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When his turn in the conversation came, Bill Gates said, Shouldn’t the measure of accomplishment be how many lives you can save with a given amount of money? He agreed with Buffett that you had to make the money first in order to have the money to give away. But as soon as he had made a certain amount, Gates said, he was going to use it to save more lives in the present, by giving most of it away.43

The Buffett Foundation was spending very little money in proportion to Buffett’s wealth. Buffett had chosen two main philanthropic issues, overpopulation and nuclear proliferation, problems that are almost unimaginably hard to solve. Nuclear proliferation didn’t lend itself well to financial solutions, although Buffett would have given as much money as he could to his highest priority, any plausible way of reducing the probability of nuclear war. His analysis of the problem was, characteristically, statistical.

“A nuclear attack is inevitable. It’s the ultimate problem of mankind. If there’s a ten percent probability that something will happen in a year, there’s a 99.5 percent probability that it will happen in fifty years. But if you can get that probability down to three percent, that reduces the probability to only seventy-eight percent in fifty years. And if you can get it down to one percent, there is only a forty percent probability in fifty years. That’s a truly worthwhile goal—it could literally make all the difference in the world.”

The other great problem, in Buffett’s view, was the strain placed on the over-burdened planet by too many people. Lacking a way to solve the nuclear problem, population control was where the Buffett Foundation had spent most of its money since the mid-1980s. This, too, he approached from a mathematical perspective. In 1950, the world’s population had been about 2.5 billion. A mere two decades later, shortly after Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was published, the world population was close to 3.7 billion.44 Ehrlich had predicted that the 1970s and 1980s would be times of massive, worldwide starvation, with hundreds of millions of people dying. By 1990 the world’s population had passed the five-billion mark, mass starvation had not occurred, and Ehrlich’s ideas were no longer taken seriously by many experts—even though the population had grown dramatically. The debate essentially centered over whether technology could outpace population growth, species extinction, and global warming. Buffett looked at the problem of expanding population and diminishing resources in terms of a “margin of safety.”

“There is a carrying capacity to the earth. It’s far, far, far, far, far greater than [Thomas] Malthus ever dreamed. On the other hand, there is some carrying capacity, and the one thing about carrying capacity is that you want to err on the low side. If you were provisioning a huge rocket ship to the moon and had enough for two hundred people and didn’t know how long the journey would take, you probably wouldn’t put more than a hundred fifty people on the ship. And we have a spaceship of sorts, and we don’t know how much the provisions are good for. It’s very hard to argue that the earth would be better off in terms of average happiness or livelihood with twelve billion people instead of six.45 There is a limit, and if you don’t know what that limit is, you’re better off erring on the safe side. It’s a margin of safety approach for the survival of the earth.”

Since the 1970s, Buffett had focused on giving women access to contraception and abortion—issues that were close to Susie’s heart—as the answer to out-of-control population growth. This was a standard point of view among humanist organizations at the time.46 Munger, Tolles had gotten Buffett involved in supporting an important court case in California, People v. Belous, which was a major step on the road to the landmark abortion ruling in Roe v. Wade.47 Charlie Munger took up this case with a passion; the firm had chosen it out of concern over the way young women were being maimed and killed