A Thought Experiment from Warren Buffett
A Thought Experiment from Warren Buffett
By Kyle Kowalski
Being born at the right time and at the right place
The “Ovarian Lottery” is a short thought experiment popularized by Warren Buffett.
The idea is borrowed from John Rawls, a Harvard philosopher and author of A Theory of Justice. There are also earlier references like “Ovarian Roulette” from Dr. Reginald Lourie in the 1960s.
In The Snowball by Alice Schroeder (Amazon), Warren Buffett is quoted as saying:
“When I was a kid, I got all kinds of good things. I had the advantage of a home where people talked about interesting things, and I had intelligent parents and I went to decent schools. I don’t think I could have been raised with a better pair of parents. That was enormously important. I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it. But I was born at the right time and place. I won the ‘Ovarian Lottery.’“
The Ovarian Lottery — A Thought Experiment from Warren Buffett
I’ve found a few different versions Warren Buffett has shared over the years. The remainder of this post outlines two of them.
The Ovarian Lottery from Warren Buffett’s Annual Meeting in 19971
For this version, you can actually listen to Warren Buffett tell the story (beginning around the 4:15 mark in the video). The full transcript is also available below the video.
“Imagine that you were going to be born 24 hours from now. And you’d been granted this extraordinary power. You were given the right to determine the rules — the economic rules — of the society that you were going to enter. And those rules were going to prevail for your lifetime, and your children’s lifetime, and your grandchildren’s lifetime.
Now, you’ve got this ability in this 24-hour period to make this decision as to the structure, but — as in most of these genie-type questions — there’s one hooker.
You don’t know whether you’re going to be born black or white. You don’t know whether you’re going to be born male or female. You don’t know whether you’re going to be born bright or retarded. You don’t know whether you’re going to be born infirm or able-bodied. You don’t know whether you’re going to be born in the United States or Afghanistan.
In other words, you’re going to participate in 24 hours in what I call the ovarian lottery.
It’s the most important event in which you’ll ever participate. It’s going to determine way more than what school you go to, how hard you work, all kinds of things. You’re going to get one ball drawn out of a barrel that probably contains 5.7 billion balls now, and that’s you.
Now, what kind of a society are you going to construct with that in prospect?
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