If you want good behavior, don’t pay on a commission basis. Our judges aren’t paid so much a case. We keep them pretty well isolated with a fixed salary. Judges in this whole thing have come out pretty well – there have been relatively few scandals.
Expect hogs to eat a lot more in the presence of a lot of hog wash.
We have never had the will to enforce the immigration laws. What you see is what you’ll continue to get.
Since mistakes of omission don’t appear in the financial statements, most people don’t pay attention to them. We rub our noses in mistakes of omission – as we just did.
The investment game is getting more and more competitive.
Although I am very interested in the subject of human misjudgment – and lord knows I’ve created a good bit of it – I don’t think I’ve created my full statistical share, and I think that one of the reasons was I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with.
A foreign correspondent, after talking to me for a while, once said: “You don’t seem smart enough to be so good at what you’re doing. Do you have an explanation?”
It’s not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ones.
We have the same problem as everyone else: It’s very hard to predict the future...
It’s human nature to extrapolate the recent past into the future, but it’s terrible that managements go along with this.
My idea of a good place to shop is Costco – it has these heavily marbled fillet steaks. The idea of eating some wheat thing and washing it down with carrot juice has never appealed to me.
If it happens every year like clockwork, what’s so extraordinary about it?
If we mix only a moderate minority share of turds with the raisins each year, probably no one will recognize what will ultimately become a very large collection of turds.
Well in the history of the See’s Candy Company they always say, “I never did it before, and I’m never going to do it again.” And we cashier them. It would be evil not to, because terrible behavior spreads.
This is a good life lesson: getting the right people into your system is the most important thing you can do.
The quality of the medical care delivered, including the pharmaceutical industry, has improved a lot. I don’t think it’s crazy for a rich country like the USto spend 15% of GDP on healthcare, and if it rose to 16-17%, it’s not a big worry.
After nearly making a terrible mistake not buying See’s, we’ve made this mistake many times. We are apparently slow learners. These opportunity costs don’t show up on financial statements, but have cost us many billions.
If you have the opportunities of Berkshire, an investment in gold is dumb.
It’s a rare business that doesn’t have a way worse future than it has a past.
The ethos of not fooling yourself is one of the best you could possibly have. It’s powerful because it’s so rare.