Outliers《Outliers》

Another superb work by Gladwell. To me this one is even better than The Tipping Point. Gladwell’s thinking is deeply sociological. In fact this book alone is a better introduction to sociology and the sociological imagination than all the introductory textbooks I’ve used so far. Gladwell rightfully deserves the honored reception he received at ASA’s Annual Meeting (forgot which year).

The title of the book is somewhat misleading or at least less informative than it should be. The central theme of book is not really about outliers but rather about what explains success. What he sets out to debunk is the explanation that is so dominant in today’s individualistic cultural discourse: success is all attributable to individual merits. The alternative explanation this book offers is the core sociological insight: individual success is always embedded in one’s social context; personal merits are a necessary condition but not a sufficient one; the right social opportunities and cultural supports must be there too.

The book is divided into two parts: Opportunity and Legacy each corresponding to one of dominant social forces that shape personal destiny: social structure and culture. The first part is more interesting and groundbreaking.

The first four chapters provide what I think is the most convincing contrast I’ve seen in social-science discussion on any issue: successful people became so not merely because they have talent but also because social structure gave them unique opportunities; extremely talented people on the other hand failed in life just because they didn’t get the opportunities.

First there are the cases of successful outliers: Bill Joy the creator of UNIX and founder of Sun Microsystem; Bill Gates we all know who he is; the Beetles; and elite Canadian hockey players. For all of them some random events determined that they were given the opportunities to develop their talents to accumulate that magic “ten thousand hours of practice” and to be ready to take advantage when the tide turns. Bill Joy stumbled onto the computer lab at U Mich; Bill Gates got access to time-sharing computer at his elite high school; Steve Jobs learns computer skills as a kid growing up in Silicon Valley; the Beetles practiced endless nights in Hamburg.

Furthermore besides these micro-level opportunities there is also a macro-level opportunity structure: most of these IT entrepreneurs happened to be born in mid-1950s so that they had the opportunity to receive training in early 1970s when personal access to computing through time-sharing had just emerged and became—at a very young age and with little vested interest in the old way of main-frame computers—the leading experts and pioneers to usher in the new era of personal computers. The rest as they say is history.

This cohort just as the 1830 cohort of American robber barons was destined to become heroes of their respective new age.

In contrast to this group Chapters 3 and 4 are about those with sheer outstanding intellectual talent who nevertheless failed to surpass their less-talented peers. The main materials are from Lewis Terman’s genius study. The finding is simple: this group of geniuses (who at a young age had IQ north of 200 and were identified by Terman’s team through rigorous tests and screening to be true prodigies) didn’t do significantly better than a random sample of people from similar family backgrounds. In fact their success/failure correlates significantly with their family background but not with their innate talent.

There are a lot of interesting tidbits in these chapters. The comparison of Robert Oppenheimer and Chris Langan (a failed genius from disadvantaged background). Convergence thinking (as tested in IQ tests) and divergence thinking. The importance of social savvy. Here he cited at length Annette Lareau’s study of parenting styles showing that how family background determines how the crucial non-inherited social skills are developed. A familiar lesson but nevertheless important.

Chapter 5 is on a different topic in itself and is to me the most fascinating part of the book—it’s exactly the kind of work I want to do. It’s a study of the social history of Jewish lawyers of New York City. Gladwell finds two explanations for the dominance of Jewish lawyers and their meteoric rise in social status. First it’s the change in the economic opportunity structure. These Jewish law graduates who were born to unusually small birth cohorts in the Depression era and entered job markets in the 1940s and 1950s couldn’t get decent jobs (because of their Jewish “antecedents”) in white-shoe WASPy establishment Wall-street firms. So they settled for the low-esteem dirty street-fight kind of legal work: hostile takeover and merger and acquisitions. By the time the corporate world changed and M&A became the main bread line for all law firms they had accumulated the magic 10000 hours of practice and were the leaders in the field. Again the rest is history.

There is yet another story here of intergenerational mobility. How came so many descendents of Jewish immigrants went to law schools? These Jewish lawyers’ family background may initially appear to be a disadvantage but Gladwell shows it’s the opposite: they got where they were thanks to their family background. The main story is as follows: Most Jewish immigrants came from Eastern Europe where because of their exclusion from land-owning they concentrated in urban trades and crafts. They brought with them skills especially skills in garment industry. As luck had it NYC happened to be rising as the garment capital of the world and garment industry was one with very a low entry barrier. So these Jewish immigrants entered this line of “meaningful work”—it’s autonomous complex (i.e. intellectually demanding) and rewarding—en masse. This occupation not only gave them an economic foundation for upward mobility equally importantly it instilled in their children a work ethic a belief that hard and intelligent work pays off. In sum it provided a particular type of parenting environment (a la Melvin Kohn and Annette Lareau) that is most conducive to the children’s upward mobility.

The causal link here is a bit weak definitely not strong enough for an academic journal but intuitively I think he’s right. And this is actually the answer I’m looking for in my family-history study. Both my question and answer are essentially the same as his: What explains inter-generational mobility? Opportunity structure of the time (on the macro-level) and family dynamics (on the micro-level). In fact I should explicitly emulate his work in the writing of my study. I should also extend the investigation to more cases just as he did with the entire group of Jewish layers in New York to make a stronger argument.

The second part of the book draws more from the social-psychology literature on cross-culture comparison of personality and cognitive ability. Here are the topics investigated in each chapter:

Chapter 6: Southerners in US are hot-tempered thanks to South’s legacy of “culture of honor” inherited from its Scotch-Irish settlers. (This should apply to me personally rather well: I derive my hot temper from Hunan’s cultural legacy.) The causal link here is again a bit weak and mechanisms of the transmission of this cultural legacy are not well spelled-out.

Chapter 7: It’s an interesting story about how cultural norms regarding people interact in a hierarchical power structure have a lot to do with plane crashes. Most plane crashes in modern time are results of miscommunications which arose because cultural norms constrain how key actors (first officer plane engineer and the pilot) interact. Another thing that can be applied to myself: the Power Distance Index (PDI) measures how superiors and subordinates interact in different cultural contexts. US is on the low end where equality is more valued than deference to authority; Korea is on the high end. I’m definitely more American than Asian on this respect. But I think the Communist revolution and the Cultural Revolution have turned many Chinese into low-PDI type.

Chapter 8: Rice cultivation in southern China created a work ethic that is conducive to upward mobility which helps explain the success of Chinese immigrants in US most of whom originates from those southern provinces. This is essentially the old climate/ecological determinism argument: the natural environment determines how people adapt to nature and thus people’s culture. The power of cultural legacy then shape many generations to come. Instead of using the example of tropical people lying underneath coconut trees waiting for coconuts to fall as LKY did he used the example of the !Kung bushmen in Africa who could rely on the abundance of the mongongo nuts and need not to worry about agriculture. Rice cultivation is as meaningful a work to Chinese peasants as garment-making was to Jewish immigrants in New York. Another thing he mentioned is how the number-naming system in the Chinese language helped Chinese to develop better mathematical skills—finally providing scientific evidence to confirm a hypothesis I long had. 七十八 is just a hell lot easier to say and remember than seventy-eight.

Chapter 9: An experiment school in Bronx made great progress simply by adopting the Asian-style of education: hard school work and a lot of that. The difference that persists between Asian and Western students in math skills is simply a result of longer hours of practice with some added help from the language system.

Chapter 10: The story of his own family’s upward mobility from Jamaica to now. Not particularly fascinating but helps to recapture the main theme of the book.