Outliers (31 page)

Bill Phillips and I have been two for two so far, and I’m very grateful I was able to enlist his Midas touch once more. Thank you, Bill. Here’s hoping we go three for three. Will Goodlad and Stefan McGrath at Penguin in England, and Michael Pietsch and—especially—Geoff Shandler at Little, Brown saw this manuscript through, from start to finish. Thanks to the rest of the team at Little, Brown as well: Heather Fain and Heather Rizzo and Junie Dahn. My fellow Canadian Pamela Marshall is a word wizard. I cannot imagine publishing a book without her.

Two final words of appreciation. Tina Bennett, my agent, has been with me from the very beginning. She is insightful and thoughtful and encouraging and unfailingly wise, and when I think of what she has done for me, I feel as lucky as a hockey player born on January 1.

I owe thanks most of all, though, to my parents, Graham and Joyce. This is a book about the meaning of work, and I learned that work can be meaningful from my father. Everything he does—from his most complex academic mathematics to digging in the garden—he tackles with joy and resolve and enthusiasm. My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child. My mother, for her part, taught me how to express myself; she taught me that there is beauty in saying something clearly and simply. She read every word of this book and tried to hold me to that standard. My grandmother Daisy, to whom
Outliers
is dedicated, gave my mother the gift of opportunity. My mother has done the same for me.

M
ALCOLM
G
LADWELL
is the author of the #1 international bestsellers
The Tipping Point
and
Blink
. He is a staff writer for
The New Yorker
and was formerly a business and science reporter at the
Washington Post
.

For more information about Malcolm Gladwell, visit his Web site at
www.gladwell.com
.

^*
The way Canadians select hockey players is a beautiful example of what the sociologist Robert Merton famously called a “self-fulfilling prophecy” — a situation where “a false definition, in the beginning . . . evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.” Canadians start with a false definition of who the best nine- and ten-year-old hockey players are. They’re just picking the oldest every year. But the way they treat those “all-stars” ends up making their original false judgment look correct. As Merton puts it: “This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.”
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A physically immature basketball player in an American city can probably play as many hours of basketball in a given year as a relatively older child because there are so many basketball courts and so many people willing to play. It’s not like ice hockey, where you need a rink. Basketball is saved by its accessibility and ubiquity.
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Even more social phenomena can be linked to relative age. Barnsley and two colleagues, for instance, once found that students who attempt suicide are also more likely to be born in the second half of the school year. Their explanation is that poorer school performance can lead to depression. The connection between relative age and suicide, however, isn’t nearly as pronounced as the correlation between birth date and athletic success.
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The sociologist C. Wright Mills made an additional observation about that special cohort from the 1830s. He looked at the backgrounds of the American business elite from the Colonial Era to the twentieth century. In most cases, not surprisingly, he found that business leaders tended to come from privileged backgrounds. The one exception? The 1830s group. That shows how big the advantage was of being born in that decade. It was the only time in American history when those born in modest circumstances had a realistic shot at real riches. He writes: “The best time during the history of the United States for the poor boy ambitious for high business success to have been born was around the year 1835.”
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The super IQ test was created by Ronald K. Hoeflin, who is himself someone with an unusually high IQ. Here’s a sample question, from the verbal analogies section. “Teeth is to Hen as Nest is to ?” If you want to know the answer, I’m afraid I have no idea.
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To get a sense of what Chris Langan must have been like growing up, consider the following description of a child named “L,” who had an IQ in the same 200 range as Langan’s. It’s from a study by Leta Stetter Hollingworth, who was one of the first psychologists to study exceptionally gifted children. As the description makes obvious, an IQ of 200 is really, really high: “Young L’s erudition was astonishing. His passion for scholarly accuracy and thoroughness set a high standard for accomplishment. He was relatively large, robust and impressive, and was fondly dubbed ‘Professor.’ His attitudes and abilities were appreciated by both pupils and teachers. He was often allowed to lecture (for as long as an hour) on some special topic, such as the history of timepieces, ancient theories of engine construction, mathematics, and history. He constructed out of odds and ends (typewriter ribbon spools, for example) a homemade clock of the pendular type to illustrate some of the principles of chronometry, and this clock was set up before the class during the enrichment unit on ‘Time and Time Keeping’ to demonstrate some of the principles of chronometry. His notebooks were marvels of scholarly exposition.“Being discontented with what he considered the inadequate treatment of land travel in a class unit on ‘Transportation,’ he agreed that time was too limited to do justice to everything. But he insisted that ‘at least they should have covered ancient theory.’ As an extra and voluntary project, ‘he brought in elaborate drawings and accounts of the ancient theories of engines, locomotives etc.’ . . . He was at that time 10 years of age.”
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The answer is that a round manhole cover can’t fall into the manhole, no matter how much you twist and turn it. A rectangular cover can: All you have to do is tilt it sideways. There: now you can get a job at Microsoft.
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The “IQ fundamentalist” Arthur Jensen put it thusly in his 1980 book
Bias in Mental Testing
(p. 113): “The four socially and personally most important threshold regions on the IQ scale are those that differentiate with high probability between persons who, because of their level of general mental ability, can or cannot attend a regular school (about IQ 50), can or cannot master the traditional subject matter of elementary school (about IQ 75), can or cannot succeed in the academic or college preparatory curriculum through high school (about IQ 105), can or cannot graduate from an accredited four-year college with grades that would qualify for admission to a professional or graduate school (about IQ 115). Beyond this, the IQ level becomes relatively unimportant in terms of ordinary occupational aspirations and criteria of success. That is not to say that there are not real differences between the intellectual capabilities represented by IQs of 115 and 150 or even between IQs of 150 and 180. But IQ differences in this upper part of the scale have far less personal implications than the thresholds just described and are generally of lesser importance for success in the popular sense than are certain traits of personality and character.”
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Just to be clear: it is still the case that Harvard produces more Nobel Prize winners than any other school. Just look at those lists. Harvard appears on both of them, a total of three times. A school like Holy Cross appears just once. But wouldn’t you expect schools like Harvard to win more Nobels than they do? Harvard is, after all, the richest, most prestigious school in history and has its pick of the most brilliant undergraduates the world over.
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To get a sense of how absurd the selection process at elite Ivy League schools has become, consider the following statistics. In 2008, 27,462 of the most highly qualified high school seniors in the world applied to Harvard University. Of these students, 2,500 of them scored a perfect 800 on the SAT critical reading test and 3,300 had a perfect score on the SAT math exam. More than 3,300 were ranked first in their high school class. How many did Harvard accept? About 1,600, which is to say they rejected 93 out of every 100 applicants. Is it really possible to say that one student is Harvard material and another isn’t, when both have identical — and perfect — academic records? Of course not. Harvard is being dishonest. Schwartz is right. They should just have a lottery.
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Here’s another student’s answers. These might be even better than Poole’s: “(Brick). To break windows for robbery, to determine depth of wells, to use as ammunition, as pendulum, to practice carving, wall building, to demonstrate Archimedes’ Principle, as part of abstract sculpture, costh, ballast, weight for dropping things in river, etc., as a hammer, keep door open, footwiper, use as rubble for path filling, chock, weight on scale, to prop up wobbly table, paperweight, as firehearth, to block up rabbit hole.”
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Most estimates put the heritability of IQ at roughly 50 percent.
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The lawyer and novelist Louis Auchincloss, who very much belongs to the old WASP-y white-shoe legal establishment in New York, has a scene in his book
The Scarlet Letters
that perfectly captures the antipathy the downtown firms felt toward takeover law. “Face it, my dear, your husband and I are running a firm of shysters,” a takeover attorney explains to the wife of his law partner.

He continues: “Nowadays when one wishes to acquire a company that doesn’t wish to be acquired, one’s counsel bring all kinds of nuisance suits to induce it to change its mind. We sue for mismanagement by the directors, for unpaid dividends, for violation of the bylaws, for improper issuance of stock. We allege criminal misconduct; we shout about antitrust; we sue for ancient and dubious liabilities. And our opponent’s counsel will answer with inordinate demands for all our files and seek endless interrogatories in order to enmesh our client in a hopeless tangle of red tape. . . . It is simply war, and you know the quality that applies to that and love.”
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The best analysis of how adversity turned into opportunity for Jewish lawyers has been done by the legal scholar Eli Wald. Wald is careful to make the point, however, that Flom and his ilk weren’t merely lucky. Lucky is winning the lottery. They were given an opportunity, and they seized it. As Wald says: “Jewish lawyers were lucky
and
they helped themselves. That’s the best way to put it. They took advantage of the circumstances that came their way. The lucky part was the unwillingness of the WASP firms to step into takeover law. But that word luck fails to capture the work and the efforts and the imagination and the acting on opportunities that might have been hidden and not so obvious.”
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Janklow and Nesbit, the agency he started, is, in fact, my literary agency. That is how I heard about Janklow’s family history.
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I realize that it seems strange to refer to American Jewish immigrants as lucky when the families and relatives they left behind in Europe were on the verge of extermination at the hands of the Nazis. Borgenicht, in fact, unwittingly captures this poignancy in his memoir, which was published in 1942. He called it
The Happiest Man.
After numerous chapters brimming with optimism and cheer, the book ends with the sobering reality of Nazi-dominated Europe. Had
The Happiest Man
been published in 1945, when the full story of the Holocaust was known, one imagines it would have had a very different title.
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Just to be clear: to say that garment work was meaningful is not to romanticize it. It was incredibly hard and often miserable labor. The conditions were inhuman. One survey in the 1890s put the average workweek at eighty-four hours, which comes to twelve hours a day. At times, it was higher. “During the busy season,” David Von Drehle writes in
Triangle: The Fire That Changed Amierca,
“it was not unusual to find workers on stools or broken chairs, bent over their sewing or hot irons, from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., a hundred or more hours a week. Indeed, it was said that during the busy seasons the grinding hum of sewing machines never entirely ceased on the Lower East Side, day or night.”
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The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously “the people of the book.” There is surely something to that. But it wasn’t just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn’t the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.
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David Hackett Fischer’s book
Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America
is the most definitive and convincing treatment of the idea that cultural legacies cast a long historical shadow. (If you read my first book,
The Tipping Point,
you’ll remember that the discussion of Paul Revere was drawn from Fischer’s
Paul Revere’s Ride.
) In
Albion’s Seed,
Fischer argues that there were four distinct British migrations to America in its first 150 years: first the Puritans, in the 1630s, who came from East Anglia to Massachusetts; then the Cavaliers and indentured servants, who came from southern England to Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century; then the Quakers, from the North Midlands to the Delaware Valley between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; and finally, the people of the borderlands to the Appalachian interior in the eighteenth century. Fischer argues brilliantly that those four cultures — each profoundly different — characterize those four regions of the United States even to this day.
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