2020: Nothing can stop the American economy.

WARREN BUFFETT: But even facing that, I would like to talk to you about the economic future of the country.

Because I remain convinced, as I have — I was convinced of this in World War II, I was convinced of it during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 9/11, the financial crisis — that nothing can basically stop America.

We faced great problems in the past. We haven’t faced this exact problem. In fact, we haven’t really faced anything that quite resembles this problem.

But we faced tougher problems and the American miracle — the American magic — has always prevailed and it will do so again.

And I would — I would like to take you through a little history to essentially make my case that if you were to pick one time to be born and one place to be born, and you didn’t know what your sex was going to be, you didn’t know what your intelligence would be, you didn’t know what your special talents or special deficiencies would be, that — if you do that one time, you would not pick 1720, you would not pick 1820, you would not pick 1920, you’d pick to — you’d pick today. And you would pick America.

And of course, the interesting thing about it is that ever since America was organized in 1789 when George Washington took the oath of office, people have wanted to come here. Can you imagine that?

For 231 years, there’s always been people that have wanted to come here. Now — my friend, I think, has jumped the gun just a shade — I’m putting up slide one — but I’m going to call for some slides as we go along.

But the interesting thing about this country is what is on slide one. Let’s put it up.

This is an extraordinarily young country. Now I’m comparing it to a couple of guys that are pretty old. But when you think about the fact that my age, Charlie’s age, or our life experience — and then we’ll throw in this young guy over here, Greg Abel — and if our life experiences combined, exceed the life of the United States, we are a very, very young country.

But what we’ve accomplished is miraculous. Now just think of this — this little spot in history. And if we’ll go to slide two, I’ve tried to estimate —

Well, let’s go back. Stay with slide two, but the population in 1790, you know, we had 3.9 million people here.

Incidentally, when you look up census figures, you find out that the — they had a big fire in the Department of Commerce building in 1921, so they lost a lot of the census records. So, these are not quite as — there’s some things where there’s a few gaps, but there were 3.9 million people in the United States.

And actually — I’ve got point-six million — it’s closer to point-seven million — there were 700,000 of those people who were slaves at the time.

But those 3.9 million people were one half of 1 percent of the population of the planet. And if you’d asked any of those 3.9 million people — any of them — to imagine what life would be like 231 years later, even the most optimistic person — and they could have been drinking heavily and even had a little pot — and they still could not in their wildest dreams have thought that in three lifetimes — Charlie’s, mine, and Greg’s — that in that period, you would be looking at a country with 280 million vehicles shuffling around its roads, airplanes — maybe not today so much but they’ll be back again — flying people at 40,000 feet, coast to coast in five hours, that great universities would exist in one state after another, great hospital systems, and entertainment would be delivered to people in a way nobody could have dreamt of in 1790.

This — this country, in 231 years, has exceeded anybody’s dreams.