Gladwell is an author whose essays appear in the New Yorker and so his books have the disadvantage that they feel as if he has shaped individual articles into support of a broader argument rather than a seamless book length argument. Sowell on the other hand is usually taking a particular proposition and either demolishing it or marshaling supporting evidence across a book length canvass.
Outliers is chock full of interesting information and ways of looking at familiar information in a new fashion and which sheds new light. And Gladwell is certainly a gifted storyteller.
For all that the storytelling is wonderful, there are a couple of significant flaws in the book. The first is that much of what Gladwell is reporting originates out of the academic fields of psychology and social sciences – fields notorious for their fads, their relaxed approach to statistical rigor, and their susceptibility to cognitive bias. The findings can be fascinating and thought provoking but when you discover that they are based on a sample of twenty-four middle class, 20 year old college students (or some similarly constrained and unrepresentative sample) over a four week time frame, suddenly your confidence in the data takes a dive and the novel insight you thought you were drawing from the article suddenly seems more like a sophomoric bull session.
The second challenge for the reader is that Gladwell is selective, as a storyteller needs to be, in the evidence he advances. He has a story to tell and that demands a narrative arc, tension, etc. Data doesn’t often lend itself to such a structure. The upshot is that while you are enjoying the story, you are not getting the whole story or maybe even an accurate story. It feels like science, looks like science but it is storytelling.
It is not perfectly clear to this reader what, exactly, the intended thesis of Outliers is meant to be. The cover blurb claims that “The lives of outliers – those people whose achievements fall outside normal experience – follow a peculiar and unexpected logic, and in making that logic plain Gladwell presents a fascinating and provocative blueprint for making the most of human potential.” This is manifestly not what Gladwell is doing. He sheds some light here and there but he does not present a blueprint for making the most of human potential. It just isn’t there.
Rather than a holistic argument, there are a couple of times in the book where you might almost conclude that Gladwell’s argument is that success is substantially a function of luck and that successful people ought to recognize that their success depended on luck and ought to have some humility. While the need for humility is an important one, and sadly absent in much modern discourse, I don’t think that is completely or even primarily what Outliersis about.
It is in fact one of the attractions of Outliers to figure out exactly what is the nature of Gladwell’s thesis. What is he proposing? On his website, Gladwell says
My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think.
The first claim, that success is achieved through ” the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances” is, I suspect, for most people, unexceptional and almost tautological. The outcomes of one’s life have to be the product of the multitudinous inputs and circumstances.
The second claim is a little more problematic. For most of the book, Gladwell seems to be making the argument that people achieve success because they were lucky: they were in the right place at the right time under the right circumstances. This hardly seems consistent with the second argument that “we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think”.
It is indisputably the case, and Gladwell marshal’s some of the evidence for this point, that the most productive societies are the most complex and that it is difficult to isolate, in such a complex environment, the relative contributions of individual effort versus societal organization. Even though a given society may be measurably more productive than others, it is also true that there is always the bell curve at work. Even in a very productive society, some individuals are more productive than others. Pointing out that some places, some times, and some social structures are more productive than others, given particular circumstances, is of relatively little value. The more interesting question is why, given those structures, times, and circumstances, some excel and others do not. Even though his main thesis may not be of particular value, I do think Gladwell is on to some useful things in Outliers and that his real message is that there are many things that we can do to improve our odds of being successful.
From page 19, we have this slightly more detailed explanation of the thesis.
In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grow up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.
So his argument is fundamentally that how far we go in terms of success depends on where we come from and from whence we started. No dispute there. In making this argument though, it often comes across as a claim that people are successful only because they are lucky. But the very stories that Gladwell tells disprove that. Every outlier he identifies share some common characteristics that distinguish them from the full range of humanity. Among these attributes are an extraordinary capacity for hard work, an intense and sustained focus on some area of expertise, a willingness to take considered risks, and yes some luck.
The argument as to whether successful people are talented or just lucky is ill-formulated and is akin to discussions about lotteries. Yes, your odds of winning any substantial lottery are astronomically against you but the only thing more certain than the odds against you winning is the odds of your winning if you don’t play. Likewise with successful people. There is an element of luck in their success but they had to be positioned for that success in the first place and that positioning came about through their own efforts – they had to have the capacity for hard work, intense focus, perseverance, etc. Those were the choices they made that determined whether, when luck brought them a chance, they would benefit from that chance. One is reminded of the quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, “I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
The alternative way of looking at this is in terms of absolute and relative outcomes. The fact that Bill Gates is a billionaire technology titan is a product of being in the right place at the right time with the right background but it could only have happened through his own efforts. Other than lottery winners and heirs to a fortune, there are no accidental outliers. Nobody gets to the top of their profession or industry by accident. Whether being at the top pays you thousands or millions or billions is a matter of luck and timing. Bill Gates five years older or younger would have a different bank account but likely would have still been a top player in his field. And for every Bill Gates who was there at the right place at the right time, there are hundreds if not thousands that had similar backgrounds but did not become billionaires. If luck and circumstance were similar, how to explain the difference in outcomes? Personal choices.
There is an odd discordance here. On the one hand all the evidence that Gladwell accumulates in his stories points to personal choices as being the real differentiators between those that succeed and those that don’t and yet he seems to also want to make the argument that those that are successful were given the opportunity to be successful in ways that others weren’t. This is where Thomas Sowell becomes especially caustic. The quest for cosmic justice is a chimera. There is no capacity by which to determine what might have been under different circumstances, no way for us to determine how to equalize the playing field a priori. All we can do is to remove barriers, increase transparency, ensure the rule of law, and convey constructive knowledge to all those that wish to avail themselves of it. Or, as Sowell puts it in The Quest for Cosmic Justice.
Much of the quest for cosmic justice involves racial, regional, religious, or other categories of people who are to be restored to where they would be but for various disadvantages they suffer from various sources. Yet each group tends to trail the long shadow of its own cultural history, as well as reflecting the consequences of external influences. The history of every people is a product of innumerable cross-currents, whose timing and confluence can neither be predicted beforehand nor always untangled afterward. There is no "standard" history that everyone has or would have had "but for" peculiar circumstances of particular groups, whose circumstances can be "corrected" to conform to some norm. Unraveling all this in the quest for cosmic justice is a much more staggering task than seeking traditional justice.
If we move away from the effort to ensure that everyone has an equal start, an impossible task, and instead focus on what are the things that anyone can do regardless of their starting point and circumstances, we get into much more fruitful discussion and here is where Outliers is especially interesting. What are some of the lessons learned about success which Gladwell documents. Among the many are:
• Work hard, work long, stay focused.
• Know the rules of the game.
• Pay attention to the process
• You can’t rely on IQ alone
• Culture is consequential and predictive
• We are not constrained by culture – we can change our ways
• We make our own luck
• Be aware of history – it has a long tail that shapes the current environment
• Pay attention to initial conditions – There is an inescapable compounding effect
• Language matters
• Communication matters
• Behaviors and values are crucial
Despite the blurb promising a blueprint for making the most of human potential, there is no such explicit blueprint. The above items, though, do appear to be the effective blueprint and it would seem to be a pretty good one. Not much point in talking about social justice, inherent inequities, and cosmic unfairness. If you want to make the most of your situation and rise to the top in your particular environment, take the dozen observations to heart. And it you want to become spectacularly successful, do all of the above and be in the right place at the right time.
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