主题： Personal Wealth

Wealth is just a bunch of claim checks on the activities of others in the future. You can use that wealth in any way you want to. You can cash it in or give it away. But the idea of passing wealth from generation to generation so that hundreds of your descendants can command the resources of other people simply because they came from the right womb flies in the face of a meritocratic society.

If all of us were stranded on a desert island—we all landed there and we were never going to be able to get off of it—the most valuable person would be the one who could raise the most rice over time. And I could say, “Well, I can allocate capital”—you wouldn’t get very excited about that.

I was born at the right time and place, where the ability to allocate capital really counts. I’m adapted to this society. I won the ovarian lottery. I got the ball that said, “Capital Allocator—United States.”

I have been lucky to have been born where I was … lucky with parents, lucky with all kinds of things, and lucky to be wired in a way that a market economy pays off like crazy for someone like me. It doesn’t pay off for someone who is absolutely as good a citizen as I am—you know, leading Boy Scout troops, teaching Sunday school … raising fine families—but just doesn’t happen to be wired in the same way I am.

I have every possession I want. I have a lot of friends who have a lot more possessions. But in some cases, I feel the possession possess them, rather than the other way around. I like to be inventive. I want to be able to do what I want to do every day. And money lets you do that. What money does is magnify you. Whatever kind of person you are going in—and age does this too as people get older—it magnifies both … good and bad tendencies. Money gives you a chance if you’re a slob to be a big slob—a huge slob. On the other hand, if you’re inclined toward doing good things, it gives you the power to do a great many great things.

As people get wealthy here, they start casting their eyes about, and they don’t get more satisfied. Sometimes they get more dissatisfied. That’s happened in the United States. Right now we have six times the GDP per capita, in real terms, as when I was born. Now, I don’t know whether people are happier now or more discontent or what than they were in 1930. But people have a way of adjusting very quickly to things becoming better, and then any little tiny adjustment downward they can get quite unhappy about.

My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest. When we got married in 1952, I told Susie I was going to be rich. That wasn’t going to be because of any special virtues of mine or even because of hard work, but simply because I was born with the right skills in the right place at the right time.

If a kid comes out of the right womb in this country, they have got food stamps for their rest of their life. They just call them stocks and bonds. And their welfare officer is their trust officer.

A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing. Neither susie nor I ever thought we should pass huge amounts of money along to our children. Our kids are great. But I would argue that when your kids have all the advantages anyway, in terms of how they grow up and the opportunities they have for education, including what they learn at home—I would say it’s neither right nor rational to be flooding them with money. In effect, they’ve had a gigantic head start in a society that aspires to be a meritocracy. Dynastic megawealth would further tilt the playing field that we ought to be trying instead to level.