Warren Buffett Speaks at HBS
Warren Buffett, the Sage of Omaha, blew in from the prairie last October, and some 1,oo0 HBS students responded with standing ovations before and after his wide-ranging remarks.
The energetic, 74-year-old Berkshire Hathaway CEO did not deliver a speech but instead took questions for ninety minutes from his Burden Hall audience. Asked about outsourcing and whether the U.S. government should offer tax inducements to counter it, Buffett replied that he saw outsourcing as “a small part of a much, much bigger problem.” He explained that the country's principal economic challenge is the trade deficit, which amounts to “a wealth transfer to the rest of the world.” “We're like an enormously rich family that daily is selling off a little piece of the farm, or mortgaging it to the rest of the world.”
Buffett spent much of his time returning to issues of equal opportunity and concern for the well-being of society’s less fortunate members. He told his audience that they were all winners in the “ovarian lottery,” that by accident of birth, they had entered and grown up in the world with enormous advantages over the planet’s six billion other inhabitants. As for the United States, he said, it is wealthy enough so that, ideally, all its citizens should be taken care of and “some base level” of health care should be available to all.
Buffett concluded with some professional and personal advice. “Go into a field that you have a passion for, and where you think well of the people you work for and with,” he counseled. And the secret to a happy marriage? “Find someone with low expectations.”
