The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [390]
Buffett had been especially moved by the logic of Garrett Hardin, whose 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons” laid out the way that people who have no ownership stake in common goods—the air, the seas—overuse and destroy them.49 While Buffett adopted many principles conceived by Hardin, a leader of the “population control” movement, he rejected solutions favored by Hardin, who espoused authoritarian ideas and took a eugenicist approach. Hardin had written that the meek not only would inherit, but already had inherited the earth. He considered this “genetic suicide”: “Look around you. How many heroes do you number among your neighbors? Or your colleagues?…Where are the heroes of yesteryear? Where is Sparta now?”50
Buffett thought that the idea of bringing back Sparta had already been tried. The man who had tried it was Adolf Hitler. The Spartans had groomed themselves genetically by abandoning weak or “undesirable” babies on a mountain-side. Modern eugenics was a social philosophy formulated by Sir Francis Galton, who drew on the work of his cousin Charles Darwin and theorized that selective breeding of the human race could improve the quality of the population. This notion had received extremely widespread support in the early twentieth century, until discredited by the experiments of Nazi Germany.51 There was no safe way to think along lines like those Hardin was pursuing, which led to a deadly division of humanity into competing groups.52 Buffett had renounced this view in favor of a civil-rights-based approach to the problems of spaceship Earth.
Accordingly, by 1994, Buffett’s emphasis had shifted from “population control” to reproductive rights.53 This change corresponded with a worldwide evolution in thinking among the population control movement. Women “were no longer to be treated as a convenient means toward the ‘end’ of population control.”54 Buffett had always felt that any means of solving the population problem that involved coercion was out of the question.55 Now he went a step further. “I wouldn’t in any way limit a woman’s right to bear children even if the world were extremely overpopulated, and I wouldn’t ban the right to choose even if there were only two people on the planet and fertility was critical. I think the world should be limited to wanted people first. I don’t think that the numbers should determine how many people are wanted. Even if everybody had seven children, I wouldn’t do as Garrett Hardin said and link the right to the numbers.” So the Buffett Foundation supported reproductive rights.
Increasingly, the complexities and nuances of reproductive rights, civil rights, and population control had all gotten lost in the controversy over abortion. Buffett’s giving ultimately was based on what he called the Ovarian Lottery.56 He had passed the idea along to a group called Responsible Wealth. The idea had great resonance for Buffett.57
“I’ve had it so good in this world, you know. The odds were fifty-to-one against me being born in the United States in 1930. I won the lottery the day I emerged from the womb by being in the United States instead of in some other country where my chances would have been way different.
“Imagine there are two identical twins in the womb, both equally bright and energetic. And the genie says to them, ‘One of you is going to be born in the United States, and one of you is going to be born in Bangladesh. And if you wind up in Bangladesh, you will pay no taxes. What percentage of your income would you bid to be the one that is born in the United States?’ It says something about the fact that society has something to do with your fate and not just your innate qualities. The people who say, ‘I did it all myself,’ and think of themselves as Horatio Alger—believe me, they’d bid more to be in the United States than in Bangladesh. That’s the Ovarian Lottery.”
The Ovarian Lottery had come to shape all