Herndon looked like he was going to vomit and couldn’t resist jumping in. “You love to cite statistics that show these kids are more likely to end up in jail than in college,” he said. “Yet you hand pick the ones who are obviously not on that track, and saddle them with a life of indentured servitude.”
“Now Britt,” Prescott chuckled with a glint in his eye. “I’m just going by statistics that we have for unselected orphans. If you have more specific data, I’d love for you to share it with us. And as for your claim of indentured servitude, well, that’s just absurd. That’s like recommending against a student’s going to college to avoid being saddled with all of that debt they’ll eventually be forced to repay.”
Shaking his head, Herndon barked back, “If you look at the roughly one thousand living people who have at one time or another been part of the Forbes 400 — the wealthiest 400 people in the world, mind you — 25 of them were adopted. Two point five percent! That’s an over-representation of adoptees among the wealthiest people in the world! I could say that you’re hand-picking from a population that’s more likely to overachieve!”
“Now here’s where we do have more specific data, Britt,” Prescott said without pause. “Of those 25 people you referenced, 17 were adopted as infants, which we don’t touch. That leaves eight who were adopted later in life. Seven of those were adopted by extended family members and one by a close family friend. Only one spent any time in an orphanage, which was purely transitional and only for a few days. All of our kids, by law, must have spent a minimum of three months in an orphanage prior to joining the program. So if you look at the population we’re drawing from, they represent precisely 0% of the Forbes 400.”
“Corporations are going to be making decisions about the way these kids are raised with future profitability as their only motivation — with no concern for their happiness!” Herndon seethed.
“Britt, two suggestions. One, look over our mission statement. Two, try some decaf.” He turned over to Blake, snickering, pointing a sideways thumb at Herndon’s image on the monitor. “Of course I’m only joking, Britt. But we are very aware that successful adults are the products of happy childhoods. They come from strong families, they have friends, and they’re involved in diverse extracurricular activities. I’d also like to point out that short-selling on the Avillage Exchange is explicitly and permanently forbidden, so every investor will only have an interest in these kids’ values going up.”
“Ok, well why don’t you tell the people at home who the true legal guardians are? Is it the ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ you referred to?” Britt asked, making quotation marks with his fingers as he spoke, leaning in almost on top of the camera.
“This is an entirely new paradigm where the legal guardians are not the parents but the corporation. I know that’s become dirty word, but let’s be honest. No investor would put a single cent into one of these kids if there were no legal bond. And if you allow yourself to get past the media buzzword ‘corporation,’ I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. The truth is most parents don’t know what they’re doing a lot of the time. They really don’t — myself included. We parents often wind up making emotional decisions without a lot of thought to the long-term consequences. I hear parents say all the time, ‘There’s no handbook on how to raise a kid.’ Well, I’m hear to tell you there is. Sort of.
“We have developed actuarial tables over the last 20 years that cover an amazing array of variables. For instance, Blake,” Prescott posed, deliberately ignoring Herndon. “Did you know that only-children have a 57% chance of choosing a profession in the field of their same-sex parent? Or that lifetime earnings of piano and violin players is 73% higher than that of children who played any other instrument growing up? Or that there is a direct correlation between lifetime health quality and educational level?”
“Fascinating,” Blake commented.
“I’ve got literally thousands of those,” Prescott said, back in coffee table chit-chat mode with Blake.
Herndon was nearly boiling over. “Anytime you’ve got a system where a group of wealthy people owns another human being, that is a form of slavery, and I am shocked and ashamed that this is going on in the United States. It’s an abomination!”
“Britt, I respect your opinion on a lot of issues, but you’re way off base here,” Prescott said calmly. “No one owns these people. Granted, while they’re minors, they don’t have the right to make all their own decisions, but no child does — their parents do.
“Then once they’re grown, they have a financial obligation to the shareholders who’ve supported them and put them in position to be successful. But they can choose to pursue whatever career their heart desires. Plus they gradually accumulate shares themselves, so that they have an opportunity to buy out the shareholders by the time they’re 50 — or earlier in some instances. By SEC regulation they’ll own 100% of their shares by the time they’re 63. It really isn’t that different than having the military pay for your college and then owing them 4 years of service afterward. Our arrangement is longer, but it’s actually much less restrictive.”
“Yeah, except they owe 90% of their after-tax income to the shareholders!” Britt yelled, nearly hyperventilating.
“Come on, Britt. You’re better than that. That’s the highest appropriation level, which only applies to the portion of their annual after-tax income over one million dollars — those kinds of numbers would apply to less than one percent of the population,” Prescott said, his heart rate at an even 60.
“One final question,” Blake said, winding the segment down wearing his familiar morning-show smirk. “Who’s next?”
“Sorry, folks. Looks like we’re out of time,” Prescott said with the same casual demeanor he’d kept throughout the interview, all-in-all satisfied with how the spot had gone.
Ryan slowly opened his eyes and looked over at the clock. He’d been asleep for almost 2 hours. The pirate bed was infinitely more comfortable than his old metal-framed bed, and the room was incomparably quieter than the orphanage.
Despite its short duration, the nap was the best sleep he’d had in months. Finally waking up refreshed, he realized how chronically exhausted he’d been.
He climbed out of bed, walked over to his desk and picked up his new smartphone, not entirely sure how to use it. J.R.’s number was already programmed into it. With one quick tap, he heard the phone start to ring. And ring. And ring. No answer.
“Mr. J.R., it’s Ryan. Don’t worry. I’m ok. I just have a couple questions about the thing you were telling me about after we ate at McDonald’s yesterday. Can you call me back? I’m not sure what my number is. Thanks.”
He then picked up the tablet, a medium with which he was very familiar, and decided to try to do a little research on his own. His search for “RTJ IPO” yielded a treasure trove of information. With tabs open for the dictionary, Wikipedia and several finance pages, he started to piece a few things together. He was extraordinarily bright, but this was almost all new terminology for him.
No relevant information was out there to be found on Sara or Thomas Ewing. But it appeared his real decision-makers were on his board of directors, so he typed in a search for “RTJ board of directors.”
The chairman of the board was James Prescott. Ryan never forgot a name — he was the CEO of Avillage. As he scrolled down the list, expectedly, he failed to recognize any of the other names — until he got to the last one.