I have little want to listen to what Charlie Munger has to say about academia, or anything really. Having done a decent dive into him when I found about how he pushes his amateur architect designs for dorm rooms (basically prisons) on universities, I found that Munger is so up his own ego, it's hard to think of him as a thinker who considers appropriate viewpoints.
Ultimately, he's an uber rich guy who got lucky getting rich. Why should we listen to him about anything?
I read bits of the posted article. It's about what I would expect from Munger, and most of it isn't worth quoting and arguing against.
> amateur architect designs for dorm rooms (basically prisons) on universities
I hope UCSB backed out of building one of these monstrosities.
"Public policy graduate student Luiza Macedo didn’t see the sun for a full week when she had to isolate in her room at Munger Residence due to a Covid-19 scare."
Yea, it's pretty sickening. It's pretty sad that in the U.S., someone else's money can buy the government, your education, and how you literally live, all in the way that that someone else thinks it should be done but wouldn't do themself.
I used to think the same as you, but I would suggest giving this a read before you pass off his success as luck as it's a direct rebuttal to the normal argument. Unless by luck you mean him meeting Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett may have been lucky to meet Munger. He credits Munger with getting him off buying “cigar butts” and instead focusing on excellent businesses (pricing power, barriers to entry, etc) at fair prices which is largely where Buffett’s wealth expanded the most.
They're both lucky, and I'm not a fan of Warren Buffett either. He constantly throws out his "money has no utility to me" as part of his "aww shucks, I'm from Nebraska" schtick, which is a slap in the face of the other n-billion people poorer than him, less lucky than him, and to whom money does have utility, as in life or death utility.
Jim Simons has mentioned explicitly about how most people underestimate the role of luck in success, and he attributes quite a bit of his success to luck.
It’s nice to read someone else who feels similar; I purchased the best known ‘book’ of his. It’s a coffee table treatise that is repetitive, dull, and self congratulatory.
Were Buffet and Munger were the only people trying to make money from the stock market in the last hundred years and nobody else was trying? Or were they the smartest and they didn't luck into being born smart, but self-generated their smarts too?
Smart is neither necessary nor sufficient to do well in trading, as well as luck. It mostly requires being rigorous, disciplined, rational, and obsessively focused on the pursuit. “Smart” and “luck” are lazy thinking ways of explaining why they do well and others didn’t. In my 30 years or so in the industry working in quant and traditional trading spaces as well as high tech startups that did very well, I’ve not seen smart beat discipline, or luck replace rational obsession. The fact is they’ve all faced enormous bad luck at some point or another, but kept plugging away. I’ve seen that almost anyone if they have a strong self discipline and a clear rational mind can do very well in trading, but it also requires obsessive focus - to the extent that most people can’t match it. I’d note this isn’t unique to trading though. I’ve seen in tech the smartest people languish around ivory towers, but the most mediocre of intellects develop the most useful systems and software that’s widely used. Again, discipline, rigor, rationality, and obsessive focus are the key factors.
When people asked how Buffett made money in investing, his usual response is "start with the A's" (referring to the Value Line manual). I have found that an unsatisfactory answer, though, because unless you have some idea of what you're looking for, "starting with the A's doesn't mean much."
A better example of Buffett's obsessiveness is that he used to pick up discarded race track tickets. The overwhelming majority were no good, of course, but you might find one in a thousand where a winning ticket had been absent-mindedly discarded and you could cash in on the bet.
But, well, the fund management industry do work hard, yet have little to show for it. An old investment classic (can't remember which) put it this way: a guy new an analyst that could tell you everything you wanted to know about every railway company, except which ones to invest in.
I think many good investments rely on just a few simple arguments. For example, back in 2021 I learned that the price of Shell shares were at their lowest point for a decade or so, oil was at a low, and the US strategic oil reserves were at their lowest level since the 80's. I figured, Jeez, how much lower can then stuff go? So I bought shares. They've nearly doubled. There's no guarantees with this stuff, of course, I've made plenty of mistakes. It also requires the availability of opportunities, naturally. Sometimes my primitive monkey brain can spot them. No guarantees, there never are, but sometimes you can spot opportunities where the odds are stacked in your favour, and those are the ones you want to dabble in.
How did he not? His wealth is a direct consequence of something he possesses and was able to deterministic enact in the world? Or is it more likely that he's old, he started off well off with a wealthy-enough and connected father, and has done nothing but invest since he was a teenager in one of the east time periods in the history of mankind to make money from money?
I'm not saying luck wasn't a factor (e.g. he wasn't hit by a bus, so, lucky?) I'm saying luck can't have been the only factor, or even a primary factor. Plenty of people try and do what he did, and fail.
Ultimately, he's an uber rich guy who got lucky getting rich. Why should we listen to him about anything?
I read bits of the posted article. It's about what I would expect from Munger, and most of it isn't worth quoting and arguing against.