The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [578]
35. Interviews with Sharon Osberg and Astrid Buffett, who recalls “Sharon was just beside herself.”
36. Interview with Sharon Osberg.
37. Interviews with Astrid Buffett, Dick and Mary Holland.
38. Interview with Dody Waugh-Booth.
39. Carol J. Loomis, “My 51 Years (and Counting) at Fortune,” Fortune, September 19, 2005.
40. Depending on how rich they had gotten and how long ago they had been sunburned. Bill Scott, whom Buffett had made breathtakingly rich, had acquired a deep tan and had begun to resemble Buffett himself.
41. Carnegie built 2,509 libraries (costing $56 million) and established other public works using over 90% of his $480 million steel-made wealth.
42. Ruane’s first wife, Elizabeth, suffered from a mood disorder and committed suicide in 1988.
43. Bill Ruane and others recalled this speech.
44. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books, 1968; Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principles of Population. The Population Bomb was based on the work of the nineteenth-century demographer and statistician Thomas Malthus, who said that humans procreate in a geometric rather than arithmetic progression; thus the earth’s population would inevitably expand beyond the point at which its resources could support it. At some point, Malthus postulated, misery and vice (e.g., war, pandemic, famine, infant mortality, political unrest) would reduce the population to a sustainable level. Malthus’s theory had enormous influence on many scientists, including Charles Darwin. Because Malthus failed to take into account a number of factors—for example, simplistically assuming that economic development stimulated population growth—his ideas were and continued to be ridiculed as predicted catastrophes failed to materialize within a decade or two after 1970. The basic concepts of Malthus and the idea of the Malthusian catastrophe are being taken more seriously in some quarters today, however.
45. 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.
46. 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.
47. This was the Belous case (People v. Belous, 71 Cal.2d 954, 458 P.2d 194, 80 Cal. Rptr. 354 [1969]), which declared laws against abortion unconstitutional in California. Munger helped write the opinion. Buffett says he has never seen Munger “so fired up,” the most unconventional thing he has ever seen Munger do.
48. Buffett said Munger tempted him into running a church by offering him the job of sexton, until he found out the job description was not what he thought. “We held mock debates over who got to be the preacher.”
49. 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.
50. Garrett Hardin, “A Second Sermon on the Mount,” from Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 1963.
51. 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.
52. The historic linkage between “population control,” the eugenics movement,