Higgenbotham wrote: ↑Tue Dec 27, 2022 3:13 pmWarren Buffett is the King of Transactional Relationships and this story below was put out today by the cheerleaders at CNBC, quoting Buffett's sidekick Charlie Munger.
What Munger seems to be saying to people is that, even if they couldn't put Christmas lights up this year when they could have and maybe did in recent years, they should be happy about that because nobody could put up Christmas lights in years in the distant past before they were born. That's not how it works. People compare their current positions to their recent experience and their immediate future prospects, which are both negative.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets ... 2ea3bee744Stop complaining, says billionaire investor Charlie Munger: 'Everybody's five times better off than they used to be'
Story by Tom Huddleston Jr. • 1h ago
Billionaire Charlie Munger thinks we should all be a lot happier.
Munger, the longtime investment partner and friend of fellow billionaire Warren Buffett, says he doesn't understand why people today aren't more content with what they have, especially compared to harder times throughout history.
"People are less happy about the state of affairs than they were when things were way tougher," Munger said earlier this year at the annual meeting of the Daily Journal, the newspaper company where he's a director.
The 98-year-old noted that he came of age in the 1930s, when Americans everywhere were struggling: "It's weird for somebody my age, because I was in the middle of the Great Depression when the hardship was unbelievable."
During that annual meeting, Munger complained that envy is a driving factor for too many people today. Prior to the early 1800s, there were thousands of years where "life was pretty brutal, short, limited and what have you. [There was] no printing press, no air conditioning, no modern medicine," he said.
If nothing else, Munger's sense of widespread envy in today's world might be right on the money: Recent studies show that roughly 75% of people are envious of someone else in any given year.
Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are especially effective at sparking feelings of envy or jealousy, often connecting us with people who only offer highly-curated peeks into the positive developments in their lives.
Every so often, when I hear or read about a billionaire telling us (which they do often) that we should all feel fortunate - after all, they've made their billions off the backs of hard working people while throwing us a few crumbs but we got bigger crumbs than the peasants did in the middle ages - and that we are oh so ungrateful because envy exists in an age of probably the most massive income inequality ever, it reminds me of this quote:
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th CenturyBarbara Tuchman wrote: If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague, and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness, and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.
Mankind was not improved by the message. Consciousness of wickedness made behavior worse. Violence threw off restraints. It was a time of default. Rules crumbled, institutions failed in their functions. Knighthood did not protect; the Church, more worldly than spiritual, did not guide the way to God; the towns, once agents of progress and the commonweal, were absorbed in mutual hostilities and divided by class war; the population, depleted by the Black Death, did not recover. The war of England and France and the brigandage it spawned revealed the emptiness of chivalry's military pretensions and the falsity of its moral ones. The schism shook the foundations of the central institution, spreading a deep and pervasive uneasiness. People felt subject to events beyond their control, swept like flotsam at sea, hither and yon in a universe without reason or purpose. They lived through a period which suffered and struggled without visible advance. They longed for remedy, for a revival of faith, for stability and order that never came.
The times were not static. Loss of confidence in the guarantors of order opened the way to demands for change, and miseria gave force to the impulse. The oppressed were no longer enduring but rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform, they were inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task. Marcel could not impose good government, neither could the Good Parliament. The Jacques could not overthrow the nobles, the popolo minuto of Florence could not advance their status, the English peasants were betrayed by their King; every working-class insurrection was crushed.
Yet change, as always, was taking place. Wyclif and the protestant movement were the natural consequence of default by the church. Monarchy, centralized government, the national state gained in strength, whether for good or bad. Seaborne enterprise, liberated by the compass, was reaching toward the voyages of discovery that were to burst the confines of Europe and find the New World. Literature from Dante to Chaucer was expressing itself in national languages, ready for the great leap forward in print. In the year Enguerrand de Coucy died, Johan Gutenberg was born, although that in itself marked no turn of the tide. The ills and disorders of the 14th Centruy could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years, until at some imperceptible moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.
1978