This and his good fortune to have been born in the U.S.A. and at the time in the country's history that baby Warren arrived have been constant themes for Mr. Buffett over the years.
Mr. Buffet has said having the father he had was the greatest gift of all. Not because dad owned a brokerage firm and not because dad was a four-term Congressman but because he got Warren hooked on reading, among other things.
Charlie Munger shares the enthusiasm, From 25iq:
- “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.”
- “You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads – at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
- “As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.”
- “I’ve gotten paid a lot over the years for reading through the newspapers.”....
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And the headline story from The Conversable Economist, November 25:
Warren Buffett used to talk from time to time about the implications of what he called “the ovarian lottery”–the random accident of why you were born with one time, place, and identity rather than another.
It’s not a new idea. Some of you will know it as a version of what the philosopher John Rawls was talking about in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice when he discussed how justice required making decisions behind a “veil of ignorance.” Going back further, it’s version of what Adam Smith was talking about in 1759 in his first classic book The Moral Sentiments, when he discusses morality as evaluated by an “impartial spectator”–a hypothetical someone who not personally involved with the specific situation under discussion. There are of course differences in how this idea is used in each case, but overall notion is that to make a fair or moral evaluation, you need to remove yourself personally from the situation, so that you instead can imagine what it would be fair or ethical if you did not know what role you might end up playing.
Buffett’s telling is vivid in its own way, and focuses on his feelings of gratitude and thankfulness. Here, I’m quoting from the transcript of a question-and-answer session Warren Buffett had with a group of business school students at the University of Florida in 1998:
I have been extraordinarily lucky. I mean, I use this example and I will take a minute or two because I think it is worth thinking about a little bit. Let’s just assume it was 24 hours before you were born and a genie came to you and he said, “Herb, you look very promising and I have a big problem. I got to design the world in which you are going to live in. I have decided it is too tough; you design it. … You say, “I can design anything? There must be a catch?” The genie says there is a catch. You don’t know if you are going to be born black or white, rich or poor, male or female, infirm or able-bodied, bright or retarded. All you know is you are going to take one ball out of a barrel with 5.8 billion (balls). You are going to participate in the ovarian lottery. And that is going to be the most important thing in your life, because that is going to control whether you are born here or in Afghanistan or whether you are born with an IQ of 130 or an IQ of 70. It is going to determine a whole lot. What type of world are you going to design?....
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