The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [579]
53. 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.
54. 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.
55. 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.
56. 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.
57. “I Didn’t Do It Alone,” a report by Chuck Collins’s organization, Responsible Wealth.
58. 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.
59. Interview with Bill Gates.
60. In 2005 Oxnam published A Fractured Mind, his memoir of living with multiple personality disorder (New York: Hyperion).
61. Interview with Bill Gates.
Chapter 51
1. Anthony Bianco, “The Warren Buffett You Don’t Know,” BusinessWeek, July 5, 1999.
2. Interview with Tony Nicely.
3. This was a 40% premium to where GEICO was trading.
4. In 1993, 707 new issues raised $41.4 billion. In 1994, 608 IPOs raised $28.5 billion, the second-most-productive year in the past quarter century. The third-best