Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966-2013

by Carol J. Loomis

Let me suggest another way to think about this. Let’s say that it was 24 hours before you were born, and a genie appeared and said, “You look like a winner. I have enormous confidence in you, and what I’m going to do is let you set the rules of the society into which you will be born. You can set the economic rules and the social rules, and whatever rules you set will apply during your lifetime and your children’s lifetimes.” And you’ll say, “Well, that’s nice, but what’s the catch?” And the genie says, “Here’s the catch. You don’t know if you’re going to be born rich or poor, white or black, male or female, able-bodied or infirm, intelligent or retarded.” So all you know is that you’re going to get one ball out of a barrel with, say, 5.8 billion balls in it. You’re going to participate in what I call the ovarian lottery. It’s the most important thing that will happen to you in your life, but you have no control over it. It’s going to determine far more than your grades at school or anything else that happens to you. Now, what rules do you want to have? I’m not going to tell you the rules, and nobody will tell you; you have to make them up for yourself. But they will affect how you think about what you do in your will and things of that sort. That’s because you’re going to want to have a system that turns out more and more goods and services. You’ve got a great quantity of people out there, and you want them to live pretty well, and you want your kids to live better than y...