Billionaire Charlie Munger Said Watching Your Kids Die Was Once the 'Agony of Poverty' — Now the Poor's Biggest Problem Is 'They're Too Fat'

By the end of his life, Charlie Munger had seen just about everything—wars, depressions, dot-com bubbles, and the rise of billionaires in hoodies. But it was at the 2022 Daily Journal shareholder meeting, a full year before his passing, that the Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman delivered one of his most sobering—and simultaneously sharpest—observations yet: America's poor used to bury their children. Now, he said, "they're too fat."

At 98 years old, Munger still wielded a wit as dry as the Mojave and a memory sharper than most men's ambition. Speaking from a small conference room in Los Angeles, a can of Diet Coke in front of him—always repping a Berkshire favorite—he was asked what worried him most about the economy and the stock market—and what gave him hope.

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"You have to be optimistic about the competency of our technical civilization," Munger said, ever the rationalist. But, he added, the nature of what we consider "problems" has radically shifted.

"In the past, if you wanted three children," Munger said, "you had to have six, because three died in infancy. That was our ancestors. Think of the agony of watching half your children die."

That wasn't metaphor. Munger was born in 1924. He remembered the tail end of those days.

"And now," he said, pausing slightly for effect, "the principal problem of the poor people is they're too fat."

It wasn't a punchline. It was a statement of contrast, loaded with perspective and more than a little bite. "That is a very different place from what happened in the past. In the past, they were on the edge of starving."

Munger's genius wasn't just in numbers. It was in pattern recognition—especially the patterns nobody liked to talk about.

Despite what he called "an enormous increase in living standards and freedom and diminishment of racial inequities," Munger lamented a darker irony of modern life: "People are less happy about the state of affairs than they were when things were way tougher."

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Why?

"It has a very simple explanation," Munger said. "The world is not driven by greed. It's driven by envy."

Yes, even the man who'd sat beside Warren Buffett for half a century, building one of the world's most envied fortunes, argued that it wasn't wealth itself that made society churn—it was comparison.

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"They take it for granted," he said of modern Americans. "All they think about is somebody else is having more now, and it's not fair that he should have it and they don't."

This wasn't just some philosophical quip for Munger. He reached straight for the Old Testament to make his point: "That's the reason that God came down and told Moses you couldn't envy your neighbor's wife—or even his donkey."

Yes, Munger really said donkey. "Even the old Jews were having trouble with envy."

From envy to economics to public safety, Munger wove it all together, noting that as a kid during the Great Depression in Omaha, Nebraska, he felt safer walking the streets than he did in modern-day Los Angeles. Even after all the societal gains, he said, "a lot of people are very unhappy and feel very abused after everything's improved by about 600%."

Then came a personal confession, rare for a man known for his cold-eyed analysis: "I have conquered envy in my own life. I don't envy anybody. I don't give a damn what somebody else has."

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But not everyone's so lucky. And many, he noted, "play to the envy in order to advance their own political careers," even entire media networks "pour gasoline on the flames of envy."

Still, even in his cynicism, Munger offered advice—especially for the younger generation tempted by Instagram lifestyles and status watches.

"If you stop to think of the pretentious expenditures of the rich—who in the hell needs a real Rolex watch, so you can get mugged for it?" he said. "Don't go there. The hell of the pretentious expenditure—I don't think there's much happiness in it."

But here's the kicker: it's those same expenditures, those same ego-driven flexes, that drive the capitalist engine. "It does drive the civilization we actually have," he said. "It drives the dissatisfaction."

Munger referenced Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, pointing out that objectively, life has vastly improved. But, he said, "as it gets better and better, people are less and less satisfied. That is weird—but that's what's happened."

In the end, Munger's message wasn't just about the economy. It was about human nature. How we never stop comparing. How we rewrite our own baseline for suffering. And how, in the land of plenty, we've somehow convinced ourselves we're starving.

But maybe the real hunger is for contentment.

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