Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success is now out and Gladwell himself has been out and about chatting it up…
The Guardian notes his timing is good:
He is publishing his book at the moment when the destructive disjunction between effort and reward that has dominated the last decade or so – the criminal nonsense of the city bonus economy – is for the first time showing signs of diminishing. Gladwell has been predicting the downturn for a while…
His book also comes at a time when there is a President-elect who just about embodies all he argues: Obama never misses a chance to tell stories about how he has been blessed with a network of support, how he was given opportunity and was lucky enough to take it.
Gladwell sees Obama as an almost inevitable product of an education system that for an enlightened period has favoured African-Americans who show dedication and ability. ‘I don’t believe in character,’ he says. ‘I believe in the effect of the immediate impact of environment and situation on people’s behaviour.’
On Gladwell’s genius:
Gladwell’s contention is not only that success is the result of a complicated mix of social advantages but also that the insistence that some individuals have extra-special gifts and talents, are geniuses in particular fields, or pull themselves up by their bootstraps, is incredibly destructive to society’s idea of itself. ‘No one,’ he says, ‘not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses – ever makes it alone.’
There is nothing new in this theory, but Gladwell’s gift for interdisciplinary cross-dressing once again makes it look extremely fashionable. He has a genius – one no doubt due to many social factors – for making everything he writes seem like an impossible adventure.
Louis Bayard, writing in Salon, is skeptical and unimpressed:
The problem with having your theory in hand from the beginning is that you have to slough off whatever data don’t fit. There is, in fact, a small-print proviso attached to each of Gladwell’s theoretical constructs: “Except when it doesn’t.” “The Tipping Point”: A small-scale social shift can generate sweeping societal change … except when it doesn’t. “Blink”: Great decision making happens on impulse … except when it doesn’t. (Or, in the case of racial profiling, shouldn’t.)
Gladwell’s “Outliers” model — the idea that success is shaped by environment, not genetics — has two additional problems. First, it is insufficiently predictive. We can easily see that favoring people with January birthdays over people with September birthdays, as Canadian hockey leagues do, can have consequences. But how could anyone have predicted that postwar Jewish lawyers would be rewarded for their expertise 20 years down the road? Or that, 20 years after Bill Gates was born, the advent of the personal computer would turn programming geeks into masters of the universe? These are historical accidents, for which it is impossible to prepare. Success, in these instances, is simply a byproduct of luck.
This leads us to the second problem with Gladwell’s model: It is every bit as deterministic as the “genius” model. “The successful are those who have been given opportunities,” he writes, “and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” But opportunity is as much out of our control as genetics. What if the opportunity doesn’t come? If, as Gladwell suggests, we are prisoners of our ethnic or cultural legacies, what if we are of the wrong ethnicity or the wrong culture? How can we ever hope to succeed? If, on the other hand, we can overcome these environmental barriers through relatively quick fixes, as Gladwell suggests elsewhere, then how significant are those barriers?
For his part, Gladwell is pleased:
I’m very happy with it, and I think anyone who liked Tipping Point or Blink will like this book too. I’ll be blogging more about it, in the near future. In the meantime, there is a short Q and A describing the themes of Outliers from my website, here. And you can buy it here.
SEE ALSO: Edward Tenner, author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences and Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity, and John Horgan, the director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology and a science correspondent for Bloggingheads.tv, have a Book Club Correspondence on Outliers at Slate.
And previously, Malcolm Gladwell’s Substantial Idea.