Outliers (30 page)

Erwin O. Smigel writes about New York’s old white-shoe law firms in
The Wall Street Lawyer: Professional Organization Man?
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). Their particular employee preferences are listed on page 37.

Louis Auchincloss has written more about the changes that took place in the old-line law firms of Manhattan in the postwar years than anyone. The quotation is from his book
The Scarlet Letters
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 153.

The economic annihilation faced by lawyers at the lower end of the social spectrum during the Depression is explored in Jerold S. Auerbach’s
Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 159.

Statistics on the fluctuating birth rate in America during the twentieth century can be found at
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005067.html
.

The impact of the “demographic trough” is explored in Richard A. Easterlin’s
Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). H. Scott Gordon’s paean to the circumstances of children born during a trough is from p. 4 of his presidential address to the Western Economic Association at the annual meeting in Anaheim, California, in June of 1977, “On Being Demographically Lucky: The Optimum Time to Be Born.” It is quoted on page 31.

For a definitive account of the rise of Jewish lawyers, see Eli Wald, “The Rise and Fall of the WASP and Jewish Law Firms,”
Stanford Law Review
60, no. 6 (2008): 1803.

The story of the Borgenichts was told by Louis to Harold H. Friedman and published as
The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis Borgenicht
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942).

For more on the various occupations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants to America, read Thomas Kessner’s
The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City 1880–1915
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).

Stephen Steinberg’s
The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1982) includes a brilliant chapter on Jewish immigrants to New York, to which I am heavily indebted.

Louise Farkas’s research was part of her master’s thesis at Queen’s college: Louise Farkas, “Occupational Genealogies of Jews in Eastern Europe and America, 1880–1924 (New York: Queens College Spring Thesis, 1982).

SIX: HARLAN, KENTUCKY

Harry M. Caudill wrote about Kentucky, its beauty and its troubles, in
Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).

The impact of coal mining on Harlan County is examined in “Social Disorganization and Reorganization in Harlan County, Kentucky,” by Paul Frederick Cressey in
American Sociological Review
14, no. 3 (June 1949): 389–394.

The bloody and complicated Turner-Howard feud is described, along with other Kentucky feuds, in John Ed Pearce’s marvelously entertaining
Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), p. 11.

The same clashes are assessed from an anthropological perspective by Keith F. Otterbein in “Five Feuds: An Analysis of Homicides in Eastern Kentucky in the Late Nineteenth Century,”
American Anthropologist
102, no. 2 (June 2000): 231–243.

J. K. Campbell’s essay “Honour and the Devil” appeared in J. G. Peristiany (ed.),
Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

The Scotch-Irish ancestry of the southern backcountry, as well as a phonetic guide to Scotch-Irish speech, can be found in David Hackett Fischer’s monumental study of early American history,
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 652.

The high murder rate in the South, and the specific nature of these murders, is discussed by John Shelton Reed in
One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). See, particularly, chapter 11, “Below the Smith and Wesson Line.”

For more on the historical causes of the southern temperament and the insult experiment at the University of Michigan, see
Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South,
by Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, Inc., 1996).

Raymond D. Gastil’s study on the correlation between “southernness” and the US murder rate, “Homicide and a Regional Culture of Violence,” was published in the
American Sociological Review
36 (1971): 412–427.

Cohen, with Joseph Vandello, Sylvia Puente, and Adrian Rantilla, worked on another study about the American North-South cultural divide: “‘When You Call Me That, Smile!’ How Norms for Politeness, Interaction Styles, and Aggression Work Together in Southern Culture,”
Social Psychology Quarterly
62, no. 3 (1999): 257–275.

SEVEN: THE ETHNIC THEORY OF PLANE CRASHES

The National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that investigates civil aviation accidents, published an Aircraft Accident Report on the Korean Air 801 crash: NTSB/-AAR-00/01.

The footnote about Three Mile Island draws heavily on the analysis of Charles Perrow’s classic
Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies
(New York: Basic Books, 1984).

The seven-errors-per-accident statistic was calculated by the National Transportation Safety Board in a safety study titled “A Review of Flightcrew-Involved Major Accidents of U.S. Air Carriers, 1978 Through 1990” (Safety Study NTSB/-SS-94/01, 1994).

The agonizing dialogue and analysis of the Avianca 052 crash can be found in the National Transportation Safety Board Accident Report AAR-91/04.

Ute Fischer and Judith Orasanu’s study of mitigation in the cockpit, “Cultural Diversity and Crew Communication,” was presented at the fiftieth Astronautical Congress in Amsterdam, October 1999. It was published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Dialogue between the fated Air Florida captain and first officer is quoted in a second study by Fischer and Orasanu, “-Error-Challenging Strategies: Their Role in Preventing and Correcting Errors,” produced as part of the International Ergonomics Association fourteenth Triennial Congress and Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Forty-second Annual Meeting in San Diego, California, August 2000.

The unconscious impact of nationality on behavior was formally calculated by Geert Hofstede and outlined in
Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations
(Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2001). The study of French and German manufacturing plants that he quotes on page 102 was done by M. Brossard and M. Maurice, “-Existe-t-il un modèle universel des structures d’organisation?,”
Sociologie du Travail
16, no. 4 (1974): 482–495.

The application of Hofstede’s Dimensions to airline pilots was carried out by Robert L. Helmreich and Ashleigh Merritt in “Culture in the Cockpit: Do Hofstede’s Dimensions Replicate?,”
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
31, no. 3 (May 2000): 283–301.

Robert L. Helmreich’s cultural analysis of the Avianca crash is called “Anatomy of a System Accident: The Crash of Avianca Flight 052,”
International Journal of Aviation Psychology
4, no. 3 (1994): 265–284.

The linguistic indirectness of Korean speech as compared with American was observed by Ho-min Sohn at the University of Hawaii in his paper “Intercultural Communication in Cognitive Values: Americans and Koreans,” published in
Language and Linguistics
9 (1993): 93–136.

EIGHT: RICE PADDIES AND MATH TESTS

To read more on the history and intricacies of rice cultivation, see Francesca Bray’s
The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

The logic of Asian numerals compared with their Western counterparts is discussed in Stanislas Dehaene in
The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Graham Robb,
The Discovery of France
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

The surprisingly secure and leisurely life of the !Kung is detailed in chapter 4 of
Man the Hunter,
ed. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, with help from Jill Nash-Mitchell (New York: Aldine, 1968).

The working year of European peasantry was calculated by Antoine Lavoisier and quoted by B. H. Slicher van Bath in
The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500–1850
, trans. Olive Ordish (New York: St. Martin’s, 1963).

The fatalism of Russian peasant proverbs is contrasted with the self-reliance of Chinese ones by R. David Arkush in “
If Man Works Hard the Land Will Not Be Lazy
—Entrepreneurial Values in North Chinese Peasant Proverbs,”
Modern China
10, no. 4 (October 1984): 461–479.

The correlation between students’ national average scores in TIMSS and their persistence in answering the student survey attached to the test has been evaluated in “Predictors of National Differences in Mathematics and Science Achievement of Eighth Grade Students: Data from TIMSS for the Six-Nation Educational Research Program,” by Erling E. Boe, Henry May, Gema Barkanic, and Robert F. Boruch at the Center for Research and Evaluation in Social Policy, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. It was revised February 28, 2002. The graph showing the results can be seen on page 9.

Results of the TIMSS tests throughout the years can be found on the National Center for Education Statistics Web site,
http://nces.ed.gov/timss/
.

Priscilla Blinco’s study is entitled “Task Persistence in Japanese Elementary Schools” and can be found in Edward Beauchamp, ed.,
Windows on Japanese Education
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1991).

NINE: MARITA’S BARGAIN

An article in the
New York Times Magazine
by Paul Tough, “What It Takes to Make a Student” (November 26, 2006), examines the impact of the government’s No Child Left Behind policy, the reasons for the education gap, and the impact of charter schools such as KIPP.

Kenneth M. Gold,
School’s In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools
(New York: Peter Lang, 2002), is an unex-pectedly fascinating account of the roots of the American school year.

Karl L. Alexander, Doris R. Entwisle, and Linda S. Olson’s study on the impact of summer vacation is called “Schools, Achievement, and Inequality: A Seasonal Perspective,” published in
Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis
23, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 171–191.

Much of the cross-national data comes from Michael J. Barrett’s “The Case for More School Days,” published in the
Atlantic Monthly
in November 1990, p. 78.

EPILOGUE: A JAMAICAN STORY

William M. MacMillan details how his fears came to pass in the preface to the second edition of
Warning from the West Indies: A Tract for Africa and the Empire
(U.K.: Penguin Books, 1938).

The sexual exploits and horrific punishments of Jamaica’s white ruling class are detailed by Trevor Burnard in
Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

The intermediary color class in the West Indies, not seen in the American South, is described by Donald L. Horowitz in “Color Differentiation in the American Systems of Slavery,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
3, no.3 (Winter 1973): 509–541.

Population and employment statistics among the different-colored classes in 1950s Jamaica are taken from Leonard Broom’s essay “The Social Differentiation of Jamaica,”
American Sociological Review
19, no. 2 (April 1954): 115–125.

Divisions of color within families are explored by Fernando Henriques in “Colour Values in Jamaican Society,”
British Journal of Sociology
2, no. 2 (June 1951): 115–121.

Joyce Gladwell’s experiences as a black woman in the UK are from
Brown Face, Big Master
(London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1969). It is a wonderful book. I recommend it highly—although, as you can imagine, I could be a bit biased.

Acknowledgments

I’m happy to say that
Outliers
conforms to its own thesis. It was very much a collective effort. I was inspired, as I seem to always be, by the work of Richard Nisbett. It was reading the
Culture of Honor
that set in motion a lot of the thinking that led to this book. Thank you, Professor Nisbett.

As always, I prevailed upon my friends to critique various drafts of the manuscript. Happily, they complied, and
Outliers
is infinitely better as a result. Many thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Terry Martin, Robert McCrum, Sarah Lyall, Charles Randolph, Tali Farhadian, Zoe Rosenfeld, and Bruce Headlam. Stacey Kalish and Sarah Kessler did yeoman’s work in research and fact-checking. Suzy Hansen performed her usual editorial magic. David Remnick graciously gave me time off from my duties at
The New Yorker
to complete this book. Thank you, as always, David. Henry Finder, my editor at
The New Yorker,
saved me from myself and reminded me how to think, as he always does. I have worked with Henry for so long that I now have what I like to call the “internal Finder,” which is a self-correcting voice inside my head that gives me the benefit of Henry’s wisdom even when he is not there. Both Finders—internal and external—were invaluable.