2020: Never bet against America.
WARREN BUFFETT: I’m now about to say something that, and don’t change the slide yet, but I’m now about to say something that some of you will be tempted to argue with me about. I would make the case that we are imperfect in a great, great, great many ways, but I would say — and if you pull up the next slide — that we are now a better country as well as an incredibly more wealthy country than we were in 1789. We’re far, far, far from what we should be, will be, but we have gone dramatically in the right direction.
It’s interesting. In 1776, we said we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And yet 14 years later, a year after we really officially began the country in 1789, we adopted a constitution. We found that more than 15% of the people in the country were slaves. And we wrestled with that. But when you say the word self-evident, that sort of sounds like you’re saying any damn fool can recognize that. And you can argue maybe a little bit about life and the pursuit of happiness, but I don’t see how in the world anybody can reconcile liberty with the idea that 15% of the population was enslaved. It took us a long time to at least partially correct that.
It took a civil war; it took losing 6% of those people, males that were between 18 and 60 years of age. But we’ve moved in the right direction. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve moved in the right direction now.
In addition, going back again to that 1776 statement — that all men are created equal, and endowed by their creator, et cetera — I think it was self-evident to the 50% of the population that they were not getting a fair deal for over half the lifetime of the country. It took 131 years until women were guaranteed the right to vote for our country’s leaders.
What’s even more remarkable is that after we adopted the 19th Amendment in 1920, it took 61 more years until a woman was allowed to join those eight males on the Supreme Court. I grew up thinking that the Supreme Court must have had some unwritten rule that said there had to be nine men. But it took 61 years, 33 males in-between, before Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the court.
Now you can say there was a pipeline problem. Half the population may have been women in 1920, but they weren’t half the lawyers — probably only 10%. So you can understand some delay. But 61 years is a long time, and if that was entirely by chance, the odds against that fewer flipping coins is about eight billion to one. Like I said, there was a pipeline problem, but it took us a long, long time. And it’s not done yet.
But I think it does give meaning to the fact that we are a better society, with a lot of room to grow, than the one that existed in 1789.
When you go to Colonial Williamsburg — I’ve been there a couple of times; as a matter of fact, I watched the debate between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford there in 1976 — it was not a great time to be black, it was not a great time to be a woman. Both of those categories still certainly have potential for significant improvement in terms of fulfilling that pledge made in 1776 about how we believe that it’s self-evident that all men were created equal. But we have made progress. We are a better society, and we will continue to improve as the years go by.
If you’ll move to the next slide — and I believe this — when you evaluate all of the qualitative facts, what we have done toward meeting the aspirations of what we wrote in 1776... What we wrote in 1776 wasn’t a fact; it was an aspirational document. And we have worked toward those aspirations. We have a long way to go. But I’ll repeat, if you move to the next slide: Never, never bet against America.