I am generally sceptical of the myth of meritocracy. That myth is largely how our current Western social institutions legitimise the inequality they produce, and is deployed in even fiercer forms to resist social policies to eliminate poverty. It is thus with some chagrin to report that I have only belatedly read Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 "Outliers: The Story of Success". First, the good news. "Outliers" is extraordinarily well written, compulsive to read, and crafts compelling anecdotes about the true nature of success. It challenges deeply help myths about the supposed genius of our culture's sporting, legal, and entrepreneurial heroes. 

Gladwell sets out to establish three core premises through which he wants to re-write the classical liberal narrative of success as the result of individual genius or talent:

• First, that success is more a matter of opportunity than talent, and opportunities are structured by social forces that are often hidden or obtuse in ways that are unintuitive or coincidental. 
• Secondly, that talent is largely a matter of having opportunities to practice (see #1). Gladwell popularised the so-called "10,000 hour" rule, which posits that extensive practice, not innate talent, distinguishes society's great artists, scientists and musicians from the rest of us. 
• Finally, Gladwell dives into the social and cultural factors that drive people to succeed, and argues that cultures which encourage "hard work" (see #2) produce more success.

For me, Gladwell fails to pull these arguments together into a cohesive whole. He proves his first point, but fails to establish a convincing factual or moral case for the second and third. 

Luck and Evolution

Gladwell is first and foremost a story-teller, and the strength of his arguments rests largely on the persuasiveness of his anecdotes. Fortunately, he leads with his best material. By exhaustively examining the relationship between coincidences such as birthdate and sporting success, Gladwell establishes a prima facie case that the artificial constraints imposed by society (in this instance, grouping players by birth year) create a selective pressure that advantages those born earliest in the selection period. It's not that those born earlier in the year are always going be slightly stronger, slightly taller and slightly faster than those born later in the year. Rather it's that the selection environment takes those minor, random differences and signal-boosts them, offering early opportunities for additional training and practice that mean that by the time these biological or developmental differences cease to matter, they've been supplanted by robust skill-based gradations.

Although Gladwell himself doesn't use evolutionary metaphors, the examples he provides offer compelling example after compelling example about how environment, rather than talent, shapes who succeeds. In Gladwell's narrative, the masters of Silicon Valley rose to prominence not because they're geniuses (most were talented, yes, but not academic standouts), but because they had the good fortune to be born in a time and place where they had opportunities to be ahead of the curve in practicing with a technology that would soon re-shape the entire economy. Gladwell's narrative history of the New York M&A legal scene is similar: the [predominantly Jewish] firms that became titans of Wall Street prevailed not because they were smarter, or better able to judge the financial markets, but because the prevailing cultural norms prevented more established WASP firms from gaining the skills and experience they would need to survive in the new neoliberal order. 

At times, Gladwell seems in awe of the talented individuals (both successful and unsuccessful) he interviewed for the book; but rather than hero worship, he accurately points out there is far more to individual success than general intelligence. Sociability and emotion intelligence matter too; as do the contacts, self-confidence and experience provided by some socio-economic backgrounds over others.  

Uneasy Bedfellows

Gladwell's alternative explanation for the success of these individuals is that practice and experience drive success. The distribution of opportunities to practice (for "10,000 hours") determines who are the standouts in a particular field. Unfortunately, the anecdote-driven nature of this claim undermines its persuasiveness. Gladwell cites a single study of musicians to grant his claim scientific weight, and it's worth noting that subsequent meta-analyses have failed to replicate the result outside the musical profession. 

The lack of a cohesive argumentative throughline becomes a particular problem in the second half of the book. It is here that Gladwell offers his case on what drives people to work hard on a task for the requisite 10,000 hours practice in the first place. Gladwell begins well by introducing the idea of cultural influences on behaviour through the often-cited work on Southerners in the US (Nisbett & Cohen) and the role of culture in airline crashes. But he then argues that some cultures are better equipped than other to produce individual behaviours that reliably produce success. My core problem is that, like so many others working in this space, Gladwell shifts the locus of success from biological to cultural factors without changing the essence of the story being told about why some groups succeed and others don't. 

Gladwell's chapter on "why Asians are good at math" is particularly egregious. Crafting a tale of pre-modern China as a capitalist, entrepreneurial idyll, he argues Chinese culture is supposedly adapted to reproduce behaviours of self-reliance, hard work and risk-taking. Even ignoring the atrocious lumping together of all of Asian economic and cultural history, his claim is also wrong on its historical face. While small-peasant landholding may have been the ideal during some periods in Chinese history, there were equally periods characterised by feudal, despotic or [in the later period, especially] market-dominated land-ownership. A more sophisticated version of Gladwell's argument could point to the emphasis on civil service exams in Confucian governance; the high population densities in the region; or the role of the immigrant experience in pushing parents to over-invest in their child's education. Instead, we get the laziest sort of innate cultural, 'just so' explanations.

Worse, perhaps, is the second-to-last chapter where Gladwell sketches a narrative of how we might equalise success. Like many boosters of charter (for non-American, read: private) schools, Gladwell believes that longer hours, more homework and stricter discipline can create a 'hard work' culture that lifts people out of poverty. While I'm amenable to arguments about extending the school day, by this point it's well understood that private schools are highly selective in taking students who are already gifted and/or driven, poorly serve those who aren't, and perpeutate a two-tiered system of education without actually improving outcomes (an issue addressed in Chapter X of my own book, "Politics for the New Dark Age").

The Takeaways

While I would recommend "Outliers" as a reading experience, I would caution about overuse of its lessons. Gladwell chooses his anecdotes well, but they are ultimately just stories. While Gladwell focuses on understanding success, his book also (unintentionally or not) holds up a mirror to the origins of inequality. So while I while I applaud efforts to shift away from narratives of success rooted in individual merit, I would caution strongly against replacing them with either biological or cultural determinism. Culture is powerful, certainly, but no group is a monolith and every variation has both positive and negative attributes, depending on the skills demanded by society in a given historical moment. The question should not be how to create self-reliant strivers, but why we would want to structure our society so that only strivers succeed in the first place.