A friend at Harvard Business School recapped a talk given last night by Warren Buffet at the venerable institution. When asked how he would vote, Buffet gave this thought experiment: It is 24-hours before you’re to be born as a baby and a genie appears. He tells you that he thinks you’re a winner and has great confidence in you.

So great is his confidence in you - that he is going to let you set the rules of the very world that you’ll be born into. You can set the social rules, the political rules, the economic rules-whatever you like. And whatever rules you set will apply for your lifetime and your kid’s lifetimes too.

You think: This sounds great! What’s the catch? And the genie then tells you that you don’t know if you’ll be born, rich or poor; black or white; male or female; sick or healthy; intelligent or slow. The only thing you know is that there’s a lottery with 6 billion different lotto balls and what you start life as is represented by one of them.

Buffet called this the “ovarian lottery” and said it’s the most important thing that’ll happen in your life-more so than your grades in school or anything else that happens to you–and you’ve got absolutely no control over it. What kind of rules would you make? It’s interesting to think about when voting.

{ Josh Wolfe, Nanotech Weekly Insider Newsletter, Oct. 29 2004 }

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READ MORE >> ideas, advertising, USA, kids | April 9th, 2008