141–150 of 324 posts
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What's the worst he's done?
Off-hand, I can't give specifics. Lehman is one situation that comes to mind. Another, not WS-based, is that he disowned his granddaughter for talking about the family in a documentary about the ultra-rich.
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It's not that it wasn't significant at that time. It's just that in the long-term, it looks small compared to making the value of the labor of the entire population 100x more valuable.
This is true, but most of the economic historians I am aware of also acknowledge that America wouldn't have been in the position to leverage industrialization that it was without the economic driver of slavery. Disentangling them is very difficult and usually smells of a political motive.
The correlation between historical slavery and industrialization/modern wealth is negative.
Not really difficult to disentangle.
And theres Canada.
There's one particular passage I'd like to point out, on page 5: Our efforts to materially increase the normalized earnings of Berkshire will be aided – as they have been throughout our managerial tenure – by America’s economic dynamism. One word sums up our country’s achievements: miraculous. From a standing start 240 years ago – a span of time less than triple my days on earth – Americans have combined human ingenu…
I don't often see this sort of pride in America. Normally the flavors I do observe are hyper-nationalistic and filled with bravado... I'd go even further: our current presidential administration spends a lot of energy telling us that America sucks because the people in it suck, the government they built sucks, and the ideals they aspire to suck, and that the solution is to deal out cruelty to the right kinds of peopl…
Amazing reality inversion.
Trump never said anything like any of these. He has said politicians and the political class suck. Not 'Americans'.
Hillary and others on that side consistently say Americans suck (deplorables), US traditional culture is evil and racist, etc.
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Warren Buffett is an expert salesperson, and this tone is the exquisitely crafted product of 70 years of salesmanship. Buffett has worked tirelessly to build his public image, and his "aw-shucks" act is a critical part of that. His image of a down-to-earth person with unquestionable integrity* has enabled him to lock down investment deals under the most favorable possible terms. *) read one of his biographies to see…
What's the worst he's done?
There's one particular passage I'd like to point out, on page 5: Our efforts to materially increase the normalized earnings of Berkshire will be aided – as they have been throughout our managerial tenure – by America’s economic dynamism. One word sums up our country’s achievements: miraculous. From a standing start 240 years ago – a span of time less than triple my days on earth – Americans have combined human ingenu…
Those who credit american ingenuity and exceptionalism must acknowledge land is by far the most precious commodity, an entire continent and a beautiful and rich one like North America is essentially priceless, and will enrich generations to come till the end of time. Much much more than $90 or $900 trillion. The economic value of this immense tract of free land and slave trade cannot be brushed aside. But there is al…
Its the people and way of life that matter. Primary resources can be bought.
In fact land can be a hindrance when it induces Dutch Disease.
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> for economic understanding it's important to note that these were not the major drivers of growth. Two hundred years of slavery was not a major driver of economic growth? Edit: Serious question, rephrased: do economic historians really not consider slavery a major driver of growth? If so, that would be highly counterintuitive. We're talking about the free labor of ~10 million people over two centuries, in an econom…
Normally the story is that you need certain institutions to make it work. Rule of law (contracts, low official corruption), absence of arbitrary confiscation risks (ie the King is not going to suddenly come and grab your stuff), unfettered movement of goods/people/ideas. Generic ideas that allow you to compare across societies. I actually studied economics, and the explanation of how growth arrived does not normally…
There's one particular passage I'd like to point out, on page 5: Our efforts to materially increase the normalized earnings of Berkshire will be aided – as they have been throughout our managerial tenure – by America’s economic dynamism. One word sums up our country’s achievements: miraculous. From a standing start 240 years ago – a span of time less than triple my days on earth – Americans have combined human ingenu…
Austerity or not, assuming infinite growth is a fallacy.
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hyper-nationalistic, filled with bravado, lauding yet reserved, sense of authenticity, extremely humble, it's austere, category of conversation in many other contexts, optimism from a source that does not appear to use it as an instrument of control Sorry English is not my first language and it is not easy for me to understand such advanced writing. Is it that you like the sort of pride that quantifies the material w…
I'm not the author, but I think they were alluding to the type of pride that results in negative forms of nationalism, especially when it's tied into ideas about ethnic states. Various nationalist parties (e.g. the British National Party in my country) are actually thinly veiled parties for racial supremacy, and the Nazi regime was born out of a myth of German natural supremacy. Not to say that all nationalism is lik…
This is the exact opposite of the principle of charity.
Why insist on mind reading evil from people who vehemently state other ideals?
By your mindset, you'd mind read Churchill and FDR - the defeaters of Nazis - as Nazis themselves.
Similarly, we could mind read leftist parties as a having the real goal of dissolving and erasing the white race. And your political mirrors do this.
Or you'd see BLM as a black supremacist movement.
Double standards.
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Yes, but Buffett is not claiming that active investing (as opposed to passive index investing) is negative-sum in aggregate! That would be ludicrous, because Buffett is an active investor himself and the Buffett Annual Report is a long form sales letter to persuade people to buy more Berkshire shares.
Buffett, as an active investor, can outperform the market, while active investors as an aggregate might not. I fail to see any ludicrousness. > Buffett Annual Report is a long form sales letter to persuade people to buy more Berkshire shares. Nonsense. Buffett doesn't care one whit about people buying more Berkshire Hathaway shares. If anything, he wouldn't mind people selling shares and driving the price down to bel…
Index funds are needed so investment funds don't overcharge their customers, and investment funds are needed to keep the market honest.
It makes sense for individuals (or institutions) to invest in index funds, but only up to a point. When too much money is stuck in passive index funds the active investors will easily outperform the market and the smart money will leave the index funds again.
The person I was responding to was drawing an analogy to a casino where the money just moves around and the institutions just skim every time money changes hands. That's negative sum. In contrast, society benefits when the stock market gives access to capital to well run companies and takes money away from poorly run companies. So the casino analogy doesn't work. Buffett understands that the stock market as a whole isn't zero sum (or negative sum), and that's true even if all investment firms in aggregate underperform the indexes.
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Yes, we took land from indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans. And yes we did awful things. But isn't it obvious that neither of these things created the wealth we have today? To my thinking, our current wealth derives from technological innovation, process engineering, psychological insight, most of which would not have been possible without welcoming people from other lands, and being willing to work with those…
But aren't you still doing that today? I believe that somewhere in your country, someone wants a big pipe on some land, but the people living there don't want it, yet they force it anyway.