A Rich Family Takes Care of All of Its Children ..
... Not Just Those With Talents Valued by the Marketplace
— Warren Buffett
by John Lawrence
It takes a billionaire to express those sentiments. Warren Buffet can well afford to take care of his children. With a net worth of $84.3 billion, none of Warren's children will go hungry tonight or not have a roof over their heads. But many others will in the US and around the world. It's a sad commentary on a society which values the marketplace more than it values its children. And who can predict where the next genius is coming from? It just may be from one of those families that have a hard time keeping a roof over their head.
When I was at Stanford, the smartest guy in my class was from a family of about ten children none of whom other than him had any special talent whatsoever. They all became barbers or beauticians or other vocations where a high IQ wasn't demanded. This guy, Mike we'll call him, could breeze through the courses on quantum mechanics and electrodynamic theory without blinking an eye, and this was graduate school. The hard stuff. He came from a poor family and, unlike his siblings, had unlimited talent. I don't think that any of his siblings were loved less by his parents just because they were not extraordinarily talented. They deserved to have a roof over their heads as well.
Buffett commented in a recent Time magazine essay: "While the wealth of the 400 richest Americans rose to $2.7 trillion last year from $93 billion in 1982, as computed by Forbes magazine, Buffett said millions of people were left behind, "stuck on an economic treadmill." Stuck indeed. All those jobs that created the middle class in America after the Second World War are gone. In a recent Globe Trekker TV program called The Rust Belt, Megan McCormick travels to cities like Buffalo, NY, once the home of giant grain elevators, now unused but still there rusting. She goes from there to Pittsburg, once the home of giant steel mills, now still sitting there rusting. She visits Akron, Ohio, once the rubber capital of the world with factories owned by Good Year, B.F. Goodrich and Firestone, now sitting there rusting.There is not even money available to take down these rusting gigantic hulks and give them a decent burial.
The poem by Percy Busshe Shelley says it all:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The rusting hulks that represent good paying middle class jobs in America are now colossal wrecks as are the opiod infested hinterlands where people can only look on those works, monuments of a bygone era, and despair. Wealth has concentrated in a few hands in a more egregious way than it ever did in the times of Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, John Rockefeller and B. F. Goodrich. The marketplace has produced marvelous products, but the problems of war and poverty still persist. A rich family takes care of all its children not just those with talents valued by the marketplace.
