After reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, I found his theories on culture, race, and class to be equally fascinating and demoralizing. In Gladwell’s latest book, he details a number of cases of financially or intellectually successful individuals such as Bill Gates, Joe Flom, the Beatles, and Andrew Carnegie. The author looks at their success outside of what they did as individuals, and instead focuses his analysis on factor’s beyond their control: the time they were born, their cultural backgrounds, and occasions of sheer luck.
Gladwell is a brilliant author. His analysis is precise, his prose is strikingly efficient, and at many points the reader is left thinking that Gladwell is an all-knowing modern day prophet, able to provide a thorough cultural and analytical analysis of any major trend. His first two books: Blink and the Tipping Point, were also well endowed in this avenue.
He begins the book with a brilliant concept, the 10,000-hour rule. The rule states that 10,000 hours of labor are a necessary precondition for the mastery of a trade, craft, or discipline. He cites the Beatles run of all night gigs at a club in Hamburg as essential to forming a tight band and learning harmony, Bill Gates’ training in a high school computer club, and larger amounts of ice time for the more skilled Canadian Junior hockey players as examples.
However, this 10,000-hour rule is the only human controlled element of the equation to success, but the ability to achieve 10,000 hours is often determined by forces outside of an individual’s control. Hockey Players with a birthday closer to the Jan 1, age group cut off are more likely to succeed and get extra practice time because they are already physically mature, which leads to teams with 90% of their players born on before April. Bill Gates became a computer Genius, and made billions, because he was one of the only teenagers in America who attended a high school with a computer club, where he could put in these thousand hours. But all this hard work is glossed over, there is little human control in Gladwell’s formula for success, and skills such as good study habits and effective communication are largely ignored.
Gladwell’s definition of success was problematic for my tastes, as a non-Billionaire. I found it to be reductive, and morally bankrupt. In outliers, in order to be successful, one had to be a billionaire, star athlete, head of a major legal firm, or industrial baron. There is no mention of morality, artistic merit, or personal fulfillment when determining success.
Gladwell is also handcuffed by his rhetorical dependence on using individual case studies as a means to jump to sweeping generalizations on race and class status. This troubled me more than anything with Outliers. Class background, affluence, and ‘cultural context,’ were deemed the most important parts of the equation for Gladwell’s version of success. It seemed to me, in Gladwell’s vision of the world, humans have little autonomy over their fates- they are bound to the norms of their culture. In his analysis of 19th century Appalachian honor killings essentially said, that the people of the hills were privy to gun violence, because they descended from a region in Britain where the people were territorial shepherds, and subsequently, more violent by nature because of their trade. This involves too many jumps of logic, without any solid empirical or statistical evidence. It is a bogus sweeping racial socioeconomic generalization that Gladwell deems an inescapable scientific fact.
For this reason, I found Gladwell’s book disheartening.His socio-economic analyses often swerve into the area of racist pseudoscience. While it’s by no means a social Darwinist or Eugenicist work, Gladwell treats ethnic generalizations as if they were proven facts. For example, when Gladwell equates Asian success at Math with the intensive labor required for the maintenance of a rice paddy, centuries ago, there is little science to back his theories. His linguistic idea, that numbers in the Chinese languages are phonetically simpler, which allows Asians to succeed in math, is also questionable. This line is also approached while discussing communication issues in Korean Airline crashes, in the most enlightening and horrifying chapter of the book, which at will teach people to think twice before using a mitigated inflection in conversation.
In conclusion, Gladwell’s book was like a three-legged dog, I was repulsed by all of the unfounded racial generalizations that were euphemized under the term ‘cultural context,’ but I was equally convinced, and could not stop staring. It’s tough to think of our cultural backgrounds as Gladwell does, something that can tie us to the status quo, barring an intervention of blind luck. But still, Gladwell is on to something special here, and maybe he has a right to be a little bit racist, because frankly, any ruminations on cultural differences is inherently racist, by definition, but we don’t go around calling cultural and social anthropologists professional racists, even though it is technically their trade.
Despite the occasional uneasiness, Gladwell is a brilliant writer, and a social prophet, it would be foolish to sleep on him. In order to have staying power as a social scientist, Gladwell will need to tweak his narrow-minded definitions of success and avoid empirically unfounded generalizations about race.
I’d really love to see Gladwell put his analytical genius and knack for sociology to work with Levitt and Dubner, the authors of Freakonomics. If he does this, his glaring weakness of using the case study as an axiom for all of human behavior will be mollified. If Gladwell can back his theories with harder science, then his portrait of society will be much easier pill for the reader to swallow, even if it defends the unfortunate realities of privilege & racism, and exposes our own lack of autonomy to forge our future. What ever happened to hard work and determination as a factor that determines ‘success?’ If anything, Outliers reinforces the old adage that it is always better to be lucky than to be good.
I found Outliers fascinating, and that Gladwell’s theories were supported by example after example. There was most definitely mention of success other than that of a billionaire, and more importantly, he mentions multiple times the importance of “meaningful work.” The case studies were completely independent from the subject of race—he even mentioned after one study that the upper class subject was African American and the lower class subject was Caucasian, stressing the fact that the results were solely based on socio-economics. It was tough to take in the overwhelming evidence of cultural and economic stereotypes, but I could see these truths everywhere—even in my own upbringing. Gladwell’s message was not to replace hard work with luck. Of course people become successful because of hard work! Gladwell made it clear that these people receive unusual opportunities, but it is their passion and work ethic and what they do with these opportunities that leads them to success.
Author Franco is confusing race with culture. Yes, Gladwell believes that out cultural conditioning is a huge part of what we become. (Most cognitive scientists would agree.) That does not make him racist. He would be racist if he were saying that one’s biological race (ie Asian, Black, Native American, etc.) were the principle determing factor in one’s life.
We need to be careful not to confuse race with other qualities such as class and culture. In writing about Asians and the culture of the rice paddy, Gladwell states only that people who come from a culture of hard work tend to absorb that ethos and pass it on to their children. That’s not racist. It is common sense, and can be observed as being often (although not invariably)true.
The notion of cultural conditioning may sound too deterministic (“disheartening” was Franco’s word) for those who come from backgrounds that do not foster success-generating behaviors. But at least awareness of it gives those eager to excel against the odds a blueprint for how to proceed from a less advantaged starting point.
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01/10/2010 at 04:17 PM
I found Outliers fascinating, and that Gladwell’s theories were supported by example after example. There was most definitely mention of success other than that of a billionaire, and more importantly, he mentions multiple times the importance of “meaningful work.” The case studies were completely independent from the subject of race—he even mentioned after one study that the upper class subject was African American and the lower class subject was Caucasian, stressing the fact that the results were solely based on socio-economics. It was tough to take in the overwhelming evidence of cultural and economic stereotypes, but I could see these truths everywhere—even in my own upbringing. Gladwell’s message was not to replace hard work with luck. Of course people become successful because of hard work! Gladwell made it clear that these people receive unusual opportunities, but it is their passion and work ethic and what they do with these opportunities that leads them to success.
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