1. Michael Lewis, “The Temptation of St. Warren,” New Republic, February 17, 1992.
2. Ron Suskind, “Legend Revisited: Warren Buffett’s Aura as Folksy Sage Masks Tough, Polished Man,” Wall Street Journal, November 8, 1991.
3. Interview with Bill Gates.
4. Ibid.
5. Grinnell College had made a lot of money from its Intel stock but had already sold it. Noyce died June 3, 1990.
6. Interview with Bill Gates.
7. Interview with Bill Ruane.
8. Interview with Don Graham.
9. Gates was right; Kodak was toast. From January 1990 to December 2007, Kodak stock rose a measly 20%, barely more than 1% a year. The S&P over the same period rose 315%. Berkshire Hathaway rose 1,627%. Microsoft rose 6,853%.
10. Interview with Bill Gates.
11. Ibid.
12. Statistics courtesy of Berkshire Hathaway.
13. Interview with Louis Blumkin.
14. A Scott Fetzer product.
15. Interviews with Kathleen Cole, Susie Buffett Jr.
16. Interview with Kathleen Cole.
17. Interview with Howie Buffett.
18. Interview with Susie Buffett Jr.
19. Interview with Bill Gates.
20. Interview with Sharon Osberg.
21. The first week the author started working on this book, she came downstairs to the hotel lobby to find the same package.
22. Interviews with Sharon Osberg and Astrid Buffett, who recalls “Sharon was just beside herself.”
23. Interview with Sharon Osberg.
24. Interviews with Astrid Buffett, Dick and Mary Holland.
25. Interview with Dody Waugh-Booth.
26. Carnegie built 2,509 libraries (costing $56 million) and established other public works using over 90% of his $480 million steel-made wealth.
27. Bill Ruane and others recalled this speech.
28. Buffett, characteristically, uses both low and high numbers higher than the current population number (a margin of safety against looking like an alarmist) even though some experts argue that the “carrying capacity” has already been exceeded.
29. Organizations such as the International Humanist and Ethical Union and Planned Parenthood routinely took this position before 1974. See Paige Whaley Eager, Global Population Policy: From Population Control to Reproductive Rights. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2004.
30. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, Vol. 162, No. 3859, December 13, 1968. Hardin’s theory was essentially a restatement of the “prisoner’s dilemma,” which also addresses cooperation and “cheating” as covered in references on that subject. In the 1970s it was assumed that economic progress would accelerate population growth, that population growth would prevent economic growth. The earth’s “carrying capacity” was assumed to be essentially fixed, rather than at least somewhat flexible through the use of technology and market forces, incorrect assumptions that caused such forecasts to peg the dates of critical population levels too early.
31. Garrett Hardin, “A Second Sermon on the Mount,” from Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 1963.
32. Nevertheless, some remnants of the eugenics movement remained alive, and by the millennial era, developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive science had raised complicated questions about the idea.
33. The historic linkage between “population control,” the eugenics movement, and racism is detailed by Allan Chase in The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). While a full treatment of these issues is beyond the scope of this book, what seems clear, from his change in terminology, steering of the Buffett Foundation, and gradual distancing from the Hardin camp, was Buffett’s disenchantment with the Malthusian views of Hardin because of their eugenics implications. (Hardin’s personal stationery featured a small U.S. map around the words “Quality of the Population.”)
34. In a highly controversial move, the Buffett Foundation had paid half the first-year costs to bring the RU-486 abortion pill to the United States.
35. From Eager’s Global Population Policy: From Population Control to Reproductive Rights, which chronicles the gradual rejection of neo-Malthusianism and coercive population control methods in favor of voluntary, evolutionary changes in birth rates through economic development, reproductive rights, and an emphasis on women’s health.
36. In “Foundation Grows: Buffetts Fund Efforts for Population Control” (Omaha World-Herald, January 10, 1988), Bob Dorr quotes Susie as saying, “Warren likes numbers … he likes to see concrete results, and you can see them [numbers] change” to explain her husband’s interest in groups such as Planned Parenthood and the Population Institute.
37. A similar term, “Ovarian Roulette,” was apparently first used by Dr. Reginald Lourie of Children’s Hospital, Washington, D.C., at a hearing of the Committee on Government Operations, United States, “Effect of Population Growth on Natural Resources and the Environment,” September 15–16, 1969, in a discussion with Garrett Hardin, to describe a mother who takes the risk of an unwanted pregnancy by not using birth control (and the term has since been used by Responsible Wealth). However, it is the second word—“lottery” versus “roulette”—that changes a bad choice to bad luck: from a child who is born unwanted to a woman who trusts to random chance, to a child who is born in cruel circumstances because of random chance.
38. “I Didn’t Do It Alone,” a report by Chuck Collins’s organization, Responsible Wealth.
39. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. The Ovarian Lottery resembles Rawls’s view, which is a form of determinism—and assumes that much, though not necessarily all, of what happens to people is determined by the present and past, for example, through their genes, or the luck of where they are born and when. The opposite of determinism is free will. From the days of the earliest philosophers, mankind has been debating whether free will exists. Philosophers also debate whether it exists on a scale or is irreconcilable with determinism. Critic Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, gives the case for irreconcilability in a critique of Rawls that more or less says that economist Adam Smith’s invisible hand gives people what they have earned and deserved (Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974). All true libertarians believe in free will and deny absolutely that determinism exists. Since economic policy is so influenced by these ideas, the topic is worth understanding; for example, it sheds light on the debate over how Alan Greenspan’s libertarian leanings influenced Federal Reserve policy that led to recent debt-fueled asset bubbles. Likewise, the debate over eugenics in genomism and reprogenetics resounds with issues of determinism and free will.
40. Interview with Bill Gates.
41. Interview with Bill Gates.