The Ovarian Lottery
Warren Buffett · 1998
"Individual success is disproportionately determined by the random accident of birth — including geography, gender, era, and innate wiring — rather than merit alone, obligating the winners to build a society that cares for those who drew unfavorable tickets."
Buffett asks you to imagine standing 24 hours before your own birth, tasked with designing the world's economic and political rules — except you have to draw a random ball from a barrel that will decide your gender, race, country, health, and raw ability, and you won't find out which ball until after the rules are locked in. Since you don't know what you'll draw, your rational move is to build a system that creates real abundance but also protects whoever draws the bad ball. Buffett's own example: he happened to be wired for a skill, capital allocation, that pays absurdly well in twentieth-century America — a few thousand years earlier, that same wiring would have made him, in his words, 'some animal's lunch.'
Delivered to students at the University of Florida in 1998, the Ovarian Lottery is heavily influenced by philosopher John Rawls' 'veil of ignorance.' The mechanism forces high achievers to mathematically confront how much of their success is dictated by the accidental time and place of their birth, decoupling wealth from any claim to moral superiority. Buffett also points to simply being born in the United States rather than a war-torn or impoverished nation as, in his estimate, a 50-to-1 advantage at the time of his birth — before any personal merit entered the picture at all.
Buffett's "Ovarian Lottery" thought experiment is heavily influenced by which philosophical concept?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- The Ovarian Lottery (University of Florida speech, 1998)Tilson Funds
- What Is the Veil of Ignorance? (John Rawls)Sloww
The Institutional Imperative
"Corporate behavior is driven largely by an invisible, gravitational force that causes otherwise rational managers to mindlessly imitate peers, resist change, and deploy capital foolishly to satisfy their own egos."