Benjamin Franklin
Intellectual model and namesake inspiration for Poor Charlie's Almanack
Biography
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was printer, scientist, diplomat, and Founding Father — and, in Munger's reading of history, the most complete demonstration that wisdom is a practice rather than a credential. Born the fifteenth of seventeen children to a Boston candle-maker, Franklin had two years of formal schooling. Everything else — the printing fortune, the electrical science that made him the most famous American alive, the civic institutions from the Philadelphia library to the fire company, the diplomacy in Paris — was self-constructed through reading, experiment, and relentless self-examination.
Franklin's literary vehicles were his Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack, the annual he published from 1732 to 1758 under the persona of Richard Saunders. The almanack's aphorisms — on thrift, industry, honesty, persuasion, and the quiet arithmetic of daily habit — became the largest repository of practical wisdom in American letters. Franklin also left a celebrated account of his own moral method: a notebook of thirteen virtues, tracked daily, by which he measured and corrected his own behavior.
It was this Franklin — the self-educator, the aphorist, the systematic self-corrector — whom Munger adopted as his personal patron saint. When Peter Kaufman's compilation of Munger's thought needed a title, it became Poor Charlie's Almanack in direct homage.
Key Stories
The bequest. At the close of the 1995 Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Munger explained why he was leaving his psychological system to posterity: he wanted to imitate three bequests — Bunyan's Old Valiant for Truth, his first employer Ernest Buffett, and Franklin. "Ben Franklin, to my great benefit, left behind his autobiography, his Almanacks, and much else." Munger's own speeches were conceived as the same genre: one man's tested, portable wisdom handed down to whoever can use it, sword left "to him who can wear it."
Persuasion through interest. Munger quoted Franklin's maxim more often than any other single aphorism: "If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason." In the 1995 speech he called it "a wise guide to a great and simple precaution in life: Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives." He retold the cautionary tale of the brilliant general counsel who lost his career by arguing moral duty to a CEO whose interest lay elsewhere — the correct answer in such situations, Munger said, "was given by Ben Franklin."
The self-correction twin. Munger repeatedly paired Franklin with Darwin as the two great proofs that psychological tendencies are not destiny. Franklin maneuvered important men into lending him books, converting their inconsistency-avoidance into liking — a technique Munger analyzed with admiration as applied inconsistency-avoidance. And Franklin's notebook method of tracking his own faults was, for Munger, the eighteenth-century prototype of the checklist discipline: "You can correct those psychological deficiencies to some extent. Ben Franklin did it. And Darwin did it."
Impact on Munger's Work
Franklin's influence on Munger is the most pervasive of any historical figure, because it is architectural rather than topical. The very form of Munger's public thought — compact aphorisms backed by long experience, delivered in plain language with dry humor — is the Franklin form. Poor Charlie's Almanack is not a clever title; it is a declaration of method: wisdom for practical people, organized for daily use, free of academic pretension.
Substantively, Franklin supplied several of Munger's working rules. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" underwrites Munger's habit-first philosophy: it is far easier to prevent a bad habit than to change one. "A small leak will sink a great ship" became Munger's way of teaching that the brain chronically underrates small, accumulating failures — the functional equivalent, in cognition, of the unnoticed leak. And Franklin's prescription for self-reliant execution — "If you want it done, go. If not, send" — anchored Munger's argument that multidisciplinary thinking cannot be delegated.
Franklin the investor and philanthropist also entered Munger's teaching. In the 1998 talk to foundation financial officers, Munger noted that Franklin's own charitable endowment was required, by Franklin's will, to concentrate investment in what it admired — and asked why modern foundations should not "thus imitate Ben Franklin? After all, old Ben was very effective in doing public good. And he was a pretty good investor, too." For Munger, Franklin was the standing proof that the self-education model — read voraciously, test ideas against experience, revise when the evidence demands — beats formal schooling for producing genuine worldly wisdom.
Key Passages From Munger's Speeches and Letters
"Ben Franklin, to my great benefit, left behind his autobiography, his Almanacks, and much else."
"We should also heed the general lesson implicit in the injunction of Ben Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanack: 'If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason.'"
"But one beauty of psychology that we should consider as we emphasize these horrors is that you are not totally doomed by your natural psychological tendencies. You can correct those psychological deficiencies to some extent. Ben Franklin did it. And Darwin did it."
"Why not thus imitate Ben Franklin? After all, old Ben was very effective in doing public good. And he was a pretty good investor, too."
Referenced In
Source: Charlie Munger Knowledge Base — Munger speeches, Wesco Financial annual letters, DJCO annual meeting transcripts