing on quick solutions. The really important concern for policymakers everywhere is to prevent disasters - that is, the outlier events that matter the most.
If we wait until income inequality is much more severe, we will have a whole class of new superrich who will probably feel entitled to their wealth and will have the means to defend their interest. That's already gone far enough. We shouldn't let it become more extreme.
There are no shortcuts when it comes to getting out of debt.
Nothing is simpler than owning the stock market and holding it forever, and that's essentially the idea behind the index fund.
Gold is money and nothing else.
Specie [gold and silver coin] is the most perfect medium because it will preserve its own level; because, having intrinsic and universal value, it can never die in our hands, and it is the surest resource of reliance in time of war.
There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world.
We've used derivatives for many, many years. I don't think derivatives are evil, per se, I think they are dangerous.
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