Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, Part 2

Continuing from yesterday's post about Gladwell's new book, which is basically an inventory of all the things besides individual talent and initiative that lead to unusual success. Put another way, it's a book about unequal opportunity--how individual success and failure are a product of external circumstances, much more so than people like to believe, and how those circumstances vary profoundly among people in complex, inequitable, and often random ways. 

In the chapter on expertise--a concept that has (justifiably) gotten a lot of attention from cognitive and education researchers--Gladwell asserts that there's essentially no such thing as great accomplishment without long, hard work. You need roughly 10,000 hours of practice at something to be really good at it, he says, and what distinguishes people like Bill Gates from others isn't fantastic intellect--although Gates certainly has that--but rather the fact that he had an exceedingly rare opportunity to accumulate those hours early in his career, at exactly the right moment in history. Which leads to another of Gladwell's main themes: timing. The 20th century's software titans were all born around 1955, he notes, just like the 19th century's industrial giants were born near 1834 and the most successful Manhattan lawyers were born in a few years bracketing 1931. All of these people had the intelligence and courage to take advantage of a rare opportunity created when the circumstances of their business fundamentally changed. But the fact that the opportunity presented itself in the first place was just luck. Men (and women) need their moment in order to succeed. 

From there Gladwell moves on to family background and culture, with a side conversation about IQ. He notes the lack of correlation between extremely high IQ scores and success in life, and offers the sad example of one Chris Langan, IQ of 190+, who grew up with an abusive father in a broken home, dropped out of college due (he claims) to some truly incompetent and uncaring financial aid officers, and currently lives on a horse farm in rural Missouri, working in solitude on a theory of the universe that nobody will ever read:

He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn't know how...These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily. But that's because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one--not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses--ever makes it alone.

Gladwell devotes most of the rest of the book to culture. Appalachian blood feuds, Korean airline crashes, successful Jewish lawyers, and the tendency of Asians to be good at math, he says, can all be explained by the particular values, attitudes, and inclinations of different cultures. Asian agricultural societies are built around rice cultivation, he observes, which requires entrepreneurial ism, attention to detail, complex management, perseverance, and phenomenal amounts of work, all year long. European-style wheat cultivation, by contrast, is much simpler, amenable to mechanization and unskilled labor, and lets you take half the year off. The things you need to do to cultivate rice are the same things you need to do to learn math, he says, noting:

When students sit down to take the TIMMS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It ask them all kinds of things, such as what their parents' level of education is, and what their views about math are, and their friends are like. It's not a trivial exercise. It's about 120 questions long. In fact, it's so tedious that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank. Now here's the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on TIMMS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems. 

The book also has a whole chapter about KIPP, and this is where the flaws in Gladwell's way of writing are most glaring. He cites Karl Alexander's well-known "summer learning loss" research of students in the Baltimore public schools. Low-income students actually gained more during schools than their well-off peers, Alexander found, but fell back over the summer while the rich kids moved ahead. It's an important point, and has led to a lot of discussions about the use of time in school. (See an ES report on the subject here.) But this leads Gladwell to say the following:

What Alexander's work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding--all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But look back at [Alexander's data]. Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it...For it's poorest students, America doesn't have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem, and that's the problem the KIPP schools set out to solve. They decided to bring the lessons of the rice paddy to the American inner city. 

The weird thing is that Gladwell goes directly from here to a description of the KIPP Bronx Academy, which indeed provides students with more time. But, as Gladwell himself notes, it also has a culture that demands a lot of effort from students. The KIPP teachers emphasize discipline, self-control and respect for authority, peers, and oneself. They explicitly teach students how to listen and respond in class. They consider every student, no matter how disadvantaged, as bound for college. Does Gladwell really believe that most inner city schools work this way? That the only difference between KIPP and regular public schools is time? Long hours are far from the only "lessons from the rice paddy," as Gladwell more than adequately describes.  

Gladwell is often characterized as public intellectual, and he's clearly a very smart guy. But his real genius lies in explanation. His 10,000 hours of expertise came not in sociology but journalism, at the Washington Post. He's a master of marrying compelling anecdotes with important ideas. The world is a complicated, confusing place, and Malcolm Gladwell makes it understandable by telling stories that are fun to read. This is an extremely difficult thing to do, and nobody does it better. But there's a temptation in this kind of writing to sand down the edges of things to a bright polish and summarize complex issues in a pithy phrase. It's a comforting, attractive message--things are simpler than you think. But it's not always true. Saying that school time matters is one thing--saying it's the only thing that matters is something else entirely. 

That said, I admire the spirit of Outliers and really enjoyed reading it. It's rooted in compassion and a belief in the possibility of a better world. Gladwell thinks that if people really appreciated all the dimensions of opportunity, they'd be more likely to support ideas and policies designed to expand opportunity to more people. Gladwell himself is an outlier, and the book is a worthy way to use the influence that position affords.