Charlie Munger on ‘Envy’

Charlie Munger on ‘Envy’

Charlie Munger was worth $2.6 billion at the time of his death. He was the right hand man of Warren Buffett. A few years ago he answered a question about envy at the Daily Journal annual meeting. Everyone needs to hear what he said:

Today, the basic needs of people are pretty well filled. Now, the trouble with that is, with all this enormous increase in living standards and freedom and diminishment of racial inequities and all the huge progress that has come… people are less happy about the state of affairs than they were when things were way tougher. And that has a very simple explanation. The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy.

And so the fact that everybody’s five times better off than they used to be, they take it for granted. All they think about is somebody else has more now, and it’s not fair that he should have it and they don’t.

That’s the reason that God came down and told Moses that you couldn’t envy your neighbor’s wife or even his donkey. And so it’s built into the nature of things. It’s weird for somebody my age, because I was in the middle of Great Depression and the hardship was unbelievable.

I have no way of doing anything about it. I can’t change the fact that a lot of people are very unhappy and feel very abused, after everything’s improved by about 600%, because there’s still somebody else who has more.

 I have conquered envy in my own life. I don’t envy anybody. I don’t give a damn what somebody else has. But other people are driven crazy by it. And other people play to the envy, in order to advance their own political careers.

I am reminded of this  beautiful story of ‘Eagle and Penguin’

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