This list obviously flawed and contentious but put it down to boyish ambition if you will.
1920s All Quiet on the Western Front: Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
The carnage of WW1 left a bitter legacy for which Germany was blamed. This German novel showed German soldiers to be human beings suffering in the same way as the British. It helped create inter-war pacifism.
1930s Heavy Weather: P G Wodehouse (1933)
This is a Blandings novel featuring the Empress of Blanding: a pig. Don’t worry about the storyline just focus on the magnificence of the surreal humour.
1940s 1984: George Orwell (1949)
British people worship the Surveillance Society. Orwell’s nightmare is here. Big Brother is all pervasive just as predicted. The building blocks of a 2023 police state is in place.
1950s Stranger on a train: Patricia Highsmith (1950)
Stranger meet on a train and agree to kill the other persons target. They believe that as there is no connexion between them and the victim they’ll escape justice.
1960s The Godfather: Mario Puzo (1969)
Puzo got under the skin of the Mafia and changed crime writing for ever. His characters were human as well as being psychopathic murderers.
1970s The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe: Douglas Adams (1979)
An utterly brilliant scifi/fantasy/black humour/social commentary novel. No known genre. The earth is about to be destroyed by a building programme for an inter-galactic highway! Arthur Dent escapes and here are his adventures.
1980s The Bonfire of the Vanities: Tom Wolfe (1987)
All social rules are abandoned to make money. And the money- makers are worshipped as Masters of the Universe. When reality hits their world stops – except it didn’t did it?
1990s The Girl with the Pearl Earring Tracy Chevalier (1999)
She gently delves into the relationship between a ‘sitter’ and the artist: Vermeer. Beautifully written
2000s The Devotion of Suspect X: Keigo Higashino (2005)
Immensely cunning plot brilliantly written and a classic police procedural. If you can get past the locale and names you’ll be rewarded
2010s Gone Girl: Gillian Flynn (2012)
Hyper-clever this was so successful that it spawned an entire genre of books with ‘Girl’ in their titles. Brilliant writing and a great finale.
End note: All the books have been filmed but the only one recommended is Godfather 2
A lawyer was working late when Satan walked into his office. “I have an offer. If you give me your soul and the soul of everyone in your family, I’ll give you a full partnership in the business.”
The lawyer stared icily at the devil, “What’s the catch?”
Nat King Cole was an enormously popular crooner, earning $4,500 a week1 in Las Vegas in 1956. He headlined at the whites-only Thunderbird Hotel, where he wasn’t allowed to venture beyond the showroom and the cook’s resting area behind the kitchen. Cole’s road manager was given a room in the hotel because he was white, but the high-paid feature attraction had to find other accommodations. He regularly stayed in a rooming house on the West Side.
Many years ago, a few friends and I wrote a list of five books, which must be read to satisfy the claim of being ‘well read’. This was one of them. Why?
It’s a book of sparkling genius taking the reader into unknown territory but in an ultra-readable non-coercive way. Every firmly held belief, embedded to the point of certainty, is challenged. Gently and persuasively.
Pleasure is so obviously a ‘Good Thing’ it seems impossible to deny. And yet? If life is lived without pain or, unwelcome challenges, and drugs relieve all anxieties is humanity diminished? Huxley invents a happiness drug, soma, to control the population. Even the riot police use soma gas to quell unrest as opposed to physical force.
To avoid social class antagonisms all babies are incubated in test tubes. People are designed to fulfil specific roles in society and nothing else. They’re indoctrinated, in the test-tube, with acceptable attitudes. This creates contentment.
Huxley in a cunning counter plot introduces Mr Savage. He wasn’t indoctrinated because he was brought up in a wilderness. When he’s exposed to the Brave New World of contentment he rejects it.
Try this
All right, then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind. There was a long silence. ‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond [the World Controller] shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said. pp210-11
A magician was working on a cruise ship with a different audience each week. He did the same tricks every cruise. There was only one problem: The captain’s parrot understood the tricks. He started shouting out at every show:
“Look, it’s not the same hat.”
“Look, he is hiding the flowers under the table.”
“Hey, why are all the cards the Ace of Spades ?”
The ship had an accident and sank. The magician found himself adrift with the parrot. They stared at each other with silent hatred.
A day passed and the parrot said: “OK, I give up. What did you do with the ship?”
“My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest.” Multi-billionaire Warren Buffett
Geography
Buffett claims being American was a necessary condition to his success. He’s wrong. In America racial identity helps define life opportunities and especially in the southern states. In Mississippi, annual household income is $49k, with a top 1%er needing $361.5k. In Buffett’s state, Nebraska, the figures are, respectively, $66.5k and $745.3k.1 Mississippi wrecks black-American human capital and weaken everyone’s economic well-being.
Buffett was born in 1930, in segregationist America. Higher education for black-Americans was a dream. Buffett attended three universities and each had overt barriers to entry. “For a century after the abolition of American slavery in 1865, most colleges and universities in the Southern United States prohibited all African Americans from attending.”2 Entry barriers existed for Jewish and black-American students in northern states universities.3
A Mississippian black Buffett, born in 1930, wouldn’t be a multi-billionaire now.
Genetics
Buffett is nonagenarian with ‘lucky’ genes. If he’s making a wider point about a genetic disposition to become rich he’s wrong again. A black Mississippian Buffett would have had vanishingly few opportunities for business success. He’d have been excluded from critically important loans because of racist banks. Winning the genetic lottery and becoming a world-class sportsman might have leveraged him into sustained wealth. But probably not.
Let’s take the case of elite black athletes at the Nazi Olympics. When they returned, “the 18 African-American Olympians of 1936 understood that their dreams had to be limited. None of them were invited to the White House, or shook the hand of President Franklin Roosevelt.”4 Jesse Owens, despite winning four gold medals and poking Hitler in the eye, was snubbed.
Professional sport was segregated in the 1930s and 40s. Super-stars couldn’t stay in team hotels. Nor eat in restaurants, or travel easily on public transport. There wasn’t a professional black middle-class to protect their financial interests, leaving them vulnerable to expoiltation.5
Buffett’s comment is a coy way of claiming he’s a ‘chosen’ one.
Capital accumulation
Buffett says compound interest is a key factor in his mega-wealth. By this he means leaving capital untouched to accumulate. His motto is: savings then spending. Buffett is hostile to conspicuous consumption. His principal business, Berkshire Hathaway,5 focuses entirely on capital accumulation. It doesn’t pay dividends or offer ‘share splits,’6 which denies investment opportunities for retail investors.
Buffett is a parasite. He invests in successful businesses. His only contribution to the investment world is his concept, ‘moats’. A moat is an advantage, which denies entry to competitive alternatives. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is worth $700billion and features five shares with a handful of make-weight investments.7
Buffett rides on the coat-tails of business genius.
Conclusion
Warren Buffett comes from a white middle-class family who supported his multiple university educational experiences.8 His military draft9 was in the New York National Guard as a pay clerk and he avoided (evaded?) the Korean war, giving him time to build wealth. Buffett’s billions come from intelligence and an insatiable desire for money. His investment policy horizon is ‘forever’. His reward for staying focused for 93 years, is that he’s a multi-billionaire.
Addendum one: The global top 1%ers
But the threshold required to make it in to that elite group is lower than you might think – just $34,000 per person.10
This illustrates the deflator from the ballast of the non-developed world’s grinding poverty. Correcting for inflation and converting $34,000 into 2023 £££s this becomes £39,605 per person for household income in the UK. Inflation calculator | Bank of England
Addendum two: What it takes to be a top 1%er in various countries
“When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote: ‘Happy’. They told me that I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them that they didn’t understand life.”
The rulers of Spain had long pursued a policy of intermarriage in the hope of uniting the entire peninsular under a single sceptre. Although in 1580 these incestuous unions achieved their goal when Philip became king of Portugal. They dramatically reduced the dynasty’s gene pool. Philip’s son Don Carlos (d. 1568) and his great-grandson Carlos II (d.1700) each had only six great-grandparents instead of the normal sixteen, with an ‘inbreeding coefficient’ much the same as the incestuous offspring of siblings, of a parent and child: 0.25. Both manifested physical and mental handicaps; both died childless. In 1570 Philip married one of his nieces and they produced seven children with an ‘inbreeding coefficient of 0.22. Only one survived, Philip III, survived his father, and during his reign (1588-1621) Spain lost ground both in Europe (notably Italy) and overseas (notably in India and the Caribbean) Bankruptcy and military failure forced him to make peace with Elizabeth’s successor in 1604 and three years later to conclude a ceasefire with the Dutch Republic which in effect recognised its sovereignty.
Source: Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker Armada: The Spanish enterprise and England’s deliverance in 1588 p481 Yale (2022)
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