Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I read Outliers several weeks ago, and didn't manage to write about it immediately afterward. It went back to the library -- Gladwell has enough money by now; he didn't need my few bucks, and my shelves are happier this way -- and now I only have a few random notes to jog my memory. So forgive the inevitably scattered and confused nature of what follows. (That is, if it's different in any identifiable way from my usual run of posts about books.)

It's fashionable, these days, to pick on Gladwell as a debaser, a writer who takes bland platitudes and feeds them back to readers. He is a popularizer; he writes books for mass audiences on big topics, and tends to simplify things by the nature of his audience and style. But he's pretty good at it -- there are plenty of other, similar writers who are much worse thinkers, researchers, and writers who don't get attacked the way Gladwell does, mostly because their work is muddier and not as popular. (The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, as always.)

I didn't find Outliers to be a codification of accepted wisdom; actually, it's close to the opposite. Gladwell writes in the New Yorker self-effacing tradition (a little less than the standard, especially towards the end of this book), so he lets his reportage speak for itself most of the time. But Outliers is specifically and directly attacking that central American platitude, the idea that everyone is equal; Outliers shows that neither ability nor opportunity is ever equal, and examines what arises from those inequalities. Gladwell does hope that opportunities, at least, can be made more equal, but he's the least convincing there -- it's a hope rather than a plan.

So Outliers traces the differences between people by looking at the extremes -- extremes of intelligence, as in a couple of chapters about geniuses, and extremes of success, as when Gladwell investigates why Bill Gates was able to build Microsoft into a global power. He finds that there are a lot of geniuses -- people with massive native intelligence -- who never succeeded in life, or did much of anything. And he also finds that the successes tend to have one or more of a short list of advantages: they were born in particular year-ranges; they had the opportunity to spend a lot of time and energy, while still very young, in fields that greatly interested them and that were about to get much larger; they were willing to work very hard, and particularly came from cultures and family businesses/jobs that rewarded exceptionally hard work. They were successful because they were in the right place at the right time, and had prepared for that opportunity -- though often, they weren't deliberately "preparing for an opportunity" at all.

Along the way, he does ease around the unfashionable idea that some cultures are "better" -- at particular things, at least -- than others. One of his strongest object lessons is that a culture with strongly hierarchical tendencies will tend to have more airplane crashes than a more egalitarian culture. But, of course, there are other things that work less well in an egalitarian society; Gladwell is analyzing the needs of particular jobs rather than declaring what is "best" in all cases.

Outliers is a work of popular nonfiction for the masses, but it's also thoughtful and packed with specifics; it's not a book of platitudes by any means.