2010: Would Berkshire hire people to improve the unemployment rate?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Glen Molinar (PH) from Cleveland, Ohio. It’s been on my bucket list to come meet you, Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger, so it’s a privilege to be here.
My question has to do with hope and jobs. You know, in America, I think we need to figure out how we can go about creating jobs. I have been trying to help people get jobs.
My question is, and a challenge maybe, how can we get Berkshire Hathaway and your board to maybe go out and just basically hire people to give them hope?
WARREN BUFFETT: Well, we will hire people when we have something for them to do. (Applause)
But — and we are actually, net, hiring people now.
I mean, when the Burlington is carrying 173,000 cars a week like last week, as opposed to some time back 155,000, we need more people. And we need more people at some of our other businesses.
But our carpet business, we are down 6,000 people-plus from our peak. But people aren’t going to quit buying carpet forever. And we will be hiring a number of people, but there’s no sense hiring them when they’re not — when there’s nothing for them to do.
I went through a period, particularly, it was dramatic to me, because we owned — Berkshire Hathaway owned — a couple of textile mills, one of them in New Bedford.
And eventually we had to close those mills after we tried for 20 years to make them work.
And if you get somebody that’s working in a textile mill and they’re 55 years old, and in many cases still were speaking Portuguese, you know, retraining doesn’t mean much to them.
I mean, you need — if you believe in creative destruction and you believe in capitalism, essentially figuring out ways to do the same things with less and less people, you better have a social safety net.
And we’ve got a pretty good one in this country, a whole lot better than we had 30 or 40 years ago.
But right now there is significant unemployment. Not any higher than it was in 1982 or thereabouts, but it’s a lot and it’s not going to go away fast, although it is going to go away.
And we should take — in my view, society owes some minimum living standard to people who are looking for work, trying to get work, and frankly, at a time like this, they’re not going to be able to find it.
But I don’t think that Berkshire Hathaway should be the social safety net.
Charlie?
CHARLIE MUNGER: Yeah, I would say that if Berkshire started out to create a bunch of make-work jobs in order to increase human hope, the net effect would, over time, would be the reduce human hope. (Applause)
WARREN BUFFETT: I think that’s true, but I’d rather have Charlie saying it than me. (Laughter)