Becky Quick: This question comes from Denny Poland, a shareholder from Pittsburgh. When describing the principal agent problem, Mr Munger said that capitalism often works best when the people managing the property also own the property. In recent years, agents of pension funds and asset management firms who do not have significant personal ownership stakes in Berkshire have forwarded proposals that were not in the economic interest of shareholders. What can be done to limit the negative influence of these agents in the decades after you’re no longer able to cast significant votes against them? 

Becky Quick: 这个问题来自匹兹堡的股东丹尼·波兰。芒格先生在描述委托代理问题时说，当管理财产的人也拥有财产时，资本主义通常运作得最好。近年来，那些在伯克希尔没有显著个人所有权的养老基金和资产管理公司的代理人，提出了不符合股东经济利益的提案。在您不再能够对他们投下重大反对票的几十年后，可以做些什么来限制这些代理人的负面影响？ 

Warren Buffett: Well, that’s a very perceptive question, and it’s been answered in a temporary manner, but who knows how the situation will develop in the future? All I know is that you have a wonderful hand at Berkshire Hathaway, but you have to be able to think your way. I mean, obviously, you have to think your way through political realities. You have to think your way for what will cause a. You want to be on. You want to be regarded as an asset to the country because you’ll find more solutions. If you are an asset, you owe to the country anyway. But beyond that, you’ll find more solutions than if you’re regarded as evil or something, and worse yet, if you deserve it. So it’s something that’s constantly in our mind, and it needs to be in the mind of the directors, and they need to think for themselves on this rather than bow to conventional wisdom, which, you know, in a sense, you don’t want to become a cynic about life, but almost everybody that approaches you, if you have tons of resources that’s got some interest in figuring out how to use your resources to their advantage, and that’s true whether they’re in politics or whether they’re in investment banking or whether they’re selling you, well, whatever it may be that they’re selling, I don’t want to do any injury to anybody, but life insurance agents see the advantage of buying life insurance, and investment managers who get paid based on assets managed to get interested in selling you their services. 

沃伦·巴菲特：这是一个非常有洞察力的问题，而且已经以一种临时的方式得到了回答，但谁知道将来情况会如何发展呢？我只知道在伯克希尔·哈撒韦，你拥有一手好牌，但你必须能够自己思考。我的意思是，显然，你必须通过政治现实来思考你的路。你必须思考什么会导致你想要处于的位置。你希望被视为国家的资产，因为你会发现更多的解决方案。如果你是资产，你反正也欠国家的。但除此之外，如果你被视为邪恶或什么的，你就会发现的解决方案会更少，更糟糕的是，如果你应得的话。所以这是我们一直在考虑的事情，它需要在董事们的心中，他们需要自己思考这个问题，而不是屈服于传统智慧，你知道，在某种意义上，你不想对生活变得愤世嫉俗，但是几乎每个接近你的人，如果你拥有大量资源，他们就有兴趣弄清楚如何利用你的资源来获得优势，无论是在政治上还是在投资银行中，或者无论他们是在向你推销什么，嗯，无论他们可能在推销什么，我不想伤害任何人，但是人寿保险代理人看到了购买寿险的优势，而那些根据管理资产获得报酬的投资经理则对你销售他们的服务感兴趣。

Imagine if everybody in this room were following the investment advice of somebody that said, you know, for 1% a year, I’ll tell you how to invest your money. And in 1950, when we started in 1965, they would have said, well, buy Berkshire Hathaway, and if they were around now and they saw the 1% deal, they’d be collecting $8 billion a year from people who aren’t getting any dividends from us. So they would have a different interest in the kind of contract they worked out with you than you would have. And best thing to do was just pay them a commission one time and own the stock. But you have to be alert to how what human nature does to both other people and to you. 

想象一下，如果这个房间里的每个人都遵循某个人的投资建议，那个人说：“你知道，每年1%的费用，我会告诉你如何投资你的钱。”而在1950年，或者我们1965年开始的时候，他们会说：“好吧，买伯克希尔·哈撒韦股票。”如果他们现在还在，看到1%的交易，他们会从那些没有从我们这里获得任何股息的人那里每年收取80亿美元。所以他们与你达成的合同类型的利益会有所不同，而你的利益则不同。最好的做法就是一次性给他们支付佣金，然后拥有股票。但你必须警惕人性对他人和你自己的所作所为。 

And then, you know, if you think it through well and actually listen to what Charlie has told you, you’ll have a big head start on most people. Charlie - there’s one thing that I should mention that really is terribly interesting about Charlie. Charlie knew the importance of psychology and human behavior and incentives and all of that. He figured that out very early. And, of course, he gave some talks, even on 25 or so ways, whatever it happened to be. I don’t remember the exact number, but the different ways that one person could take advantage of another by understanding how humans behave. And then after doing a magnificent job of explaining it. He believed in understanding what others would do, but he thought it was beneath him to actually use those methods to manipulate people. Really interesting human being that thinks through the psychology of human behavior and figures out, you know, how you become a great insurance salesman or manager on Wall Street, or accumulate assets under management or whatever it may be. And you get very rich by understanding the weaknesses of others to some extent, and then decide that it’s very important for you to recognize these when they occur. It’s very important for you to know them better than the person that actually is using them, but not that you don’t have to stoop to using them yourself. And Charlie told me that in his lifetime after he figured this out, there were a couple of times when he used them. He wasn’t proud of it, but he also never lied to me. So he explained to me that there were a couple times when he used some of these techniques, but he didn’t plan on using them anymore. Also wanted me to know that if I ever did something like that, I wasn’t really behaving terribly, that he allowed for the fact that humans may misbehave. 

然后，你知道，如果你仔细思考并真正聆听查理告诉你的话，你将在大多数人面前拥有一个巨大的先机。查理——有一件事我应该提一下，这真的是关于查理非常有趣的一点。查理知道心理学、人类行为、激励等的重要性。他很早就明白了这一点。当然，他甚至做过一些演讲，关于25种左右的方式，或者无论具体数字是多少，关于一个人如何通过理解人类行为来利用另一个人的不同方式。在出色地解释了这一点之后，他相信理解他人会做什么，但他认为自己使用这些方法去操纵人是有失身份的。真正有趣的人，他思考了人类行为的心理学，并弄清楚了，你知道，如何成为一个伟大的保险销售员或华尔街的经理，或者积累管理下的资产，或者无论它可能是什么。你通过在一定程度上理解他人的弱点，然后决定在它们出现时认识到这些是非常重要的。对你来说，比实际使用它们的人更了解它们是非常重要的，但这并不意味着你非得降低自己去使用它们。查理告诉我，在他一生中，当他明白这一点后，有几次他使用了它们。他并不为此感到骄傲，但他也从未对我撒谎。所以他向我解释说，有几次他使用了这些技巧，但他不打算再使用它们了。他还想让我知道，如果我做了类似的事情，我的行为并不是真的很糟糕，他允许人类可能会有不当行为的事实。 

So I’m sure that I behaved somewhat better before my marriage than I did afterwards in my enthusiasm for different activities, like dancing or something. And he said, we all do it, but don’t do it again. So that’s part of acquiring human wisdom. And speaking of human wisdom, we’ve just got that one book out there by Charlie, I mean, poor Charlie’s Almanac, and that’s worth reading three or four times. I think I read Ben Graham’s book about five or six times. And each time I read it, I realized that I just needed to think a little more deeply about certain things. They weren’t complicated or anything. But, you know, it’s better to. If you’ve got some great instruction, like you get with Charlie, it’s better to read it several times than to just figure you’ll just read every book once it’s in the library. Okay, let’s go to section four. 

所以我可以肯定，在我结婚之前，我在对不同活动的热情上表现得比结婚后要好一些，比如跳舞或其他什么。他说，我们都会这样做，但不要再这样做了。这就是获得人类智慧的一部分。说到人类智慧，我们刚刚有了查理的那本书，我的意思是，poor Charlie’s Almanac，值得读三四遍。我想我读本·格雷厄姆的书大概五六遍。每次我读它，我意识到我只需要更深入地思考某些事情。它们并不复杂或其他什么。但是，你知道，最好是。如果你得到了像查理那样的伟大指导，最好多读几遍，而不是认为你需要在图书馆里看完每本书。好的，让我们去第四部分。