My Book Report

DISCLAIMER: This posting has nothing to do with the usual mannymontaigne topics. Danny lent me a couple books, and I promised him that I would critique the one I read most recently:
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. In all likelihood, unless you've read Gladwelll, you could care less about this posting. So instead of reading this posting, just go have a glass of Highland Park. Either that, or watch film about Stephen F. Austin, so we're ready for Friday night.

The subtitle of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers is, “The Story of Success”, and Gladwell’s thesis is summed up in the concluding pages of the book: “To build a better world, we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success -- the fortunate birthdates and the happy accidents of history -- with a society that provides opportunities for all.”(p. 268) To oversimplify this book, Gladwell attempts to prove that success is not the result of ability, or hard work, or initiative, or apparently any combination of the above, but rather comes from being in the right place at the right time. That and ten thousand hours of practice.

Gladwell is half right. He’s right when he attempts to show that there is no direct correlation between IQ, or ability, and success. He’s also right when he argues that opportunity can raise statistical performance across a given population – say inner city students. But once again, even though Gladwell writes an entertaining, engaging, and often thought provoking book, he can’t synthesize his various observations into any coherent theory. He errs in this book for two reasons. First, his methodology, if you want to call it that, is flawed. He really never thinks through his conclusions. He doesn’t look at them from every possible angle, to see if his propositions really make sense. Second, on a more substantive level, he is completely wrong when he tries to take talent, or genius, completely out of the equation. In Gladwell’s world, we can all be Mozart or Einstein; we just need a level playing field and an equal opportunity to get ahead.

Let’s talk methodology first. Gladwell cites what he calls the ten-thousand-hour rule for the proposition that great musicians (the Beatles) or great software developers (Bill Gates) became great for one simple reason: they practiced for ten thousand hours. Now really, all Gladwell is doing is arguing a general rule or law, on the basis of a couple anecdotal examples. Mozart supposedly became a great composer only after he had been writing music for 10,000 hours. Bill Joy and Bill Gates founded Sun and Microsoft only after they wrote code for 10,000 hours. And the Beatles only got great once they had played in Hamburg for years, seven hours a day, for a total of, yes, 10,000 hours. So then is Gladwell saying that any schlemiel will become a success if he only works at his craft for 10,000 hours?

There are a number of ways that Gladwell failed to think through this proposition. The first and most obvious is that for every example he selects, there are numerous counterexamples. In music, what about Dylan, who wrote Hard Rain and Blowin in the Wind, when he was only 21, barely a year out of Minnesota? How about Isaac Newton, who invented calculus and discovered the laws of motion when he was a young man? I mean, how does one discover something entirely new, such as calculus, if the ten-thousand-hour rule is really a rule? A second flaw in Gladwell’s analysis is that his exemplars were not the only ones who practiced for 10,000 hours. Gates and Joy were not the only teenagers fiddling with computers day and night, whether at Michigan or MIT or any of the other schools that had computer labs; and the Beatles were not the only band that played day and night for years on end. What elevated Gates and John Lennon from the others? Third, and this is a defect in Gladwell’s thinking in all of his books, is that he fails to consider causation. Do certain violinists become prodigies because they practice for 10,000 hours? Or do these performers practice incessantly, because of their innate ability? By far the worst example of Gladwell’s defective thinking is his quote (from some other purported thinker) about how Mozart didn’t compose any masterworks until his 271st composition at the age of twenty-one. And so the fact that Mozart didn’t compose Figaro when he was ten years old proves he wasn’t a genius?

I agree with Gladwell when he posits that success results from a constellation of factors, including opportunity, accident, being in the right place at the right time. All of the computer geeks who became jillionaires happened along just as PCs or the internet were about to blow up. The earlier geniuses like John Von Neumann, who is often credited with conceiving computers, never had a chance to turn their ideas into any practical application that could, in turn, generate any financial success for them. So in order to capitalize on computer hardware or software, one had to wait another generation or more, for the precise time when mainframe computers had become more accessible, and microchips were making it possible to put all that circuitry in a small box that could sit on the countertop. I disagree with Gladwell though, when he confuses talent with success. His book too often measures success in purely material terms, which I suppose isn’t a surprise from someone who is undoubtedly a deeply committed Marxist. For Gladwell, success is material or popular success. Kenny G has probably sold a thousand times more records than Ornette Coleman. So what? Who was more of a success, and by what measure?

Gladwell’s biggest problem though is that he is philosophically opposed to genius. It runs counter to his basic philosophy that we could all have been Mozart or Shakespeare if only we’d had the same opportunities they had. And by the way, what opportunities did Shakespeare have? Or Socrates, what advantages did he have in life? And Gladwell’s chapter on Chinese agriculture and its relationship to math is a prefect example of his refusal to recognize genius. Apparently, in order to grow rice, one has to be careful, and exact. Add that to the fact that it’s real easy to say numbers in the Chinese language, and one finds two cultural reasons why the Chinese are better at math than Americans. OK? So then why weren’t geometry, and algebra, and calculus invented in China by the children of this precise rice-growing culture? Why wasn’t Archimedes Chinese? In fact, what great mathematician was Chinese? I know there are a million Chinese kids at MIT these days, and I’m sure cultural factors play a strong part of that, just as they did when there were so many Jewish kids at MIT and Harvard a generation ago. But statistical achievement is different in many ways from the breakthroughs that have changed the way we understood the world.

In the end, one would like to root for Gladwell, and to imagine all the other great writers, composers, inventors, thinkers, lawyers and hockey players we’d have, if all the world had the same opportunities. But think of this: one of Gladwell’s examples of success stories is the tale of Joe Flom, who became a fabulously successful lawyer, after being raised as a child of immigrants living in New York’s tenements. Joe Flom, and other lawyers who made a fortune fighting hostile takeovers weren’t any more talented than anyone else; nor any smarter. They just had the good fortune to grow up in the tenements of New York’s lower east side, in the depths of the depression. Talk about being born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Danny, really, what are you doing hanging around with all these pinkos?