Charlie Munger on economics, finance & civilization
Munger called himself a lover of civilization's progress, which he credited to capitalism backed by sound money. He was scathing about the ways finance goes wrong: perverse incentives, easy money, triple-A paper that hid hurricane risk, repealed margin requirements, phantom accounting assets, and bright people diverted into trading. Late in life he worried that unlimited money-printing breaks the discipline the system depends on, and he held that avoiding nuclear war is mankind's main problem.
16 points · 6 appearances · 2008–2023
How the view evolved
Nobody knows how far extreme monetary methods can go → Easy deficits may not work; be financially responsible
In 2019 he is agnostic about extreme monetary methods — 'I just think we don't know', and he'd distrust any economist who claimed to. By 2023 he doubts the system works without some hardship at the bottom and concludes 'we just have to be financially responsible whether it feels good or not'.
Up next
1995–2023 · changed view
“But of course, when people use the word common sense, what they mean is uncommon sense, because the standard human condition is ignorance and stupidity. They say old Joe has common sense, they mean as he has uncommon sense, I guess.”
1995–2020 · changed view
“Cicero is famous for saying a man who doesn't know what happened before he's born goes through life like a child. ... If you generalize Cicero, as I think one should, all these other things that you should know in addition to history — and those other things are the big ideas in all the other disciplines. And it doesn't help you just to know them enough so you could prattle them back on an exam and get an A. You have to learn these things in such a way that they're in a mental latticework in your head and you automatically use them for the rest of your life.”
2007–2023 · changed view
“Well I think it's very useful to get the capitalist perspective, namely how do you make this thing work for the people that own it, because the reality will make more sense when you go at it with that perspective. So even if you don't intend to get rich, you want that perspective, because you'll understand the reality you're dealing with better. So I think you mentally want to make yourself an investor as part of the proper training of your mind. And since you have to do it anyway to improve your mind, you may as well get rich while you're doing it. And so if you underspend your income while you're life and keep learning and collect all the bonehead experience mistakes other people made and avoid them and so on, I would confidently predict that you'll do just fine.”
2007–2023 · changed view
“What are the core ideas that have helped me? Well, luckily I got at a very early age the idea that the safest way to try and get what you want is to try and deserve what you want. It's such a simple idea. It's the golden rule, so to speak. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. There is no ethos in my opinion that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large the people who had this ethos win in life, and they don't win just money, just honors and emoluments. They win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with. And there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust. And so, and the way to get it is to deliver what you'd want to buy if the circumstances were reversed.”