STREET DOGS

In 2013, billionaire investor Warren Buffett met with a group of MBA students, one of whom asked him what shaped his political views.

Here is an abbreviated version of his answer:

My political views were formed by this process. Just imagine that it is 24 hours before you are born.

A genie comes and says to you in the womb, you’re going to emerge in 24 hours and it is an enormous responsibility I am going to assign to you — determination of the political, economic and social system into which you are going to emerge.

You set the rules — set anything in motion … for you, your children and grandchildren.

What’s the catch? One catch: just before you emerge you have to go through a huge bucket with 7-billion slips, one for each human.

Dip your hand in and that is what you get — you could be born intelligent or not intelligent, born healthy or disabled, born black or white, born in the US or in Bangladesh, etc.

You have no idea which slip you will get.

Not knowing which slip you are going to get, how would you design the world?

You’ll want to incentivise the top performers, don’t want equality in results but do want something that those who get the bad tickets still have a decent life. You also don’t want fear in people’s minds — fear of lack of money in old age, fear of cost of healthcare.

Do you want men to push women around?

If you are designing the world you don’t want an unfair world for women … there’s a 50/50 chance you get female. I call this the “Ovarian Lottery”. The right way to look at it is from the standpoint of how you would view the world if you didn’t know who you would be.