Baby Maeve and the Ovarian Lottery

My daughter, Maeve, is about to turn 8 months old. She’s chunky, smiley, and effortlessly sits like Buddha while playing with her toys. No crawling or walking yet. She did recently learn to wave (…flail her arm) to say hi to people. It’s pretty cute.

And I’m sorry…we’re trying hard not to plaster pictures of Maeve all over the Internet, so you’ll have to take my word on it.

But parenting isn’t a cake walk. Kelly and I have put a lot of time and resources into providing for Maeve as best we can. Sleep comes and goes. There’s only so much time in the day. It’s not easy. But it’s certainly worthwhile. It’s both “very hard” and also “simply the best” at the same time.

Maeve’s grandparents have been an amazing help, watching her a few days a week while we work. Maeve has met many of our friends and their kids – she’s social. She goes to the library, the local pool, and she’s taken two plane trips. She has a support system. She is worldly.

The point is: Maeve is living a good life. We’re happy about that.

We were sitting in the kitchen the other day as Buddha Maeve played on her mat. I’d recently been reading about the disproportionate impact that early years (0-2 years old, maybe 0-3 ) have on a human’s life. And a sad thought crossed my mind.

I’m sure there are some babies in greater Rochester (let alone the rest of the world) who are exactly as old as Maeve, but aren’t getting nearly the same support from their parents and families. It’s not that I think Kelly and I are supreme parents. Instead, it’s that I know other parents might not have the time, resources, support, emotional capacity, etc. to provide for their kids.

Put frankly: we all know that some parents aren’t fit to be parents, and that sucks.

Here’s the important takeaway, though. Maeve’s situation has nothing to do with Maeve‘s great decision-making. Agreed? She’s 8 months old. She’s still working on getting food from her hand into her mouth. She is not the captain of her own ship. Instead, Maeve’s life is entirely a function of luck in terms of which house, which family, which country, which time period, etc. she was born into.

This is Warren Buffett’s so-called ovarian lottery. Buffett explains it well:

I have been extraordinarily lucky.

I use this example and I will take a minute or two because I think it is worth thinking about a little bit.

Let’s just assume it was 24 hours before you were born and a genie came to you and he said, “Herb, you look very promising and I have a big problem. I got to design the world in which you are going to live in. I have decided it is too tough; you design it…”

You say, “I can design anything? There must be a catch?”

The genie says there is a catch.

You don’t know if you are going to be born black or white, rich or poor, male or female, infirm or able-bodied, bright or retarded. All you know is you are going to take one ball out of a barrel with 5.8 billion. You are going to participate in the ovarian lottery.

And that is going to be the most important thing in your life, because that is going to control whether you are born here or in Afghanistan or whether you are born with an IQ of 130 or an IQ of 70. It is going to determine a whole lot.

What type of world are you going to design?

Warren Buffett

Here’s a longer clip of Charlie and Warren discussing the Ovarian lottery (in the context of, of all things, capital gains taxes). I highly recommend it.

The philosophical argument is that we should ask the genie to design a world where we are not overly punished for “losing” such a lottery, nor overly rewarding for “winning” the lottery. Because we don’t know in advance whether we’ll win or lose! Instead, we’d design a world where other factors down the line (ideally, factors within our control) play a greater role in our life’s “wins” and “losses.”

The ovarian lottery is the ultimate admission that some things are within our control and other things are out of our control. Going further, it’s the admission that some of the most impactful variables in our lives, the ones that define us to our very core, are out of our control. That’s a scary admission. It hurts the ego to think, “Some of my personal success is just…luck?”

It’s a sad thought that, while Maeve has done well (at least so far) in the ovarian lottery, some of her little Buddha peers have gotten burned by it. And, for better or worse, there are lifelong consequences to that.

I bring this idea up because of its natural parallel to the financial planning world, where we make decisions based on the best available information today. But we make those decisions knowing full well that many of the future variables will be out of our control, and the best laid plans today will, in hindsight, not have been correct.

You can’t control the stock market and the returns it provides you. You don’t decide when a recession hits. You don’t know how interest rates and inflation will change. You might work your career expecting Social Security to be there in full, only to watch policymakers shift the rules. Tax laws, personal health, family issues, inheritances…it’s all out of your control.

Yet, we build a financial plan on a foundation of assumptions for all of these factors. That plan, and those assumptions, will invariably need revisions at some point. Sometimes, those “out of my control” variables will hurt us.

It doesn’t mean we were “wrong,” per se, but instead means we weren’t able to control everything as much as we wish we could have. We control what we can, and add margin for the rest.

Both parenting and financial planning require us to do our best with what we can control—while acknowledging the immense role of luck. We can’t choose our starting point, and we can’t predict every twist and turn, but we can still make thoughtful decisions that give us the best possible chance at success.

Now…where did all the binkies go?!

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-Jesse

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