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Start reading the table of contents
Reading Group Guide A Preview of David and Goliath
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for margaritas
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INITIATION
The mystery of Rosette
“These people died of old age. THAT'S."
out li er -,l ( )r noun1: something located outside of a main or related body, or otherwise classified2: a statistical observation whose value differs markedly from others in the sample
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1. Roseto Valfortore is a hundred miles southeast of Rome, in the foothills of the Apennines in the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval towns, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once great landowners of this region. An arch on one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine - Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps lead up the hillside, flanked by neatly packed two-story stone houses with red-tiled roofs.
For centuries, the Paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries of the surrounding hills or worked in the fields of the valley, coming down four or five miles from the mountain in the morning and making the long journey back in the afternoon. Life was hard. The townspeople were poorly educated and desperately poor with little hope of economic improvement until the late 19th century, when Roseto learned of the land of opportunity on the other side of the ocean.
In January 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans (ten men and one boy) left for New York. They spent their first night in the United States sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street in Manhattan's Little Italy. So they ventured west, eventually finding work at a slate quarry ninety miles west of town, near the town of Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of this group also ended up in Bangor, joining their compatriots at the slate quarry. These immigrants, in turn, sent a message to Roseto of the promise of the New World, and soon after, band after band of Rosetans were packing up and heading for Pennsylvania until the initial influx of immigrants turned into a deluge. In 1894 alone, around 1,200 Rosetta residents applied for United States passports, abandoning entire streets of their former town.
The people of Rosetta began buying land on a rocky hill connected to Bangor by a steep and rutted wagon road. They built neatly crammed two-story stone houses with slate roofs in narrow streets that ran up and down the hillside. They built a church and named it Nossa Senhora do Carmo and named the main street that was on Avenida Garibaldi after the great hero of Italian unification. Initially, they called their city Nueva Italia. But they soon moved to Roseto, which seemed appropriate since almost all of them came from the same town in Italy.
In 1896, a dynamic young priest named Father Pasquale de Nisco assumed the leadership of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. De Nisco founded spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the townspeople to clear the land and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons, and fruit trees in the long yards behind their houses. He distributed seeds and bulbs. The city came alive. The people of Rosetta began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a monastery and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries, as well as restaurants and bars open along Avenida Garibaldi. More than a dozen factories producing blouses for the clothing trade were built. Neighboring Bangor was mostly Welsh and English, and the nearby town was mostly German, which meant, given the tumultuous English-German-Italian relations in those years, that Roseto was exclusively for Rosettes. If you had wandered the streets of Roseto, Pennsylvania, in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian, but the precise southern Foggia dialect spoken in Roseto Italian. Roseto, Pennsylvania, was a tiny, self-sufficient world unto itself, almost unknown to the society around it, and would have remained so had it not been for a man named Stewart Wolf.
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Wolf was a doctor. He studied digestion and stomach and taught at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine. He spent his summers on a farm in Pennsylvania, not far from Roseto, though of course that didn't mean much, since Roseto was so much in his own world that it was possible to live in the next town over and never know much about it. This. "One time when we were there in the summer, it must have been in the late 1950s, they invited me to speak before the local medical society," Wolf said years later in an interview. “After the conversation, one of the local doctors invited me for a beer. And as we drank he said, 'You know, I've been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over the world and I rarely see someone from Roseto under the age of 65 with a heart condition.'
Wolf was surprised. That was in the 1950s, years before the advent of cholesterol-lowering drugs and aggressive heart disease prevention measures. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of 65. It is impossible to be a doctor, said common sense, without seeing heart disease.
Wolf decided to investigate. He got the support of some of his Oklahoma students and colleagues. They collected the death certificates of the townspeople from as many years back as possible. They analyzed medical records. They collected medical histories and compiled family genealogies. "We've been busy," Wolf said. “We settled on a preliminary study. We started in 1961. The mayor said, 'All my sisters will help you.' He had four sisters. He said, 'You can have the council chamber.' I said, 'Where are you going to hold the board meetings?' We had small booths where we could draw blood and do electrocardiograms. We were there for four weeks. So I spoke to the authorities. They gave us school for the summer. We invite the entire population of Roseto to get tested."
The results were amazing. In Roseto, virtually no one under the age of 55 has died of a heart attack and shown signs of heart disease. Among men 65 and older, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was about half that of the United States as a whole. The overall death rate in Roseto was actually 30-35% lower than expected.
Wolf brought a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. “I hired medical and sociology students to be interviewers, and in Roseto we went door to door and talked to everyone over the age of 21,” recalls Bruhn. That was over fifty years ago, but Bruhn still had a sense of wonder in his voice as he described what they had found. “There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They had no one on welfare. Then we look at stomach ulcers. They didn't get any of it either. These people died of old age. That is."
Wolf's profession had a name for a place like Roseto, a place that was outside of everyday experience, where normal rules didn't apply. Roseto was a stranger.
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2. Wolf's first thought was that the Rosetans must have retained some Old World dietary practices that made them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly realized that this was not true. The people of Rosetta cooked with lard instead of the much healthier olive oil they used in Italy. Pizza in Italy was thin crust with salt, oil, and maybe some tomatoes, anchovies, or onions. Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough with sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham, and sometimes eggs. Sweets like cookies and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter; in Roseto they were eaten all year round. When Wolf had nutritionists analyze typical rosetan eating habits, they found that 41% of calories came from fat. Nor was it a city where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run 10 kilometers. The residents of Rosette, Pennsylvania were heavy smokers and many battled obesity.
If diet and exercise didn't explain the results, what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close-knit group from the same region of Italy, and Wolf's next thought was to wonder if they were a particularly hardy strain that protected them from disease. So he tracked down Rosetan's relatives living in other parts of the United States to see if they shared the same remarkable health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. not you.
Then he looked towards the region where the Rosetans lived. Could it be that living in the eastern Pennsylvania foothills was good for his health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor, just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles away. Both were about the size of Roseto, and both were inhabited by the same race of European immigrant workers. Wolf reviewed the medical records from both cities. Among men 65 and older, death rates from heart disease were three times higher in Nazareth and Bangor than in Roseto. Another dead end.
Wolf was beginning to realize that Roseto's secret wasn't in diet, exercise, genes, or location. It had to be Roseto herself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked through the city, they found out why. They saw Rosetans visit each other, like stopping on the street to chat in Italian or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underpin the social fabric of the city. They saw how many houses three generations lived under one roof and how much respect grandparents demanded. They attended Mass at Nossa Senhora do Carmo and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two different civic organizations in a city of just under two thousand people. They captured the particular egalitarian spirit of the community, which prevented the rich from flaunting their successes and helped the unsuccessful hide their failures.
By transplanting the Paesani culture of southern Italy to the foothills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans created a powerful protective social structure that could shield them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were sane because of their heritage, because of the world they had made for themselves in their little mountain town.
“I remember going to Roseto for the first time and seeing the family dinners of three generations, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting in their doorways and talking among themselves, the blouse factories where the women worked. . during the day while the men worked in the quarries,” Bruhn said. "It was magical."
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, one can imagine
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kind of skepticism they faced. They would go to conferences where their colleagues would present long streams of data arranged in complex diagrams related to this type of gene or this type of physiological process, and they themselves would talk about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to each other. with others online. Calle and three generations under one roof. Live long, common sense said at the time, largely depended on who we were, that is, our genes. It depended on the choices we made: what we chose to eat, how much we exercised, and how effectively the medical system treated us. No one was used to thinking about health in community terms.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in a whole new way: They had to make them realize that they couldn't understand why someone is healthy if they only think about their own health. . decisions or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They needed to understand what culture they belonged to, who their friends and family were, and what city their families were from. They had to acknowledge the idea that the values of the world we live in and the people around us have a profound impact on who we are.
At Outliers, I want to do to our understanding of success what Stewart Wolf did to our understanding of health.
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PART ONE
CHANCE
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CHAPTER ONE
the matthew effect
“ALL THAT HAS BEEN GIVEN TO HIM, AND HE WILL HAVE MUCH. BUT, FROM WHERE
HE WHO HAS NOT HAS, EVEN WHAT HE HAS, WILL TAKE FROM HIM." — MATTHEW 25:29
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1. On a warm spring day in May 2007, the Medicine Hat Tigers and Vancouver Giants met in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the Memorial Cup ice hockey championship. The Tigers and Giants were the top two teams in the Canadian Hockey League, which in turn is the best youth hockey league in the world. These were the future stars of the sport: seventeen-, eighteen-, and nineteen-year-olds who had been skating and throwing discus since childhood.
The game was televised on Canadian national television. Memorial Cup banners hung from poles in the streets of downtown Vancouver. The arena was full. A long red carpet was laid out on the ice, and the game's dignitaries were introduced by the announcer. First came the Prime Minister of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell. Then Gordie Howe, one of the game's legends, came out to thunderous applause. "Ladies and gentlemen," the announcer exploded. "Sir. Hockey!"
For the next sixty minutes, the two teams played energetic and aggressive hockey. Vancouver scored the first goal early in the second period after a Mario Bliznak rebound. Towards the end of the second period, it was Medicine Hat's turn as the team's leading scorer, Darren Helm, fired a quick shot past Vancouver goaltender Tyson Sexsmith. Vancouver responded in the third period to score the game-winner and when Medicine Hat desperately retired their goaltender, Vancouver scored for the third time.
After the game, the players and their families, as well as sportswriters from around the country, crowded into the winning team's locker room. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of champagne and sweaty hockey equipment. A hand-painted banner hung on the wall: Embrace the fight. In the center of the room, Giants coach Don Hay stood with tears in his eyes. "I'm very proud of these guys," he said. “Just look around the dressing room. There is not a man who has not bought it with all his heart.
Canadian ice hockey is a meritocracy. Thousands of Canadian children begin playing the sport at a "beginner" level before they even reach kindergarten. From there, there are leagues for all ages, and at each of these levels, players are vetted, ranked, and rated, with the most talented selected and groomed for the next level. As players reach their teens, the best of the best were introduced to an elite league called Major Junior A, which is the top of the pyramid. And when your Major Junior A team plays for the Memorial Cup, that means you're at the top of the pyramid.
This is how most sports choose their future stars. This is how soccer is organized in Europe and South America, and this is how Olympic athletes are chosen. It's not that different, by the way, from the way the classical music world chooses its future virtuosos, or the way the ballet world chooses its future dancers, or the way our elite educational system choose their future scientists and intellectuals.
You can't buy your ticket to Major Junior A Hockey, no matter who your father or mother is, who your grandfather was, or what business your family is in. It also doesn't matter if you live in the farthest corner of Canada's northernmost province. If you have the skill, the vast network of hockey scouts and talent scouts will find you, and if you're willing to work to develop that skill, the system will reward you. Success in hockey is based on individual merit, and both words are important. Players are judged on their own performance, not someone else's, and on their skill, not any other arbitrary fact.
Or is it you?
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2. This is a book about fugitives, about men and women who do extraordinary things. In the next few chapters, I'll introduce you to one type of outlier after another: geniuses, business moguls, rock stars, and software programmers. Let's unravel the mysteries of a remarkable lawyer, see what separates the best drivers from those who have accidents, and try to figure out why Asians are so good at math. And by examining the lives of the notables among us, the skilled, the talented, and the driven, I will argue that there is something profoundly wrong with our understanding of success.
What is the question we always ask ourselves about successful people? We want to know who they are: what kind of personality they have, how smart they are, what lifestyle they have, or what special talents they were born with. And we assume that it is these personal qualities that explain how this person got to the top.
In the autobiographies that the billionaire/entrepreneur/rock star/celebrity publishes each year, the plot is always the same: our hero is born into humble circumstances and strives for greatness through his own drive and talent. In the Bible, Joseph is driven out by his brothers and sold into slavery and then, through his own brilliance and insight, becomes Pharaoh's right-hand man. In Horatio Alger's famous 19th century novels, children born into poverty find wealth through a combination of courage and initiative. "I think overall it's a disadvantage," JebBush once said of what it meant for his business career to be the son of a US president, the brother of a US president and the grandson of a wealthy Wall Street banker and US senator. . When he ran for governor of Florida, he repeatedly described himself as a "self-made man," and it's a measure of how much we associate success with individual efforts that few bother with that description.
"Raise your head," Robert Winthrop told the crowd many years ago at the unveiling of a statue of the great hero of American independence, Benjamin Franklin, "and look at the image of a man who came out of nowhere, doing nothing because someone, relatives or patrons, who have not enjoyed the benefits of early childhood education, which are not open to you - a hundred times open - who have rendered the humblest service in the factories where your youth was employed, but who lived to stand before kings, and who died to leave a name the world will never forget."
At Outliers I want to convince you that this kind of personal success statement doesn't work. People don't come out of nowhere. We owe something to paternity and patronage. The people who stand in front of the kings can look like they did it all themselves. In fact, however, they are invariably the recipients of hidden advantages, extraordinary opportunities, and cultural legacies that enable them to learn, work hard, and understand the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grow. The culture we belong to and the heritage of our ancestors shape the patterns of our achievements in ways we can't even imagine. In other words, don't just ask how successful people are. Only by asking ourselves where they come from can we decipher the logic behind who is successful and who is not.
Biologists often talk about the "ecology" of an organism: the tallest oak tree in the forest is not the tallest just because it grew from the toughest acorn; it is also the tallest because no other tree blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed its bark like a seedling, and no woodcutter cut it down before it was fully grown. We all know that successful people come from difficult countries.
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seed. But do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil they took root in, and the rabbits and woodcutters they happily avoided? This is not a book about tall trees. It's a book about forests, and hockey is a good starting point because the explanation of who makes it to the top of the hockey world is much more interesting and complicated than it seems. In fact, it's downright weird.
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3. Here's the 2007 Medicine Hat Tigers lineup. Take a closer look and see if you can spot anything odd about it.
No. Name Pos L/W Height Weight Date of Birth Hometown22 Tyler Ennis L 5'9" 160 Oct 6, 1989 Edmonton, AB23 Jordan Hickmott C R 6' 183 Apr 11, 1990 Mission, BC25 Jakub Rumpel RW R 5'8" 166 Jan. 27 Aug 1987 Hrnciarovce, SLO28 Bretton Cameron CR R 5'11" 168 26 Jan 1989 Didsbury, AB36 Chris Stevens LW L 5'10" 197 20 Aug 1986 Dawson Creek, BC3 Gord Baldwin D L 6'5" 205 Mar 1, 1987 Winnipeg, MB4 David Schlemko D L 6'1" 195 May 7, 1987 Edmonton, AB5 Trever Glass D L 6' 190 Jan 22, 1988 Cochrane, AB10 Kris Russell D L 5'10" 177 May 2 1987 Caroline, AB18 Michael Sauer DR 6'3" 205 Aug 7, 1987 Sartell, MN24 Mark Isherwood DR 6' 183 Jan 31, 1989 Abbotsford, BC27 Shayne Brown DL 6'1" 198 Feb 20, 1989 Stony Plain , AB29 Jordan Bendfeld DR 6'3" 230 Feb 9, 1988 Leduc , AB31 Ryan Holfeld GL 5'11" 166 Jun 29, 1989 LeRoy, SK33 Matt Keetley GR 6'2" 189 Apr 27, 1986 Medicine Hat, AB
You see it? Don't feel bad if you don't because no one in the hockey world has done it for many years. In fact, it wasn't until the mid-1980s that a Canadian psychologist named Roger Barnsley first drew attention to the age relationship phenomenon.
Barnsley was at a hockey game in southern Alberta for the Lethbridge Broncos, a team that played in the same Major Junior A League as the Vancouver Giants and Medicine Hat Tigers. He was there with his wife Paula and his two children and his wife was reading the show when she came across a list of lists like the one above that she was looking at.
"Understood," he said, "do you know when these youngsters were born?" Barnsley said yes. “You are between sixteen and twenty years old, so you were born in the late sixties.” "No, no," Paula continued. "In what month?" "I thought she was crazy," Barnsley recalls. "But I looked at him and what did she say?
it just hit me. For some reason, there were an incredible number of birth dates in January, February and March.
Barnsley went home that night and looked up the birth dates of every professional hockey player he could find. He saw the same pattern. Barnsley, his wife, and a colleague, A.H. Thompson, compiled statistics on all the players in the Ontario Youth Hockey League. The story was the same. More players were born in January than in any other month, and by a staggering margin. The second most common month of birth? February. The third? March. Barnsley noted that nearly five and a half times as many Ontario Junior Hockey League players were born in January than November. He watched the eleven-star and thirteen-star teams: the young players who were selected for the elite travel teams. The same history. He looked at the composition of the National Hockey League. The same history. The more he looked, the more Barnsley believed that what he was seeing was not a coincidence, but an iron law of Canadian hockey: in any elite group of hockey players, the best of the best, 40 percent of the players will have been born. between January and March, 30% between April and June, 20% between July and September and 10% between October and December.
"In all my years in psychology, I have never encountered such a large effect," says Barnsley. “You don't even have to do a statistical analysis. just look at it
Look again at the Medicine Hat list. you see it now Seventeen of the twenty five players
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of the team were born in January, February, March or April. Here's the play-by-play of the first two goals in the Memorial Cup final, only this time I
replaced the players' birthdays with their names. It doesn't sound like the Canadian Junior Hockey League anymore. Now it sounds like a strange athletic ritual for teenagers born under the zodiac signs of Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces.
11 de Março starts on one side of the Tigres net and leaves the puck to his teammate 4 de Janeiro, who passes it to 22 de Janeiro, who passes it back to 12 de Março, who finishes it off from close range to the Tigres goalkeeper , 27.4. 27 blocks the kick but it is cleared by Vancouver's March 6. He kicks! Medicine Hat defenders on February 9 and 14 try to block the puck while January 10 watches helplessly. Results of March 6!
Now let's move on to the second half.
It's Medicine Hat's turn. The Tigers' favorite for January 21 moves on the right side of the ice. On Feb. 15, he stops and spins around the Vancouver defender. On January 21, then December 20, he sent the puck to his teammate—Wow! What is he doing out there?! -- who rocks the quarterback on May 17 and pushes back a cross pass on January 21. He kicks! Vancouver's March 12 defender dives and tries to deflect the shot. Vancouver goalie March 19 helpless progress. Results for January 21! He raises his hands in triumph. His companion from May 2 jumps on his back for joy.
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4. The explanation for this is quite simple. This has nothing to do with astrology, nor is there anything magical about the first three months of the year. Simply put, in Canada, the forage class ice hockey eligibility deadline is January 1st. So a kid who turns 10 on January 2nd might be playing alongside someone who won't be 10 at the end of the year, and at that age, before adolescence, a 12-month age difference makes a big difference • difference in physical maturity.
Because Canada is the most fanatical hockey country in the world, coaches begin selecting players for the traveling "back-up" team, the All-Star teams, at the age of nine or ten and, naturally, they are older. talented the bigger they are, the better coordinated. players who benefited from crucial additional months of maturity.
And what happens when a player is selected for a representative team? He's getting better coaches and his teammates are better, and he's playing 50 or 75 games a season instead of 20 games a season like the ones left in the "home" league, and he's coaching twice or twice as much. up to three times what he would otherwise have. In the beginning, your advantage is not so much that you are naturally better, but just a little older. But at thirteen or fourteen, with the benefit of better training and all that extra practice under his belt, he's actually better, so he's the one with the best chance of making it to Junior Major League A and from there to the big leagues. .*
Barnsley argues that this type of skewed age distribution exists whenever three things happen: selection, transfer, and differential experience. If you decide early who is good and who is not good; Separate “talent” from “talent”; and when you offer superior experience to the "gifted", you give this small group of people born just before the deadline a huge advantage.
In the United States, soccer and basketball do not select, broadcast, or differentiate as dramatically. As a result, a child can physically fall behind in these sports and still play as long as his more mature peers.* But baseball does. The deadline for almost all non-college baseball leagues in the United States is July 31, with the result that more major leaguers are born in August than in any other month. (The numbers are staggering: In 2005, among Americans playing Major League Baseball, 505 were born in August, up from 313 in July.)
European soccer is also organized like hockey and baseball, and the distribution of birth dates in this sport is also highly skewed. In England the selection date is September 1 and in major league football at one point in the 1990s 288 players were born between September and November and only 136 players were born between June and August. In international soccer, the cut-off date used to be August 1, and at a recent World Youth Championship, 135 players were born in the three months after August 1, with just 22 born in May, June, and July. Today the deadline for international youth soccer is January 1st. Take a look at the 2007 Czech youth soccer team that reached the Youth World Cup final.
Here we go again:
We will be Player's Date of Birth Position 1 Marcel Gecov January 1, 1988 MF2 Ludek Frydrych January 3, 1987 GK3 Petr Janda January 5, 1987 MF4 Jakub Dohnalek January 12, 1988 DF5 Jakub Stuten January 26, 1987 MF6 Michal played 27 Jan 1987 DF7 Marek Strestik 1 Feb 1987 FW8 Jiri Valenta 2nd 14 1988 MF
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January 9 Monday February 20, 1987 DF10 Thomas Oklestek February 21, 1987 MF11 Heavy Oils February 21, 1987. 02/21/1987 MF12 Radek Pedro 02.02. 24, 1987 GK13 One Hundred Breeders Ma. 15, 1989 DF14 Oct. Mar. 15 March 1989. 26 March 1987 MF15 26 March 1987 MF15 March 29 April 1988 DF16 Martin Fenin 29 April 1988 | May 16, 1987 HW17 Thomas Pekhart May 26, 1989 HW18 Luke Cuban Jun 22, 1987 DF19 Thomas Cihlar jun. August 24, 1987 DF20 Thomas Frystak August 24, 1987. 18 Sep 1987 GK21 Thomas Micola 26 Sep 1988 MF
In the national team playoffs, the Czech soccer managers might as well have told everyone born after the summer solstice to pack up and go home.
Of course, hockey and soccer are just games that some are involved in. But the same biases are also evident in much broader areas, such as education. Parents with children born at the end of the calendar year often consider keeping their child before the start of kindergarten: it's hard for a five-year-old to keep up with a child born many months earlier. But most parents, one suspects, think that whatever disability a young child faces in kindergarten will eventually go away. But not. It's like ice hockey. The small initial advantage that a child born at the beginning of the year has over a child born at the end of the year is maintained. It traps children in patterns of success and failure, encouragement and discouragement that last for years.
Recently, two economists, Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey, examined the relationship between scores on something called Trends in the International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS (math and science tests given to children every four years in many countries). countries of the world). . worldwide) and the month of birth. They found that among fourth graders, older children performed between four and 12 percentage points better than younger children. It's a "great effect," as Dhuey explains. That means if you take two intellectually equal fourth-graders with different birthdays, the older student might score in the 80th percentile, while the younger one might score in the 68th percentile. That's the difference between qualifying for a gifted program and not do it.
"It's like sports," Dhuey said. “We shared skills from an early age. We have advanced reading groups and advanced math groups. From the very beginning, when you look at children, in kindergarten and first grade, teachers confuse maturity with ability. And they take the older kids to the advanced stream where they learn better skills; and the following year they do even better in the higher groups; and next year the same thing happens and they do it even better. The only country where we don't see this is Denmark. They have a national policy that they don't have pooling skills until they are ten years old. Denmark is waiting to make selection decisions until the age differences at maturity level out.
Dhuey and Bedard then ran the same analysis, only this time looking at the university. What did you find? At four-year colleges in the United States, the highest form of post-secondary education, students who are in the relatively youngest cohort of their class are underrepresented by about 11.6%. This initial difference in maturity does not disappear over time. He insists. And for thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college and having a real shot at middle class or not.*
"I mean, it's ridiculous," says Dhuey. “It is strange that our choice of terms is arbitrary.
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what's causing these long-lasting effects, and no one seems to care."
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5. Think for a moment what hockey history and first birthdays say about success.
This tells us that our notion that it is the best and the brightest who easily rise to the top is too simplistic. Yes, hockey players who make it to the professional level are more talented than you or me. But they also had a huge advantage, an opportunity they didn't deserve and didn't deserve. And this opportunity played a crucial role in his success.
Sociologist Robert Merton called this phenomenon the “Matthew Effect” after the New Testament verse in Matthew: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance. but if you do not have, what you have will be taken from you. In other words, those who are successful are more likely to receive the kinds of special opportunities that lead to greater success. It is the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It is the best students who receive the best instruction and attention. And it is the children over the age of nine and ten who receive the most training and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists call "cumulative advantage." The ice hockey pro starts off slightly better than his teammates. until the hockey player is a true fugitive. But he didn't start out as a fugitive. He started out a little better.
The second implication of the hockey example is that the systems we have for determining who is ahead are not particularly efficient. We believe that starting all-star leagues and talent shows as soon as possible is the best way to ensure no talent slips away. But take another look at the list of soccer teams in the Czech Republic. There are no players born in July, October, November or December and only one in August and one in September. Everyone born in the last half of the year has been discouraged, forgotten about, or kicked out of the sport. The talent of almost half of the Czech athletes was wasted.
So what do you do if you are a young Czech sportsman unlucky enough to be born at the end of the year? You can't play soccer. The deck is against you. Then maybe you could try the other sport that the Czechs are obsessed with: hockey. But wait. (I think he already knows what he can expect). This is the list of the 2007 Czech youth ice hockey team that placed fifth at the World Championships.
Meeting. Player Date of Birth Position1 David Kveton January 3, 1988 Forward2 Tree Suchy January 3, 1988 . January 3, 1988 Defense3 Michael Kolarz January 3, 1988 Defense3. February 12, 1987 Defense4 Jacob Vojta February 12, 1987. February 8, 1987 Defense5 Jacob Kindl. February 10, 1987 Defense6 Michael Frolik. Feb 17, 1989 Forward7 Martin Hanzal Feb 17, 1989 | February 20, 1987 Forward8 Thomas Svoboda February 20, 1987 . March 24, 1987 Forward9 Jacob Cerny March 24, 1987 . 5, 1987 Forward10 Thomas Kudelka Tuesday. 10/10/1987 Defense11 Jaroslav Barton Mar. April 26, 1987 Defense12 H. O. Poziville April 26, 1987 . 05/22/1987 Defender13 Daniel Rakos 05/25/1987 Forward14 David Kuchejda Jun. July 12, 1987 Forward15 Vladimir Sobotka 07/07. 02.02.1987 Forward16 Jacob Kovar 07.07. 19.07.1988 Goalkeeper17 Lukas Vantuch 07.07. 08/20/1987 Forward18 Jacob Voracek 08/20/1987 | 8/15/1989 Forward19 Thomas Pospisil 8/15/1989 Forward19 Thomas Pospisil 8/25/1987 Forward20 Wednesday Pavelec 8/8. 11.31.1987 Goalkeeper21 Thomas Kana 11.11. 12/29/1987 Forward22 Michael Repik December 31, 1988
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If you were born in the last quarter of the year, you can also do without ice hockey. Do you see the consequences of the way we think about success? because we like it
We deeply personalize success and miss opportunities to lift others to the highest level. We create rules that frustrate conquests. We are quick to write people off as failures. We admire those who are too successful and despise those who are too unsuccessful. And above all, we have become very passive. We ignore the size of the role that we all play - and by "we" I mean society - in determining who does and does not do what.
If we wanted to, we could realize that deadlines are important. We could start two or even three hockey leagues, broken down by birth month. Have players progress in separate lanes, then select star teams. If all Czech and Canadian athletes born at the end of the year were given a fair chance, the Czech and Canadian teams would suddenly have twice as many athletes to choose from.
Schools could do the same. Primary and secondary schools could place students born in January-April in one grade, those born in May-August in another grade, and those born in September-December in third grade. They could allow students to learn and compete with other students of the same maturity level. Administratively it would be a bit more complicated. But it wouldn't necessarily cost much more money, and it would level the playing field for those hurt by the education system through no fault of their own. In other words, we could easily take over the performance machinery, not just in sport but, as we'll see, in other important areas as well. But not us. That is because? Because we cling to the notion that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world we all grew up in and the rules we write as a society don't matter.
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6. Before the Memorial Cup final, Gord Wasden, father of one of the Medicine Hat Tigers, stood on the ice and talked about his son Scott. He was wearing a Medicine Hat baseball cap and a black Medicine Hat T-shirt. “When he was four and five years old,” recalls Wasden, “his little brother of his would ride in a walker and hold a hockey stick and they would play hockey on the kitchen floor from dawn to dusk. Scott has always had a passion for it. He played representative hockey during his minor league hockey career. He has always made it to the triple-A teams. As a freshman or a rooster freshman, he would always play on the [senior] representative team.” Wasden was clearly nervous: his son was about to have the biggest game of his life. "He had to work very hard to get what he got. I'm very proud of him.
These were the ingredients for success at the highest level: passion, talent and hard work. But there was another element. When did Wasden feel that his child was special? "You know, he was always a bigger kid for his age. He was strong and had a knack for scoring goals early on. And he's always been a standout for his age, a captain of his team. .."
Older child for his age? Of course she was. Scott Wasden was born on January 4, three days before the absolutely perfect birthday of an elite hockey player. He was one of the lucky ones. If the Canadian hockey pick date were later in the year, he could be watching the Memorial Cup championship from the stands instead of playing on the ice.
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CHAPTER TWO
The 10,000 hour rule
"WE HAD TO PLAY EIGHT HOURS IN HAMBURG."
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1. The University of Michigan opened its new data center in 1971 in a brand new building on Beal Avenue in Ann Arbor, with beige brick exterior walls and a dark glass facade. The university's gigantic mainframe computers stood in the middle of a large white room and looked like, as one faculty member recalled, "one of the final scenes of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey." Next to him were dozens of drills, what passed for computer terminals at the time. In 1971 this was state of the art. The University of Michigan had one of the most advanced computer programs in the world, and over the lifespan of the data center, thousands of students have walked this blank space, the most famous being a clumsy teenager named Bill Joy.
Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the data center opened. She was sixteen years old. He was tall and very thin with a lot of unruly hair. He had been selected as a "study student" as a senior at North Farmington High School near Detroit, which, he says, meant he was a "no-data nerd." He thought that he might end up being a biologist or a mathematician. But at the end of his freshman year, he stumbled across the Computer Center and was hooked.
From then on, the data center was his life. He programmed whenever he could. Joy got a job with a computer science teacher so she could code over the summer. In 1975 she enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There she delved even deeper into the world of computer programs. During his doctoral oral exams, he created a particularly complicated algorithm on the spot that, as one of his many admirers wrote, "so astounded his examiners [that] one of them later experienced 'Jesus confusing the old men' by comparison." . ”
Working with a small group of programmers, Joy was tasked with rewriting UNIX, a mainframe software system developed by AT&T. Joy's version was really good. In fact, it was so good that it became, and still is, the operating system that literally runs millions of computers around the world. "When you put your Mac in this fun mode where you can see the code," says Joy, "I see stuff that I remember writing twenty-five years ago." And do you know who wrote most of the software that allows you to access the Internet? joy bill
After graduating from Berkeley, Joy co-founded the Silicon Valley company Sun Microsystems, which was a key player in the computer revolution. There he rewrote another computer language, Java, and the legend of him grew even more. Joy is spoken of with as much respect among Silicon Valley members as someone like Microsoft's Bill Gates. He is sometimes referred to as the Edison of the Internet. As Yale computer scientist David Gelernter says, "Bill Joy is one of the most influential people in the history of modern computing."
The story of Bill Joy's genius has been told many times, and the lesson is always the same. Here was a world that was pure meritocracy. Computer programming didn't work like an old man's network, where you got an advantage through money or connections. It was an open field in which all the contestants were judged solely on their talents and achievements. It was a world where the best men won, and Joy was clearly one of those best men.
However, it would be easier to accept this version of events if we were not looking only at hockey and soccer players. Yours should also be a pure meritocracy. It just wasn't. It was a story about how outliers in a given area achieved their high status through a completely random combination of skill, opportunity, and advantage.
Is it possible that the same pattern of special opportunities also occurs in the real world? We will do it
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Remember the story of Bill Joy and find out.
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2. For nearly a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in heated debate over a problem that most of us would consider solved years ago. The question is: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not all hockey players born in January end up playing at a professional level. Only a few do that: the natural talents. Talented performance plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the more psychologists study the careers of gifted individuals, the lesser the role of innate ability and the greater the role of preparation seems to be.
Exhibit A of the talent argument is a study conducted by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and two elite colleagues at the Berlin Conservatory in the early 1990s. With the help of academy professors, they divided violinists into the school into three groups. In the first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world-class soloists. In the second, those who only qualified as "good". In the third, there were students who were unlikely to play professionally and who were planning to become music teachers in the public school system. All the violinists were asked the same question: How many hours have you practiced in your entire career since you first learned the violin?
All three groups started playing at roughly the same age, around five years of age. In those early years, everyone practiced about the same amount, about two or three hours a week. But when the students were around eight years old, real differences began to emerge. The students who would finish at the top of their class began to practice more than anyone else: six hours a week at the age of nine, eight hours a week at the age of twelve, sixteen hours a week at the age of fourteen. years and so on, until the age of twelve, twenty of them practiced, that is, they played their instruments with determination and persistence with the intention of improving, more than thirty hours a week. In fact, by the age of 20, elite performers had already completed ten thousand hours of practice. On the other hand, merely good students got 8,000 hours and future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.
Ericsson and his colleagues then compared amateur pianists with professional pianists. The same pattern emerged. Hobbyists never practiced more than about three hours a week growing up, and by the age of twenty they had accumulated two thousand hours of practice. The professionals, on the other hand, steadily increased their practice time each year until, like violinists, they reached ten thousand hours by the age of twenty.
What's amazing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find "naturals," musicians who reached the top effortlessly while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. he worked harder than the others, but he just didn't have what it took to break the front ranks. His research suggests that once a musician is qualified enough to be accepted into a top music school, what separates one artist from another is how hard they work. That is. Also, the people at the top don't just work more or a lot more than everyone else. You work much, much harder.
The notion that mastering a complex task requires a critical minimum of practice is a recurring theme in professional studies. In fact, researchers have determined what they believe to be the magic number for true experience: ten thousand hours.
“The picture that emerges from such studies is that it takes ten thousand hours of practice
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Reach the level of mastery that comes with being a world-class expert, in everything,” writes neurologist Daniel Levitin. “In study after study of composers, basketball players, novelists, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and everything in between, this number keeps coming up. Of course, that doesn't explain why some people get more out of their workouts than others. But no one has yet found a case where a truly world-class experience has been achieved in less time. It seems that it takes so long for the brain to absorb everything it needs to know to achieve true mastery.
This is true even for people we consider to be gifted children. Mozart, for example, began writing music at the age of six. But, writes psychologist Michael Howe in his book Genius Explained,
by the standards of mature composers, Mozart's early works are not excellent. The earliest pieces were probably written by his father and perhaps improved upon in the process. Many of Wolfgang's children's compositions, such as the first seven of his Concertos for Piano and Orchestra, are largely arrangements of works by other composers. Of the concertos containing only Mozart's original music, the oldest, now considered a masterpiece (No. 9, KV 271), was not composed until he was 21: by then Mozart had already been composing concertos for ten years.
Music critic Harold Schönberg goes even further: Mozart, he argues, was actually "developed late", since he did not create his greatest work for more than twenty years before composing it.
Becoming a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer reached that elite level faster: he took nine years.) And what is ten years? Well, that's about the time it takes to practice 10,000 hours of intense practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.
Here's the explanation for the puzzling nature of the formations of the Czech and Canadian sports teams. There was virtually no one on those teams born after September 1, which doesn't seem to make sense. You'd think that by the end of the year a host of Czech hockey or soccer prodigies would be born who are so talented that they'll eventually rise to the top despite their birth date as young adults.
But for Ericsson and those who argue against the primacy of talent, this is not surprising. This newborn prodigy is not selected for the All-Star team at eight years old because he is too small. And without that extra practice, he has no chance of reaching ten thousand hours when professional ice hockey teams fight over players. And without ten thousand hours under his belt, he has no way of mastering the skills necessary to play at the highest level. Even Mozart, the greatest musical prodigy of all time, didn't get going until he was ten thousand hours old. Practicing is not what you do when you are good. It's what you do that makes you good.
Of course, the other interesting aspect of those 10,000 hours is that 10,000 hours is an enormous amount of time. It is virtually impossible to reach this number on your own as a young adult. You need parents who encourage and support you. You can't be poor because if you have to work part time to pay the bills, there won't be enough time in the day to practice properly. In fact, most people can only reach that number by participating in a special program, like an all-star hockey team, or getting one of some kind.
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exceptional opportunity that gives them the opportunity to dedicate these hours.
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3. Let's go back to Bill Joy. The year is 1971. He is tall and lanky and is sixteen years old. He's a math whiz, the kind of student that schools like MIT, Caltech and the University of Waterloo attract by the hundreds. "When Bill was a kid, he wanted to know everything about everything long before he knew what he wanted to know," says his father William. “We responded whenever we could. And when we couldn't, we just gave him a book." When it came time to apply to college, Joy earned a perfect score on the math portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. "It wasn't particularly difficult," he says matter-of-factly. "There was enough time to check it again."
He has tons of talent. But that's not the only consideration. Never. The key to his development is that he stumbled upon this nondescript building on Beal Avenue.
In the early 1970s, when Joy was learning to program, computers were the size of rooms. A single machine (which may have less power and memory than your current microwave) can cost over a million dollars, and that was back in the 1970s. Computers were rare. Once you found one, it was difficult to access; If I could get access, the lease time would cost a fortune.
Also, the programming itself was extraordinarily tedious. This was the time when computer programs were created using cardboard punch cards. Each line of code was printed on the card using a die cutting machine. A complex program can contain hundreds, if not thousands, of these cards in tall decks. Once a program was complete, it would go to a mainframe computer that it had access to and deliver the deck of cards to an operator. Because the computers could only do one task at a time, the operator would schedule their program, and depending on how many people were in line ahead of you, it could take a few hours or even a day to get your cards back. he made a single mistake, even a typo, in his program, he had to remove the cards, track down the mistake, and start the whole process over.
Under these circumstances, it was extremely difficult for someone to become an expert programmer. Certainly becoming an expert in your twenties was next to impossible. If you can "plan" just a few minutes out of every hour you spend in the computer lab, how can you get ten thousand hours of practice? “Programming with cards”, recalls a computer scientist at the time, “did not teach programming. He taught her patience and revision.
It wasn't until the mid-1960s that a solution to the scheduling problem emerged. After all, computers were powerful enough to manage more than one "appointment" at a time. If the computer's operating system were rewritten, the computer scientists realized, the machine's time could be shared; The computer can be trained to do hundreds of tasks at once. This, in turn, meant that programmers no longer had to physically hand over their stacks of computer cards to the operator. Dozens of terminals could be built, all connected to the mainframe by a phone line and all working simultaneously, online.
Here's how a landmark story describes the advent of timeshare:
This was not just a revolution. It was a revelation. Forget the operator, the covers, the wait. With timeshare, you can sit in front of your teletype, type a few commands, and get a response right there. Timesharing was interactive: a program could ask for an answer, wait for you to type it, act while you wait, and display the result, all in "real time."
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This is where Michigan came in because Michigan was one of the first universities in the world to switch to timeshare. In 1967 a prototype of the system was in service. In the early 1970s, Michigan had enough computing power for a hundred people to program in the data center at the same time. "In the late 1960s, early 1970s, I don't think there was anywhere else like Michigan," said Mike Alexander, one of Michigan's computer systems pioneers. "Maybe with. Maybe Carnegie Mellon. Maybe Dartmouth. I don't think there were others.
This was the opportunity Bill Joy received when he arrived on the Ann Arbor campus in the fall of 1971. He did not choose Michigan for his computers. He had never done anything with computers in high school. He was interested in math and technology. But when the programming bug hit him in his first year, he found himself, by happy accident, in one of the few places in the world where a seventeen-year-old could program whatever he wanted.
"Do you know the difference between computer cards and timeshares?" says Freude. "That's the difference between mail chess and rapid chess." Programming was no longer a frustrating exercise. It was fun.
"I lived on the north campus, and the data center was on the north campus," Joy continued. "How long did I stay there? Oh, a phenomenal amount of time. It was open 24 hours a day. I would stay there overnight and come home in the morning. In a typical week in those years, I would spend more time in the data center than my classes.All of us down there had this recurring nightmare of forgetting to show up for class, not even realizing we were enrolled.
“The challenge was that they gave each student an account with a fixed amount of money, so they ran out of time. When connecting, you must enter how much time you would like to spend on the computer. They give you about an hour. That's all you'd get. But someone figured out that if you add "time equals" and then add a letter like "t equals k," there's no charge," she said, laughing at the memory. "It was a bug in the software. You could set t equal to k and just sit there forever.
Just look at the barrage of opportunities that came to Bill Joy. Because he attended a forward-thinking school like the University of Michigan, he was able to practice with a timesharing system instead of punch cards; Since Michigan's system had a bug, he could program whatever he wanted; Since the university was willing to spend money to keep the computer center open 24 hours a day, he was able to stay up all night; and because he managed to put in so many hours, he rose to the occasion when the opportunity to rewrite UNIX presented itself. Bill Joy was brilliant. He wanted to learn. That was a big part of it. But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the chance to learn how to be an expert.
"In Michigan, I probably scheduled eight or 10 hours a day," he continued. "When I was at Berkeley, I did it day and night. I had a terminal at home. I stayed up until two or three in the morning, watching movies and old shows. Sometimes I've fallen asleep on the keyboard," he feigned. hitting your head on the keyboard - "and you know how the key keeps repeating and it starts beeping, beeping, beeping? After this has happened three times, you need to go to bed. Even when I got to Berkeley, it was still relatively incompetent. I was competent my second year there. At that time I wrote programs that are still used today, thirty years later. He took a moment to do the math in his head, which doesn't take long for someone like Bill Joy. Michigan in 1971. Serious sophomore programming. Add the summers, then the days and nights of his freshman year at Berkeley. "So maybe… ten thousand hours?" he finally said. "Okay."
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4. Is the ten thousand hour rule a general rule of thumb for success? If we dig below the surface of every great artist, will we always find the equivalent of the Michigan Computer Center or hockey team, some kind of special practice opportunity?
Let's test the idea with two examples, and for the sake of simplicity, let's make them as familiar as possible: The Beatles, one of the most famous rock bands of all time; and Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world.
The Beatles - John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr - arrived in the United States in February 1964, launching the so-called British invasion of the American music scene and releasing a string of hits that changed the face of popular music. Music.
The first interesting thing about the Beatles for our purposes is how long they had been together when they came to the United States. Lennon and McCartney began performing together in 1957, seven years before they came to the United States. (By the way, the time between his beginnings and arguably his greatest artistic achievements, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles [White Album], is ten years.) And if you take a closer look at those long years of preparation you will find an experience that feels all too familiar against the backdrop of hockey players, Bill Joy, and world-class fiddlers. In 1960, while they were still a high school rock band, they were invited to perform in Hamburg, Germany.
“Back then there were no rock and roll clubs in Hamburg. There were strip clubs," says Philip Norman, author of the Beatles biography Shout! "There was a certain club owner named Bruno who was originally a carnival performer. He came up with the idea of getting rock bands to play at different clubs. They had this formula. It was a non-stop extravaganza, hour after hour, with lots of people coming and going. And the bands played all the time to catch the passing traffic. In an American red-light district, that would be called continuous striptease.
"Many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from Liverpool," Norman continued. "It was an accident. Bruno went to London to look for bands. But he met a businessman from Liverpool in Soho who happened to be in London. And he arranged for some bands to be sent. That's how the connection was made. And Finally, The The Beatles formed connections not only with Bruno but also with other club owners, they kept getting back together because they drank too much and had too much sex.
And what was special about Hamburg? It's not that it pays well. This did not happen. Or that the acoustics were fantastic. They were not. Or that the audience was well informed and appreciative. They were the complete opposite. It was the time when the band had to play.
Here's John Lennon in an interview after The Beatles broke up, talking about the band's performances at a Hamburg strip club called Indra:
We improve and gain more confidence. We couldn't help it with the whole experience of playing all night. He helped that they were foreigners. We had to push ourselves even harder, put our hearts into it, to better ourselves.
In Liverpool we only did one-hour sessions and we always played our best numbers, the same in all of them. In Hamburg we had to play eight hours, so we really had to find a new way to play.
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Eight o'clock? Here's Pete Best, then drummer for The Beatles: "As soon as word got out, it was us
While they were putting on a show, the club started rocking them. We played seven nights a week. At first we played almost continuously until 12:30 at night when it closed, but as we got better, the crowd stayed until 2:00 in the morning.
Seven days a week? Between 1960 and the end of 1962, the Beatles toured Hamburg five times.
On their first tour they played 106 nights, five or more hours a night. On the second trip they played 92 times. On the third trip they played 48 times, totaling 172 hours on stage. The last two shows in Hamburg, in November and December 1962, included another 90 hours of performance. In total, they performed 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had actually performed some 1,200 live performances. Do you know how extraordinary that is? Most bands today don't play 1,200 gigs in their entire career. The Hamburger Crucible is one of the things that defines the Beatles.
"They weren't good on stage when they went there and they were very good when they came back," Norman continued. “They didn't just learn perseverance. They had to learn a lot of numbers, covers of everything you can think of, not just rock 'n' roll, but a little bit of jazz as well. Before that they were not disciplined on stage. But when they came back, they sounded like nobody. It was his creation.
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5. Now we come to the story of Bill Gates. His story is almost as well known as that of the Beatles. A brilliant young math genius discovers computer programming. He leaves Harvard. He starts a small computer company called Microsoft with his friends. Through sheer brilliance, ambition and courage, he becomes the giant of the software world. This is the general scheme. Let's dig a little deeper.
Gates's father was a wealthy Seattle lawyer and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy banker. As a child, Bill was precocious and bored with his studies. So his parents pulled him out of public school and sent him to Lakeside, a private school that served Seattle's elite families, at the start of seventh grade. In the middle of Gates' sophomore year at Lakeside, the school started a computer club.
"The moms' club at school had a sale every year, and there was always a question about where the money would go," Gates recalls. “Some went to the summer program, where the kids from the inner city came to campus. Part of it would go to the teachers. That year they put $3,000 into a computer terminal in this fun little room that we later took over. It was something incredible."
It was, of course, an "incredible thing" because that was in 1968. Most colleges didn't have computer clubs in the 1960s. Even more remarkable were the kinds of computers Lakeside bought, as virtually everyone had at the 1960s. But Lakeside installed what they called the ASR-33Teletype, a time-sharing terminal that connected directly to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. Gates continued: "Someone was very progressive." programming as a freshman in college in 1971. Bill Gates began real-time programming when he was in the eighth grade in 1968.
From then on, Gates lived in the computer room. He and several others began to teach themselves how to use this strange new device. Buying time on the mainframe to which the ASR was connected was, of course, expensive, even for a wealthy institution like Lakeside, and it wasn't long before the $3,000 invested by the Mothers' Club ran out. Parents raised more money. the students spent. So a group of programmers from the University of Washington formed a company called Computer Center Corporation (or C-Cubed) that rented out computer time to local businesses. Son at Lakeside, a year before Gates. Would the Lakeside Computer Club, Rona thought, try out the company's software programs for free programming time over the weekend? Absolutely! After school, Gates would take the bus to the C-Cubed offices and code late into the night.
C-Cubed eventually went bust, so Gates and his friends started hanging around the University of Washington data center. It wasn't long before they partnered with a company called ISI (InformationSciences Inc.), which agreed to give them free computer time in exchange for working on software that could automate the company's payroll process. Over a seven-month period in 1971, Gates and his associates ran 1,575 hours of computer time on the ISI mainframe, an average of eight hours a day, seven days a week.
"It was my obsession," Gates says of his early years in high school. “I skipped athletics. I went up there at night. We schedule over the weekend. It would be a rare week where we wouldn't make it.
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twenty or thirty hours later. There was a time when Paul Allen and I got into trouble because we stole some passwords and crashed the system. They threw us out. I couldn't use the computer all summer. That was when I was fifteen and sixteen years old. Then I found out that Paul had found a computer available at the University of Washington. They had these machines in the medical center and in the physics department. They worked twenty-four hours a day, but with this huge amount of free time, between three and six in the morning, they never planned anything. Gates laughed. “I went out at night after going to bed. I could walk to the University of Washington from my house. Or I would take the bus. That's why I'm always so generous to the University of Washington for allowing me to steal so much computer time." (Years later, Gates's mother said, "We always wondered why he found it so hard to wake up in the morning.")
One of the founders of ISI, Bud Pembroke, received a call from the technology company TRW, which had just signed a contract to install a computer system at the massive Bonneville power plant in southern Washington state. TRW urgently needed programmers familiar with specific power plant software. In those early days of the computer revolution, it was hard to find programmers with that kind of specialized expertise. But Pembroke knew exactly who to call: those Lakeside high school students who spent thousands of hours computing on the ISI mainframe. Gates was now a senior and had somehow managed to convince his teachers to let him escape to Bonneville under the guise of an independent study project. There he spent the spring writing code, supervised by a man named John Norton, who, according to Gates, taught him as much programming as almost everyone else he knew.
Those five years, from eighth grade to the end of high school, were Bill Gates' Hamburg and certainly presented him with an even more extraordinary range of opportunities than Bill Joy's.
The number one probability was that Gates would be sent to Lakeside. How many high schools in the world had access to a time-share terminal in 1968? Opportunity number two was for the Lakeside moms to have enough money to pay the school's computer fees. Number three was that when the money ran out, one of the parents was working at C-Cubed and he needed someone to review his code on the weekends and he also didn't care that the weekends turned into nights. Number four was that Gates had just found out about ISI and ISI was calling someone to work on his payroll software. Number five was that Gates lived within walking distance of the University of Washington. Number six was that the university had free computer time between three and six in the morning. Number seven was TRW named Bud Pembroke. Number eight was that the best programmers Pembroke knew for this particular problem were two high school students. And number nine was that Lakeside was willing to let those kids spend the spring semester miles away writing code.
And what do almost all of these options have in common? They gave Bill Gates more time to practice. When Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try out his own software company, he had been programming for almost seven years straight. He had already done ten thousand hours. How many teenagers in the world have had the kind of experience that Gates had? "If there were fifty in the world, I would be surprised," he says. “There was C-Cubed and the payroll we did, then TRW, all of those things came together. I had more exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone at the time, all due to an incredibly lucky series of events."
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6. When we combine the stories of the hockey players, the Beatles, Bill Joy, and Bill Gates, I think we get a more complete picture of the road to success. Joy, Gates and the Beatles are undeniably talented. Lennon and McCartney had a musical talent that comes along only once in a generation, and Bill Joy, let's not forget, was so quick on his mind that he was able to come up with an intricate algorithm on the fly that astonished the teachers. of the. . That's obvious.
But what really sets his stories apart is not his extraordinary talent, but his extraordinary possibilities. The Beatles were invited to Hamburg for various reasons. Without Hamburg, the Beatles might have taken a different path. "I was very lucky," Bill Gates said at the beginning of our interview. That doesn't mean you're not brilliant or an exceptional achiever. It just means that he understands how incredibly lucky he was to be with Lakeside in 1968.
Every outlier we've seen so far has been the beneficiary of some unusual opportunity. Lucky breaks don't seem to be an exception for software billionaires, rock bands, and celebrity athletes. They seem to be the norm.
Let me give you one last example of the hidden opportunities that outliers take advantage of. Suppose we do a different version of the calendar analysis we did with the ice hockey players in the previous chapter, only this time we look at birth years, not birth months. To get started, take a look at the following list of the 75 richest people in human history. Each person's net worth is calculated in current US dollars. As you can see, it includes queens, kings, and pharaohs from centuries past, as well as contemporary billionaires like Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim.
No. Name Assets in billions (USD) Company of origin or source of wealth1 John D. Rockefeller 318.3 United States Standard Oil2 Andrew Carnegie 298.3 Scotland Carnegie Steel Company3 Nicholas II of Russia 253.5 Russia House of Romanov4 William Henry Vanderbilt 231, 6 United States Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad5 Osman Ali Khan, Asaf Jah VII 210.8 Monarchy of Hyderabad6 Andrew W. Mellon 188.8 United States Gulf Oil7 Henry Ford 188.1 Ford Motor Company of the United States8 Marcus Licinius Crassus 169.8 Roman Republic Roman Senate9 Basil II 169.4 Monarchy of the Byzantine Empire10 Cornelius Vanderbilt 167.4 United States New York and Harlem Railroad11 Alanus Rufus 166.9 England Investments12 Amenhotep III 155.2 Ancient Egypt Pharaoh13 William de Warenne, 1st Earl of Surrey 153.6 England Earl of Surrey14 William II of England 151.7 England Monarchy15 Elizabeth I 142.9 England House of Tudor16 John D. Rockefeller jr. United States Standard Oil17 Sam Walton 128.0 USA Wal-Mart18 John Jac ob Astor 115.0 Germany American Fur Company19 Odo of Bay eux 110.2 England Monarchy20 Stephen Girard 99.5 France First Bank of the United States21 Cleopatra 95 .8 Ancient Egypt Ptolemaic Heritage22 Stephen Van Rensselaer III 88.8 United States Rensselaerswyck Heritage23 Richard B. Mellon 86.3 United States Gulf Oil24 Alexander Turney Stewart 84.7 Ireland Long Island Rail Road25 William Backhouse Astor Jr. Heritage 31 Carlos Slim Helú 72.4 Mexico Telmex 32 TV Soong 67.8 China Central Bank of China 33 Jay Gould 67.1 Union Pacific of the United States 34 Marshall Field 66.3 Marshall Field and Company of the United States 35 George F. Baker 63.6 New Jersey United States Central Railroad 36 Hetty Green 58.8 United States National Coast Bank37 Bill Gates 58.0 United States Microsoft38 Lawrence Joseph Ellison 58.0 United States Oracle Corporation39 Richard Arkwright 56.2 England to Derwent Valley Mills
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40 Mukesh Ambani 55.8 India Reliance Industries41 Warren Buffett 52.4 EE. UU. Berkshire Hathaway42 Lakshmi Mittal 51.0 India Mittal Steel Company43 J. Paul Getty 50.1 EE. UU. Getty Oil Company44 James G. Fair 47.2 EE. UU. Consolidated Virginia Mining Company45 William Weightman 46.1 EE. UU. Merck & Company46 Russell Sage 45.1 United States Western Union47 John Blair 45.1 United States Union Pacific48 Anil Ambani 45.0 India Reliance Communications49 Leland Stanford 44.9 United States Central Pacific Railroad50 Howard Hughes Jr. 43.4 United States Hughes Tool Company, Hughes Aircraft Company, Summa Corporation, TWA51 Cyrus Curtis 43.2 United States Curtis Publishing Company52 John Insley Blair 42.4 United States Delaware, Lackawanna y Western Railroad53 Edward Henry Harriman 40.9 United States Union Pacific Railroad54 Henry H. Rogers 40 .9 United States Standard Oil Empresa55 Paul Allen 40.0 Estados Unidos Microsoft, Vulcan Inc.56 John Kluge 40.0 Alemania Metropol now Broadcasting Company57 J. P. Morgan 39.8 Estados Unidos General Electric, US Steel58 Oliver H. Pay ne 38, 8 Estados Unidos Standard Oil Company59 Yoshiaki Tsutsumi 38.1 Japanese Seibu Corporation60 Henry Clay Frick 37.7 Estados Unidos Carnegie Steel Company61 John Jacob Astor IV 37.0 Heritage of the United States62 George Pullman 35.6 United States Pullman Company63 Collis Potter Huntington 34.6 United States Central Pacific Railroad64 Peter Arrell Brown Widener 33.4 United States American Tobacco Company65 Philip Danforth Armor 33.4 United States Armor Refrigeration Line66 William S. O'Brien 33.3 Estados Unidos Consolidated Virginia Mining Company67 Ingvar Kamprad 33.0 Sweden IKEA68 K. P. Singh 32.9 India DLF Universal Limited 69 James C. Flood 32.5 Estados Unidos Consolidated Virginia Mining Company 70 Li Ka -shing 32 .0 China Hutchison Whampoa Limited 71 Anthony N. Brady 31.7 United States Brookly n Rapid Transit 72 Elias Hasket Derby 31.4 United States Shipping 73 Mark Hopkins 30.9 United States Central Pacific Railroad74 Edward Clark 30.2 United States States Singer Sewing Machine75 Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal 29.5 Arabia Saudi Kingdom Holding Company
Do you know what is interesting about this list? Of the 75 names, a staggering 14 are Americans born nine years apart in the mid-19th century. Think about it for a moment. Beginning with Cleopatra and the pharaohs, historians have trawled through every year of human history since then, searching all corners of the globe for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and nearly 20% of the names they find come from a single generation in his story. lifetime. only country
Here is the list of these Americans and their birth years:
1. John D. Rockefeller, 1839 2. Andrew Carnegie, 183528. Frederick Weyerhaeuser, 183433. Jay Gould, 183634. Marshall Field, 183435. George F. Baker, 184036. Hetty Green, 183444. James G. Fair, 183154. Henry H. Rogers, 184057. J. P. Morgan, 183758. Oliver H. Payne, 183962. George Pullman, 183164. Peter Arrell Brown Widener, 183465. Philip Danforth Armor, 1832
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What's going on here? The answer becomes obvious when you think about it. In the 1860s and 1870s, the American economy underwent perhaps the greatest transformation in its history. It was when the railroads were built and Wall Street was born. At this point, industrial manufacturing began in earnest. It was when all the rules by which the traditional economy worked were broken and made new. What this list says is that it really does matter how old you were when that transformation happened.
If you were born in the late 1840s, you're missing out. You were too young to enjoy this moment. If you were born in the 1820s, you were very old: your mindset was shaped by the pre-Civil War paradigm. But there was a specific, narrow window of nine years that was perfect for seeing the potential that the future held. The fourteen men and women on the list above had vision and talent. But they, too, have been presented with a rare opportunity, just as ice hockey and soccer players born in January, February, and March are presented with a rare opportunity.*
Now let's do the same type of analysis for people like Bill Joy and Bill Gates. If you talk to Silicon Valley veterans, they'll tell you this is the most important date in history.
The start of the personal computer revolution was in January 1975, when PopularElectronics magazine ran a cover story about an extraordinary machine called the Altair 8800. The Altair cost $397 at home. The story's headline read: "INNOVATION PROJECT! The world's first minicomputer kit to compete with commercial models.
For the readers of Popular Electronics, then the bible of the young world of software and computing, this headline was a revelation. Until then, computers had been large, expensive mainframes of the type found in the white Michigan computer center. For years every hacker and electronics genius has dreamed of the day when a computer small and cheap enough for the average person to use and own would appear. That day had finally arrived.
If the era of personal computers had arrived in January 1975, who would be in a better position to take advantage of it? The same principles apply here as in the days of John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.
"If you were very old in 1975, you would already have a job at IBM after you finished university, and when people started working at IBM, it was very difficult for them to transition to the new world," says Nathan Myhrvold, who did. a senior manager at Microsoft for many years. "You had a multi-billion dollar company that made mainframes, and if you were a part of it you would think why mess with these pathetic little computers? That was the computer industry for these people and it had nothing to do with this new revolution. They were blinded by the fact that this was the only way to see computers. They made good money. It was just that there was no chance to become a millionaire and have an impact on the world.
If you were more than a few years out of college in 1975, you were in the old paradigm. They had just bought a house. Are you married. A baby is on the way. She is in no position to give up a good job and a pension for a $397 computer kit. So we exclude everyone born before, say, 1952.
At the same time, you don't want to be too young. You really want to go downstairs, in 1975, and you can't if you're still in high school. So let's also exclude anyone born after, say, 1958. In other words, the perfect age for 1975 is old enough to be part of
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next revolution, but not so old that you missed it. The ideal is to be twenty or twenty-one years old, so born in 1954 or 1955.
There is an easy way to test this theory. When was Bill Gates born?
Bill Gates: October 28, 1955
That's the perfect birth date! Gates is an ice hockey player born on January 1. Gates' best friend at Lakeside was Paul Allen. He also hung out with Gates in the computer room and spent those nights at ISI and C-Cubed. Allen founded Microsoft with Bill Gates. When was Paul Allen born?
Paul Allen: January 21, 1953
Microsoft's third-richest man has been at the helm of the company since 2000, one of the most respected executives in the software world, Steve Ballmer. Ballmer's date of birth?
Steve Ballmer: March 24, 1956
Let's not forget a man as famous as Gates: Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer. Unlike Gates, Jobs did not come from a wealthy family and he did not go to Michigan like Joy. But you don't need to delve into his upbringing to realize that he also had his Hamburg. He grew up in Mountain View, California, just south of San Francisco, the absolute epicenter of Silicon Valley. His neighborhood was full of engineers from Hewlett-Packard, then and now one of the largest electronics companies in the world. As a teenager, he toured the MountainView flea markets where electronics builders and repairmen sold parts. Jobs came of age and breathed the same air of business that he would later dominate.
This paragraph from Accidental Millionaire, one of many Jobs biographies, gives us an idea of how extraordinary his childhood experiences were. works
he attended evening lectures by Hewlett-Packard scientists. The lectures covered the latest advances in electronics, and Jobs, exercising a style that was a hallmark of his personality, attacked Hewlett-Packard engineers and extracted additional information from them. At one point, he even called Bill Hewlett, one of the company's founders, to request parts. Jobs not only got the job he asked for, but he also got a summer job. Jobs worked on an assembly line building computers and was so fascinated that he tried to design his own...
Wait. Bill Hewlett gave you parts? That's equivalent to Bill Gates having unlimited access to a timesharing terminal at the age of thirteen. It is as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor as a child was Giorgio Armani. And when was Jobs born?
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Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955
Another pioneer of the software revolution was Eric Schmidt. He led Novell, one of Silicon Valley's largest software companies, and became CEO of Google in 2001. Date of birth?
Eric Schmidt: April 27, 1955
I am not suggesting, of course, that all software moguls in Silicon Valley were born in 1955 and some were not, just as not all business titans in America were born in the mid-1830s, but there are very patterns here. clear. and what is striking is how little we seem to want to acknowledge them. We act as if success is just a matter of individual merit. But nothing in the stories we've seen so far suggests that things are that simple. Rather, they are stories about people who were given a special opportunity to work hard and took advantage of it, coming of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was being rewarded by the rest of society. His success was not solely his own merit. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.
Let's not forget Bill Joy, by the way. If he was a little older and he had to deal with the monotony of programming computer circuit boards, he would have studied science, he says. Bill Joy, the computer legend, would have been Bill Joy, the biologist. And if he had arrived a few years later, the small window that would have given him the opportunity to write support code for the Internet would have closed. Once again, Bill Joy the computer legend might as well have been Bill Joy the biologist. When was Bill Joy born?
Bill Joy: November 8, 1954
After leaving Berkeley, Joy became one of the four founders of Sun Microsystems, one of the oldest and largest software companies in Silicon Valley. And if he's still thinking that the coincidences of time, place, and birth don't matter so much, here are the birthdays of the other three founders of Sun Microsystems:
Scott McNealy: November 13, 1954 Vinod Khosla: January 28, 1955 Andy Bechtolsheim: September 30, 1955
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CHAPTER THREE
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The genius problem, part 1
"KNOWING A GUY'S IQ IS OF LITTLE HELP WHEN THEY ARE IN THE FORM OF CLEVERBOYS."
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1. In the fifth episode of the 2008 season, the American television trivia show 1 Against 100 had a man named Christopher Langan as a special guest.
The 1 vs. 100 television show is one of many that followed the phenomenal success of Slumdog Millionaire. It has a permanent gallery of a hundred ordinary people who serve as what is known as a "mob". Each week they compete with a special guest. There's a million dollars at stake. The guest must be smart enough to answer more questions correctly than his hundred opponents, and by that standard, few have seen themselves as qualified as Christopher Langan.
"Tonight the mob faces its fiercest competition yet," the comment began. “Meet Chris Langan, considered by many to be the smartest man in America.” The camera panned slowly to a stocky, muscular man in his fifties. "The average person has an IQ of a hundred," the voiceover continued. "Einstein 150. Chris has an IQ of 195. He currently wraps his big brain around a theory of the universe. But will his huge skull be enough to take down the mob for a million dollars? Find out now at One against a Hundred”.
Langan took the stage to thunderous applause. "Don't you think you have to have a great intellect to do well in One Against a Hundred,
You?" asked the show's host, Bob Saget. Saget gave Langan an odd look, like he was some kind of lab sample.
"Actually, I think it could be a hindrance," Langan replied. She had a deep, confident voice. “To have a high IQ, one tends to specialize, to think deeply. You avoid nonsense. But now that I see these people”—she looked at the crowd, the amusement in his eyes betraying how ridiculous he was making—“I think I'll do just fine.
In the last decade, Chris Langan has achieved a rare kind of fame. He became the public face of the genius of American life, an unusual celebrity. He's been invited on news shows, featured in magazines, and has been the subject of a documentary by filmmaker Errol Morris, all because of his brain that seems to defy description.
TV News 20/20 once hired a neuropsychologist to give Langan an IQ test, and Langan's score was literally off the charts, too high to accurately measure. On another occasion, Langant created an IQ test designed specifically for people who are too smart for ordinary IQ tests. He answered all but one question correctly * He was speaking at six months. At the age of three, he listened to the radio on Sundays while the announcer read the comics and continued alone until he learned to read on his own. At the age of five, he began asking his grandfather about the existence of God, and he remembers being disappointed with the answers.
At school, Langan could take a test in a foreign language class without having learned anything, and if the teacher took two or three minutes to arrive, he could flip through the book and pass the test with straight A's. In his early youth, while working as a laborer on a farm, he began to read extensively in the field of theoretical physics. At sixteen he began reading the famous and obscure masterpiece Principia Mathematica by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. He got a perfect score on the SAT from him, despite falling asleep at one point during the test.
"He did math for an hour," says his brother Mark of Langan's high school summer program. “Then he did French for an hour. So he learned Russian. Then I read philosophy. Have
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this religiously, every day." Another of his brothers, Jeff, says, "You know, when Christopher was fourteen or fifteen, he did
I would draw things just for fun and it would be like a photograph. By the time he turned fifteen, he could rival Jimi Hendrix on guitar lick for lick. blow. blow. blow. Christopher didn't go to school half the time. He just showed up for the test and there was nothing they could do about it. Tous, it was hilarious. He could put together a semester's worth of textbooks in two days, take care of what he had to do, and then go back to what he originally did.”*
In the 1v100 set, Langan looked balanced and confident. His voice was deep. His eyes were beady and beady, he didn't circle the topics, looking for the right sentence or going back to repeat a previous sentence. By the way, he didn't say a or ah, nor did he use any kind of conversational smoothing: his sentences came out one after another, polished and crisp, like soldiers on parade. Every question Saget asked him, he dismissed as nonsense. When his winnings reached $250,000, he seemed to make a mental calculation that the risks of losing it all outweighed the potential benefits of staying in the game. He stopped abruptly. "I'll get the money," he said. He shook Saget's hand firmly and that was it: he won, we like to think, geniuses always.
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2. Shortly after World War I, Lewis Terman, a young psychology professor at Stanford University, met a remarkable young man named Henry Cowell. Cowell grew up in poverty and chaos. Since he doesn't get along with other children, he hasn't been to school since he was seven years old. He worked as a janitor at a one-room school off the Stanford campus, and Cowell would sneak out of his work all day and play the school piano. And the music that he made was beautiful.
Terman's specialty was intelligence testing; The standard IQ test that millions of people around the world would take for the next fifty years, the Stanford-Binet, was his idea. So he decided to test Cowell's IQ. The boy must be smart, he thought, and he certainly was. He had an IQ of over 140, which is almost genius level. Terman was intrigued. How many other diamonds in the rough were there? he asked himself.
He started looking for others. He found a girl who knew the alphabet at nineteen months and another who read Dickens and Shakespeare at four. He met a young man who had been expelled from law school because his professors did not believe it was possible for a human being to recite long passages of legal opinion accurately from memory.
In 1921 Terman decided to make gifted research his life's work. Armed with a large grant from the Commonwealth Foundation, he assembled a team of field researchers and sent them to California elementary schools. Teachers were asked to nominate the brightest students from their classes. These children were subjected to an intelligence test. Students who finished in the top 10 received a second IQ test, and those who scored above 130 on that test received a third IQ test, and from that set of scores Terman selected the best and most bright. By the time Terman finished, he had reviewed the records of some 250,000 middle and high school students and identified 1,470 children whose average IQs were above 140 and even 200. This group of young geniuses became known as the "Termites." . and have been the subject of one of the most famous psychological studies in history.
For the rest of his life, Terman tended to his charges like a chicken. They have been tracked and tested, measured and analyzed. His educational achievements were noted, marriages tracked, illnesses tabulated, mental health charted, and all promotions and job changes duly recorded. Terman wrote letters of recommendation to his recruits for jobs and graduate applications. He gave a constant stream of advice and suggestions as he recounted his findings in thick red volumes entitled Genetic Studies of Genius.
"Nothing about a person is as important as their IQ, except maybe their morale," Termanonce said. And for those with very high IQs, she believed, "we must look for leaders who promote science, the arts, government, education, and general social welfare." As his subjects grew, Terman would post updates on his progress and record his extraordinary accomplishments. "It is almost impossible," Terman wrote giddily when his students were in high school, "to read a newspaper report of any contest or activity involving California boys and girls without the names of one or more of the winners being among the winners." ". .. members of our talented group.” He sampled writings on some of his more artistic subjects and had literary critics compare them to the early writings of famous authors. They couldn't tell any difference. All signs pointed to a group with the potential for "heroic stature," she said. Terman believed that his termites were destined to be America's future elite.
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Today, many of Terman's insights remain central to how we think about success. Schools have “gifted” programs. Elite universities often require students to take an intelligence test (such as the American Scholastic Aptitude Test) for admission. High-tech companies like Google or Microsoft carefully measure the cognitive abilities of potential employees based on the same belief: They believe that those at the top of the IQ scale have the most potential. (At Microsoft, job seekers answer a variety of questions to test their intelligence, including the classic, "Why are manhole covers round?" If you don't know the answer to that question, you're not smart enough to to work at Microsoft.* )
If I had magical powers and offered to increase your IQ by 30 points, you would say yes, right? You would assume this would help you get ahead in the world. And when we hear someone like Chris Langan, our knee-jerk reaction is the same as Terman's when he met Henry Cowell nearly a century ago. We feel admiration. Geniuses are the latest outliers. Surely there is nothing that can hold someone like that.
But is that true? So far we've seen in Outliers that exceptional performance has less to do with talent and more to do with talent.
Chance. In this chapter I will try to better understand why this is so by examining the extraordinary in its purest, most distilled form: genius. For years, we have looked to people like Terman to understand what high intelligence means. But as we will see, Terman made a mistake. He had been wrong about his termites, and if he had found young Chris Langan studying Principia Mathematica at the age of sixteen, he would have been wrong about him for the same reason. Terman didn't understand what a true outlier was, and that's a mistake we still make to this day.
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3. One of the most widely used intelligence tests is something called Raven's Progressive Matrices. It does not require knowledge of languages or specific knowledge acquired. It is a measure of the capacity for abstract thought. A typical Raven test consists of 48 items, each more difficult than the last, and IQ is calculated based on how many items were answered correctly.
Here is a typical question of the type that is asked at Raven's.
You got it? I guess most of you did. The correct answer is C. But try it now. It's the kind of really hard question that comes at the end of Raven.
The correct answer is A. I have to admit that I haven't been able to figure it out, and I don't think most of you either. However, Chris Langan almost certainly could do it. When we say that people like Langana are genuinely brilliant, we mean that they have the kind of mind that can solve puzzles like the one in the last question.
A great deal of research has been done over the years to determine how a person's performance on an IQ test like Raven's affects success in real life. people in
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at the lower end of the scale - with an IQ below 70 - are considered mentally retarded. A score of 100 is average; You probably need to be just above that mark to finish college. To be accepted into any reasonably competitive graduate program and to be successful, you'll likely need an IQ of at least 115. In general, the higher your score, the more educated you are, the more money you're likely to make and—if Believe it or not - the longer you will live.
But there is a catch. The connection between success and IQ only works in a limited way. Once someone reaches an IQ of around 120, the additional IQ points don't seem to have any measurable benefit in the real world.*
"There is ample evidence that someone with an IQ of 170 is more likely to think well than someone with an IQ of 70," wrote British psychologist Liam Hudson, "and this is true when the comparison is much closer, between IQs of, say, , , 100, and 130. But the relationship seems to break down when comparing two people, both with relatively high IQs... A mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 has an equal chance of winning a Nobel Prize than one with an IQ of 180.
What Hudson is saying is that in basketball, IQ is very similar to height. Does someone who is 1.60 have a real chance of playing professional basketball? Not really. You have to be at least 6 or 6 feet tall to play at this level, and all things being equal, it's probably better to be one two than six one, and better one three than one two. But after a certain point, height doesn't matter anymore. A player who is 1.80 meters tall is not automatically better than one who is 5 centimeters shorter. (Michael Jordan, the tallest player of all time, was 6'3 inches, after all.) A basketball player just needs to put in enough, and the same goes for intelligence. Intelligence has a limit.
The intro of Episode 1 vs. 100 stated that Einstein had an IQ of 150 and Langanha had an IQ of 195. Langan's IQ is 30% higher than Einstein's. But that doesn't mean Langan is 30% smarter than Einstein. That's ridiculous. All we can say is that they are both pretty smart when it comes to thinking about really difficult things like physics.
I realize that the notion that IQ has a limit is counterintuitive. We think that, for example, Nobel Prize winners in science should have the highest IQ scores imaginable; that they have to be the kind of people who got perfect scores on their college entrance exams, won every scholarship available, and did so well in high school that they were selected by the best universities in the country.
But take a look at the list below, where the last 25 Americans to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine earned their bachelor's degrees in 2007.
Antioch CollegeBrown UniversityUC BerkeleyUniversidad de WashingtonColumbia UniversityCase Institute of TechnologyMITCaltechHarvard UniversityHamilton College
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Columbia University, University of North Carolina, DePauw University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Minnesota, University of Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, Union College, Kentucky, University of Illinois, University of Texas, Holy Cross, Amherst College, Gettysburg College, Hunter University
No one would argue that this list represents the top college picks of America's best high school students. Yale, Columbia and MIT are on the list, as are DePauw, Holy Cross and Gettysburg College. It's a list of good schools.
Similarly, here are the faculties of the last 25 American chemistry Nobel laureates:
City College de Nova YorkCity College de Nova YorkStanford UniversityUniversidad de Dayton, OhioRollins College, FloridaMITGrinnell CollegeMITMcGill UniversityGeorgia Institute of TechnologyOhio Wesleyan UniversityRice UniversityHope CollegeBrigham Young UniversityUniversidade de TorontoUniversidade de NebraskaDartmouth CollegeHarvard UniversityBerea CollegeAugsburg CollegeUniversidade de Massachusetts
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Washington State University, University of Florida, University of California, Riverside, Harvard University
Apparently, to become a Nobel laureate, you have to be smart enough to get into a university that's at least as good as Notre Dame or the University of Illinois. That's all.*
That's a radical idea, isn't it? Suppose her teenage daughter learns that she has been accepted to two universities: Harvard University and Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Where should she go? I think Harvard because Harvard is a "better" school. Students do 10 to 15 percent better on their entrance exams.
But given what we're learning about intelligence, the idea that schools can be classified as runners in a race doesn't make sense. Georgetown students may not be as smart as Harvard students on an absolute scale. But everyone is clearly smart enough, and future Nobel laureates are coming from schools like Georgetown as well as schools like Harvard.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz recently suggested that elite schools should ditch their complex admissions process and simply run a lottery for everyone who crosses the threshold. "Divide people into two categories," says Schwartz. "Good enough and not good enough. The ones that are good enough are put in a hat. And if you're not good enough, you get rejected." Schwartz admits his idea has little chance of acceptance. But he's absolutely right. writes Hudson (and remember that he did his research in elite English boarding schools in the 1950s and 1960s): "Knowing a child's IQ is of little help when you're faced with a class full of bright kids."
Let me give you an example of the Threshold effect in action. The University of Michigan Law School, like many elite educational institutions in the United States, has an affirmative action policy when it comes to applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. About 10 percent of the students who enroll in Michigan each fall are members of racial minorities, and if the law school hasn't significantly relaxed its admission requirements for these students, admitting them with lower undergraduate grades and test scores standardized lower than the others, the percentage is estimated at less than 3 percent. Also, when we compare the grades that minority and non-minority students get in law school, we see that white students do better. This is not surprising: if one group scores higher in graduation and on tests than the other, they will almost certainly score higher in law school as well. That's one of the reasons affirmative action programs are so controversial. In fact, an attack on the University of Michigan grant program recently reached the US Supreme Court. It is concerning to many people that an elite educational institution is leaving students less qualified than their peers.
However, a few years ago, the University of Michigan decided to take a closer look at how law students fared after graduation. How much money did they earn? How far have you come in your career? How satisfied were you with your career? What social and social contributions have they made? What kind of honors have they won? They looked at everything that could be an indication of success in the real world. And what they found surprised them.
"We knew that our minority students, many of them, were doing well," says Richard Lempert, one of the authors of the Michigan study. "I think our expectation was that we would find half or two
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Cup third full that didn't do as well as white students, but many still made it. But we were completely surprised. We thought they were doing very well. We did not find serious deviations anywhere.
What Lempert is saying is that, the only measure a law school should really care about, how well its graduates perform in the real world, minority students are no less qualified. They are just as successful as white students. That is because? Because while the academic credentials of Michigan's minority students aren't as good as those of white students, the quality of law students is high enough to be above the bar. You are smart enough. Knowing a law student's test scores is of little use when faced with a classroom of smart law students.
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4. Let's take the idea of the limit one step further. If intelligence is only important up to a certain point, then other things, things that are not related to intelligence, must become more important. It's like basketball all over again: once someone is big enough, we start worrying about speed, courtesy, agility, handling and feel on the ball.
So what could some of these other things be? Let's say instead of measuring your IQ, I gave you a completely different test.
Write down as many different uses as you can think of for the following objects:
1. a brick2. a blanket
This is an example of what's called a "divergence proof" (as opposed to a proof like Raven's, which asks you to sort a list of possibilities and find the correct answer). It requires using your imagination and turning your mind in as many different directions as possible. In a divergence test, there is obviously no single correct answer. What the examiner is looking for is the number and uniqueness of his responses. And what the test measures is not analytical intelligence, but something fundamentally different, something much closer to creativity. The divergence test is just as challenging as the convergence test, and if you don't think so, I suggest you pause and try the basic test now.
For example, here are the answers to the Uses of Objects quiz collected by Liam Hudson from a pupil named Poole at one of the best UK secondary schools:
(Brick). For use in Smash and Grab attacks. To help keep a house together. For use in Russian Roulette if you want to stay in shape at the same time (ten step checkers, spin and throw - no dodges allowed). To attach the quilt to a bed, tie a brick to each corner. Like a cookie made from empty Coca-Cola bottles.
(The ceiling). To use in bed. As a cover for illicit sex in the woods. With tent. What to do with smoke signals. As a sail for a ship, cart or sled. As a replacement for a towel. As a target practice target for myopic people. Like something to catch people jumping from burning skyscrapers.
It is not difficult to read Poole's responses and understand how his mind works. He is funny. He is a bit subversive and impulsive. He has a talent for drama. Your mind jumps from violent images to sex, to people jumping from burning skyscrapers to very practical things like getting a duvet to sleep on. We get the impression that if we give him ten more minutes, he'll think of twenty more uses.*
Now, for comparison purposes, consider the responses of another student in the Hudson sample. Her name is Florence. Hudson tells us that Florence is a child prodigy, with one of the highest IQs in her school.
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(Brick). He builds things, he plays.
(The ceiling). Keep warm, put out the fire, tie to the trees and sleep (like a hammock), makeshift stretcher.
Where is the imagination of Florence? She identified the most common and functional uses for brick and roofing and just stopped. Florence's IQ is higher than Poole's. But that means little since both students are over the limit. What's interesting is that Poole's mind can go from violent images to sex and people jumping off buildings without missing a beat, and Florence's mind can't. Now, which of these two students do you think is better suited to do the kind of brilliant, creative work that wins Nobel prizes?
That's the second reason the Nobel prizes come from both Holy Cross and Harvard, because Harvard doesn't select its students based on how well they do on the brick-using test, and maybe the brick test. use of a brick: cut a brick. it is a better indicator of eligibility for the Nobel Prize. This is also the second reason why Michigan Law School was unable to find any difference between its Affirmative Action graduates and the rest of its graduates. There's much more to being a successful lawyer than just IQ: it's about having the kind and generous spirit that Poole had. And just because Michigan's minority students do worse on convergence tests doesn't mean they don't have this other crucial trait in abundance.
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5. That was Terman's fault. He fell in love with the fact that his termites were at the absolute pinnacle of the intellectual scale, the ninety-ninth percentile of the ninety-ninth percentile, not realizing how little that seemingly extraordinary fact meant.
By the time the termites reached adulthood, Terman's mistake was clear. Some of his brilliant children grew up to publish books, scientific articles, and succeed in business. Several ran for public office, including two Supreme Court justices, a district court judge, two members of the California legislature, and a prominent state official. But few of his geniuses became national figures. They usually made a lot of money, but not that much. Most had careers that could only be described as ordinary, and a surprising number ended in careers that even Terman considered failures. There were also no Nobel laureates among his handpicked group of geniuses. His field researchers actually tested two elementary school students who became Nobel Prize winners, William Shockley and Luis Alvarez, and rejected them both. His IQ was not high enough.
In a scathing critique, the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin once noted that if Terman had simply assembled a random group of children with the same family background as termites and dispensed with IQs entirely, he would have ended up with a group that almost did. achievement. the same, the same amount of impressive things, as his meticulously selected group of geniuses from him. "Without imagination and standards of genius," Sorokin concluded, "the 'gifted group' as a whole is 'gifted.' Genius" had all but disappeared. "We have seen," Terman concluded with more than a hint of disappointment, "that intellect and performance correlate far from perfect."
So what I said at the beginning of this chapter about Chris Langan's exceptional intelligence is of little use if we are to understand his chances of becoming a global success. Yes, he is a one in a million mind man with the ability to finish PrincipiaMathematica at the age of sixteen. And yes, his lines march one after the other, polished and crisp like soldiers on parade. And? If we want to understand the probability of it becoming a true outlier, we need to know a lot more about it.
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CHAPTER FOUR
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The genius problem, part 2
"After lengthy negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be released on probation."
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1. Chris Langan's mother was from San Francisco and separated from her family. She had four children, each with a different father. Chris was the oldest. His father disappeared before Chris was born; They say he died in Mexico. His mother's second husband was murdered. The third of him committed suicide. His fourth was a failed journalist named Jack Langan.
"To this day, I've never met anyone who was as poor as a child as our family was," says Chris Langan. "We didn't have a matching pair of socks. Our shoes had holes. Our pants had holes. We only had one set of clothes. I remember my brothers and I would go to the bathroom and use the tub to wash our only clothes and we'd be naked because we didn't we had nothing to wear.
Jack Langan would continue to drink and disappear. He locked the kitchen cabinets so the children couldn't get the food. He used a whip to keep the boys at bay. He would get jobs and then lose them and move to the next town with the family. One summer, the family lived in a tent on an Indian reservation, surviving on government surplus peanut butter and cornmeal. For a time they lived in Virginia City, Nevada. "There was only one cop in town, and when the Hell's Angels arrived, he was huddled in the back of his office," recalls Mark Langan. “There was a pub that I will always remember. It was called the Bucket of Blood Saloon.
When the children were in elementary school, the family moved to Bozeman, Montana. One of Chris's brothers spent time with a foster family. Another was sent to a reform school.
"I don't think the school ever understood how talented Christopher was," says his brother Jeff. “He didn't fake it. That was Bozeman. It wasn't like today. When we were children it was a small town in the country. They didn't treat us well there. They just decided that my family is a bunch of bums. To defend himself and his brothers from him, Chris started lifting weights. One day when Chris was fourteen, Jack Langan was rough on the boys like he was sometimes and Chris knocked him unconscious. Jack left, never to return. After high school, Chris received two full scholarships, one to Reed College in Oregon and one to the University of Chicago. He chose Reed.
"It was a big mistake," Chris recalls. "I had a real culture shock. I was a short-haired kid who worked as a ranch hand in Montana during the summers, and there I was with a bunch of long-haired city kids, most of them from New York. And these kids had a very different style than I was used to. I couldn't say anything in class. You were very curious. Constantly asking questions. They forced me into a bedroom. There were four of us and the other three kids had completely different lifestyles. They smoked weed. They brought their friends into the room. I had never smoked weed. So I basically started hiding in the library.
He continued, "So I lost that scholarship... My mom had to fill out a parental statement for this scholarship renewal. She forgot. She was confused about the requirements or something. At some point I found out that my bag didn't it had been renewed so i went to the office to ask why and they said well no one sent us the financial statement we allotted all the scholarship and it ran out so i'm afraid you don't have any more scholarship here that was the style of the place They just didn't care. They didn't care about their students. There was no advice, guidance, nothing."
Chris dumped Reed before finals, leaving him with a bunch of F's on his report card. In it
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first half won aces. He returned to Bozeman and worked as a construction and wilderness firefighter for a year and a half. He then enrolled at Montana State University.
“I took math and philosophy classes,” he recalls. "And then in the winter, I lived thirteen miles out of town on Beach Hill Road, and the transmission fell out of my car. My brothers used it when I was away for the summer. They worked on the railroad and rode the tracks. I had no money to fix it. So I took turns going to my supervisor and dean and telling them I have a problem. My car transmission dropped and they put me in class at 7:33. If I could just transfer to the portions of the afternoon of these classes, I'd be grateful for this car trouble. I had a neighbor who was a farmer who picked me up at eleven. My adviser was a cowboy-faced guy with a pointy mustache and a tweed jacket. He said, " Well son, after looking at your Reed College transcripts, I see that you have yet to learn that everyone has to make sacrifices to get an education. Rejected request.' So I went to the dean. Equal treatment.”
His voice turned tense. He was describing things that had happened over thirty years ago, but the memory of him still infuriated him. "It was at that point that I realized I was struggling to earn money to go back to school and it's the dead of winter in Montana. I'm willing to drive into town every day, do whatever it takes just to get to and from school and they're not willing to do anything for me. Then banana. And at that moment I decided that I could do without the higher education system. Even if I couldn't quit, I hated it so much I wouldn't do it again. So I quit school college, simple as that.
Chris Langan's experiences at Reed and Montana State marked a turning point in his life. When he was a child, he dreamed of becoming an academic. He should have gotten his PhD; Universities are institutions designed in large part for people with their deep intellectual interest and curiosity. "When he entered the college environment, I thought he would thrive, and he did," his brother Mark says of him. "I thought he would find a niche. It made absolutely no sense to me when he left.
Untitled Langan wrestled. He worked in construction. One frigid winter, he worked on a clam boat on Long Island. He took factory jobs and minor government jobs, eventually becoming a bouncer at a Long Island bar, which was his primary occupation for much of his adult life. Throughout all of this, he continued to delve into philosophy, mathematics, and physics while working on a massive paper that he dubbed "CTMU," the "Theoretical Cognitive Model of the Universe." But with no academic credentials, he is desperate to be published in an academic journal.
"I'm a guy with a year and a half of college," he says with a shrug. "And eventually that'll get the editor's attention, because they'll take the article and send it to the reviewers, and those reviewers will try to find me, but they won't find me. And they'll say, This guy's a year and a half in college. How can he know about that?" what is he talking about?
It is a moving story. At one point I asked Langan, hypothetically, if he would accept a position at Harvard University if offered. "Well, that's a tough question," he replied. “Of course, as a tenured professor at Harvard, I would do that. My ideas would carry weight, and I could use my position, my Harvard affiliation, to push them forward. An institution like this is a great source of intellectual energy and if it were in a place like this it could absorb the vibrations of the air”. He suddenly realized how lonely his life had been. Here he was, a man with an insatiable appetite.
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education, forced to live in intellectual isolation for most of his adult life. "I noticed that kind of intellectual energy even during the year and a half of my career," he said almost wistfully. “Ideas are always in the air. It's such an exciting place.
"On the other hand," he continued, "Harvard is basically a glorified corporation based on profit incentives. That's what works. It's endowed with assets in the billions. The people who run it aren't necessarily in search of the truth and the knowledge. They want to be big shots and when you take a paycheck from these people it all comes down to what you want to do and what feels right to you compared to what the man says you can do to get another to get a check If you're there, they give you a thumbs up. They make sure you don't cross the line.
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2. What does the Chris Langan story tell us? His explanations, as touching as they are, are also a bit strange. His mother forgets to sign the grant form and, just like that, he doesn't receive a grant. She tries to switch from morning classes to afternoon classes, which the students do every day, and is prevented. And why were Langan's professors at Reed and Montana State so indifferent to his plight? Professors often delight in minds as brilliant as he is. Langan talks about dealing with Reed and the state of Montana as if they were some kind of huge, inflexible government bureaucracy. But universities, especially small liberal arts colleges like Reed, are rarely rigid bureaucracies. Making compromises to help someone stay in school is what teachers do all the time.
Even in his discussion of Harvard, Langan seems not to understand the culture and details of the institution he is talking about. When he gets a paycheck from these people, it comes down to what he wants to do and what he thinks is right versus what the man says he can do to get another paycheck. What? One of the main reasons university professors accept lower salaries than those in the private sector is that university life gives them the freedom to do what they want and what they see fit. Langan graduated from Harvard.
As Langan told me his life story, I couldn't help but think of the life of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist famous for leading the American efforts to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. By all accounts, Oppenheimer was a child with a mind similar to that of Chris Langan. His parents thought he was a genius. One of his teachers recalled that "every new idea was absolutely beautiful to him." He did laboratory experiments in third grade and studied physics and chemistry in fifth grade. When he was nine years old, he once told one of his cousins: "Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek."
Oppenheimer went to Harvard and then to Cambridge University for a Ph.D. in physics. There, Oppenheimer, who had battled depression his entire life, became discouraged. His aptitude was for theoretical physics, and his tutor, a man named Patrick Blackett (Nobel Prize winner in 1948), forced him to pay attention to the details of experimental physics, which he hated. He became increasingly emotionally unstable and then, in an act so bizarre that no one understood, Oppenheimer took some chemicals from the lab and tried to poison his owner.
Fortunately, Blackett discovered that something was wrong. The university has been informed. Oppenheimer was called to the canvas. And what happened next is as unbelievable as the crime itself. This is how the incident is described in Oppenheimer's biography of the American Prometheus, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin: “After lengthy negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be released on probation and that regular meetings with a prominent Harley Street psychiatrist in London.
On trial period? Here we have two very bright young students, each facing a dangerous problem.
his college career. Langan's mother missed the deadline for her financial support. Oppenheimer tried to poison his teacher. To proceed, they must present their cases before an authority. And what happens? Langan loses his scholarship and Oppenheimer is sent to see a psychiatrist. Oppenheimer and Langan may be geniuses, but otherwise they couldn't be more different.
The story of Oppenheimer's appointment as scientific director of the Manhattan Project twenty years later is perhaps an even better example of this difference. The general in charge of
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The Manhattan Project was Leslie Groves, and she scoured the country to find the right person to lead the atomic bombing effort. Oppenheimer was a long shot by rights. He was only thirty-eight years old and younger than many of the people he would have to lead. He was a theorist, and that was a job that required experimenters and engineers. His political affiliations were dubious: he had all kinds of friends who were communists. Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that he has never had leadership experience. "He was an impractical guy," one of Oppenheimer's friends later said. "He was walking around in scuffed shoes and a weird hat, and more importantly, he didn't know anything about equipment." As one Berkeley scientist more aptly put it: "He couldn't run a cafeteria."
Oh, and by the way, in grad school he tried to kill his tutor. That was the summary of the man who, without exaggeration, attempted one of the most important tasks of the 20th century. And what happened? The same thing that happened in Cambridge twenty years before: he made the rest of the world see things his way.
Here are Bird and Sherwin again: “Oppenheimer understood that Groves was guarding the entrance to the Manhattan project and he used all his charm and brilliance. It was an irresistible performance. Groves was injured. "'He's a genius,' Groves later told a reporter. 'A real genius.' "Groves was an engineer with an MIT degree, and Oppenheimer's big lesson was bringing out that side of Groves. Bird and Sherwin continue: "Oppenheimer was the first scientist Groves met on his [potential candidate] tour who understood that building a atomic bomb required finding practical solutions to a variety of interdisciplinary problems... [Groves] agreed when Oppenheimer floated the idea of a central laboratory for this purpose, where, as he later said, "we could begin to analyze chemical, metallurgical, engineering and munitions that have so far not received attention. found .'"
Oppenheimer lost his scholarship at Reed? He hadn't been able to persuade his teachers to move their classes to the afternoon? Of course, no. And not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. Because he had the kind of knowledge that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.
"They required everyone to do some preliminary calculations," Langan said of his brief stay in Montana. “And I came across a guy who taught in a very dry and trivial way. I didn't understand why he taught like this. So I asked him questions. In fact, I had to chase him into his office. I asked him, "Why do you teach like this? Why do you think this practice is relevant to calculus?" And this guy, this tall, lanky guy, always had sweat stains under his arms, and he turned around and looked at me. and he said, 'You know, there's something you should probably understand. Some people just don't have the brainpower to be mathematicians.'
There they are, the teacher and the prodigy, and what the prodigy clearly wants is to finally commit to a mind that loves math as much as he does. But it fails. In fact, and this is the most painful part of all, he manages to have an entire conversation with his math teacher without sharing the one fact a math teacher is likely to be attracted to. The professor never realizes that Chris Langan is good at calculus.
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3. The specific skill that allows you to get away with a murder charge or convince your teacher to transfer you from the morning session to the afternoon session is what psychologist Robert Sternberg calls "practical intelligence." . For Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect." It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why or being able to explain it. It is of a practical nature, that is, it is not knowledge in itself. It is knowledge that will help you read situations correctly and get what you want. And, most importantly, it is a different kind of intelligence than the kind of analytical ability that is measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are "orthogonal": the presence of one does not imply the presence of the other. You can have a lot of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence, or you can have a lot of practical intelligence and little analytical intelligence, or, as in the case of someone like Robert Oppenheimer, you can have a lot of both.
So where does something like practical intelligence come from? We know where analytical intelligence comes from. It is something that is, at least in part, in your genes. Chris Langan started talking at six months. He taught himself to read at the age of three. He was born smart. To some extent, IQ is a measure of innate ability.* But interpersonal skills are knowledge. It is a set of skills that must be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and it seems that the place where we acquire these kinds of attitudes and skills is in our families.
Perhaps the best explanation we have for this process comes from the sociologist Annette Lareau, who conducted a fascinating study of a group of third-graders a few years ago. She selected blacks, whites, and children from rich and poor homes, eventually zeroing in on twelve families. Lareau and her team visited each family at least twenty times, lasting for hours each time. She and her assistants would ask their subjects to treat them like "the family dog" and follow them to church, football games and doctor's appointments, a tape recorder in one hand and a notebook in the other. .
You might expect that if you spend that much time in twelve different homes, you would come up with twelve different notions of parenting: there would be the strict parent and the neglectful parent and the overcommitted parent and the soft parent and so on. . However, what Lareau found is something else entirely. There were only two parenting "philosophies" and they were almost neatly divided into classes. The richest parents raised their children in one way and the poorest parents raised their children in another way.
The wealthiest parents were very involved in their children's free time, taking them from one activity to another and asking them about their teachers, coaches, and teammates. One of the rich kids Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two football teams, a swim team, and a summer basketball team, played in an orchestra, and took piano lessons.
This kind of intense programming was almost completely absent from the lives of poor children. Playing for them wasn't twice a week soccer practice. She invented outdoor games with his brothers and other children from the neighborhood. What a child did was seen by his parents as separate from the adult world and not particularly important. A girl from a working-class family, Katie Brindle, sang in an after-school choir. But she signed up and went to choir rehearsal alone. Lareau writes:
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What's Mrs. Brindle doesn't make it routine for middle-class mothers to take their daughter's interest in singing as a cue to look for other avenues to help her develop that interest into a formal talent. Similarly, Mrs. Brindle isn't open about Katie's interest in the theater, nor does she regret not being able to nurture her daughter's talents. Instead, she presents Katie's abilities and interests as character traits: singing and acting are part of what makes Katie "Katie." She sees her daughter's concerts as "cute" and a way for Katie to "get attention".
Middle-class parents talked to their children, argued with them. They didn't just give orders. They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to challenge authority figures. When their children did poorly in school, the wealthiest parents defied their teachers. They intervened on behalf of their children. A child Lareau follows loses eligibility for a gifted program. His mother arranges for him to be retested in private, applies to the school, and arranges for her daughter to be accepted. By contrast, poor parents are intimidated by authority. They react passively and remain in the background. Lareau writes of a low-income father:
At a parent-teacher conference, for example, Ms. McAllister (who has a high school degree) said she seems reserved. The sociable and outgoing character that she shows at home is hidden in this environment. She is sitting hunched over in her chair, her jacket closed. She is very calm. When the teacher reports that Harold isn't turning in his homework, Mrs. McAllister says, clearly surprised, but all she says is, "He did that at home." name For them, it is up to the teachers to manage the education of the child. That's your job, not theirs.
Lareau calls the bourgeois style of education "mixed culture." It is an attempt to "actively promote and evaluate a child's talents, opinions, and abilities." Instead, poor parents tend to follow a "natural growth success" strategy. They see it as their responsibility to support their children while allowing them to grow and develop on their own.
Lareau emphasizes that one style is not morally superior to another. In his opinion, the poorer children were often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in the use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practice, mixed cultivation has enormous advantages. The middle-class child with a busy schedule is exposed to an ever-changing set of experiences. He learns to work in a team and to function in highly structured environments. She is taught to be comfortable with adults and to speak when she needs to. In Lareau's words, middle-class children learn a sense of "entitlement."
This word, of course, has negative connotations these days. But Lareau means it in the best sense of the word: “They acted as if they had the right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively direct interactions in institutional settings. They seemed comfortable in these environments; They were open to sharing information and asking for attention…. It was a common practice among middle-class children to tailor interactions to their preferences. You knew the rules. “Even in fourth grade, middle-class kids seemed to act on their own to gain an advantage.
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In contrast, poor and working-class children were characterized by "an emerging sense of distance, mistrust, and discomfort." They did not know how to get what they wanted or, to use Lareau's wonderful phrase, how to "adapt" whatever environment they found themselves in to their best purposes.
In a revealing scene, Lareau describes a doctor's visit for nine-year-old Alex Williams and his mother, Christina. The Williamses are wealthy professionals.
"Alex, you should think about any questions you want to ask the doctor," Christina says in the car on the way to the doctor's office. "You can ask him anything you want. Don't be shy. You can ask anything.
Alex thinks for a minute, then says, "I have some lumps under my arms from the deodorant." Christine: "Really? You mean your new deodorant? Alex: "Yeah" Christina: "Well, you should ask the doctor."
Alex's mother, Lareau writes, "teaches him that he has a right to speak," that he's perfectly fine to assert himself, even if he's in a room with an older person and an authority figure. They meet the doctor, a nice man in his forties. She tells Alex that he is in the ninety-fifth percentile for height. Then Alex interrupts:
ALEX: What am I on? DOCTOR: Does that mean that he is taller than ninety-five out of a hundred young people, if
They're, uh, ten years old. ALEX: I don't have ten. DOCTOR: Well, they mapped you at ten. You are nine years and ten months. she - she usually
Take the year closest to this chart.
See how easily Alex interrupts the doctor: "I'm not even ten years old." Right: His mother allows this casual rudeness because she wants him to learn how to deal with authority figures.
THE DOCTOR TURNS TO ALEX: Okay, now the main question. Do you have any questions you'd like to ask me before I do your physical?
ALEX: Um... just one. I have felt swelling in my arms, right around here (indicating the armpits).
DOCTOR: Underneath? Álex: Yes. DOCTOR: Correct. I'll have to look at them when the exam gets closer. and I'll leave
see what they are and what I can do. Do they hurt or itch? ALEX: No, they're just there. DOCTOR: Okay, I'll take a look at those lumps.
That kind of interaction just doesn't happen with lower-class kids, Lareau says. They would be calm and submissive, with their eyes averted. Alex takes charge of the moment. "By remembering to ask the question he prepared beforehand, he gains the doctor's full attention and
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it focuses on a topic of their choosing,” Lareau writes.
In doing so, he successfully shifts the balance of power from the adults to himself, and the transition goes smoothly. Alex is used to being treated with respect. He is considered special and a person deserving of adult attention and interest. These are the main characteristics of the mixed farming strategy. Alex doesn't show up for the exam. He behaves like his parents: he argues, negotiates and plays with the same ease.
It is important to understand where the special mastery of this moment comes from. It's not genetic. Alex Williams did not inherit the ability to interact with authority figures from his parents and grandparents as he inherited his eye color. Nor is it racist: it is not a practice specifically for blacks and whites. It turns out that Alex Williams is black and Katie Brindle is white. It is a cultural advantage. Alex has these skills because his mother and father carefully taught him these skills during his young life, in the manner of polite families, egging him on, egging him on, encouraging him and showing him the rules of the game, until this little essay. in the car on the way to the doctor's office.
When we talk about class benefits, Lareau argues, that's essentially what we mean. Alex Williams fares better than Katie Brindle because he's richer and goes to a better school, but also because, and perhaps most importantly, the law he's learned is a perfectly suited attitude to succeed in the world.
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4. That's the edge Oppenheimer had that Chris Langan lacked. Oppenheimer grew up in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan, the son of an artist and a successful clothing manufacturer. Your childhood was the embodiment of combined cultivation. Over the weekend, the Oppenheimers traveled to the field in a chauffeured Packard. In the summer they took him to Europe to visit his grandfather. He attended the School for Ethical Culture on Central Park West, perhaps the most progressive school in the country, where, according to his biographers, the students "were imbued with the notion that they were being groomed to reshape the world." When the math teacher noticed that he was bored, she sent him off to work independently.
As a child, Oppenheimer was a passionate collector of stones. At the age of twelve, he began corresponding with local geologists about rock formations he had seen in Central Park and so impressed them that they invited him to speak at the Mineralogical Club of New York. As Sherwin and Bird write, Oppenheimer's parents responded to his son's hobby with an almost classic example of mixed farming:
Dreading the idea of speaking in front of an adult audience, Robert asked his father to explain that a 12-year-old boy had been invited. Amused, Julius encouraged his son to accept the honor. On the scheduled night, Robert appeared at the club with his parents, who proudly introduced his son as J. Robert Oppenheimer. The astonished audience of geologists and amateur rock collectors erupted with laughter as he stepped onto the podium: a wooden box had to be found to stand on so that the audience could see more than the lock of his black hair and the curling ends above the pulpit. Though shy and awkward, Robert read his prepared remarks to loud applause.
Is it any wonder that Oppenheimer mastered the challenges of his life so brilliantly? If you're someone whose father grew up in the business world, then you've seen firsthand what it means to get out of a bind. If you are someone who was sent to the School for Ethical Culture, then you will not be intimidated by a line of Cambridge professors ready to judge you. If you studied physics at Harvard, you know how to talk to an Army general who studied engineering at MIT.
Chris Langan, on the other hand, had only the desolation of Bozeman and a household ruled by an angry, drunken stepfather. "[Jack] Langan did this to all of us," Mark said. “We all have a real grudge against authority.” That was the lesson Langan learned as a child: distrust authority and be independent. He never had a father teach him to speak up for himself or to argue and negotiate with authority figures on his way to the doctor. He didn't study well. learned constraint. It may seem like a small thing, but it was a crippling handicap in navigating the world beyond Bozeman.
"I couldn't get any financial help either," Mark continued. “We had zero, less than zero knowledge of the process. How to apply. The forms. checkbooks It was not our environment”.
"If Christopher had been born into a wealthy family, if he was the son of a well-connected doctor in a big market, I guarantee you he'd be one of those guys you read about graduating at seventeen," says his brother Jeff. "It's the culture you're in
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that determines it. The problem with Chris is that he was always too bored to really sit and listen to his teachers. If someone had recognized his intelligence and had come from a family where education is valued, he would have kept him from getting bored."
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5. When the termites reached adulthood, Terman examined the records of 730 males and divided them into three groups. One hundred fifty, the top 20 percent, belonged to Group A. They were the real success stories, the stars: the lawyers, doctors, engineers, and academics. Ninety percent of As have college degrees, including 98 with college degrees. The middle 60% were from Group B, the ones who were "quite" out of place. The last 150 were the Cs, the ones Terman thought would have done the least with their superior mental abilities. They were the postal workers, the busy bookkeepers, and the men lying unemployed on their sofas at home.
A third of Cs dropped out of university. A quarter had only a high school degree, and the 150 Cs, each of whom were considered geniuses at some point in their lives, collectively earned a total of eight college degrees.
What was the difference between As and Cs? Terman analyzed all possible explanations. He examined his physical and mental health, his "masculinity values" and his hobbies and professional interests. He compared the ages at which they started walking and talking and their exact IQ scores in middle and high school. In the end, he only counted one thing: family history.
The vast majority of the As belonged to the middle and upper classes. Their houses were full of books. Half of the parents in Group A had college degrees or more, at a time when college education was a rarity. The Cs, on the other hand, were on the other side of the tracks. Nearly a third of them had a parent who dropped out of school before eighth grade.
At one point, Terman had his field workers visit each of the A and C groups and assess their personality and behavior. What they found is everything one would expect when comparing children raised in an atmosphere of blended culture with children raised in an atmosphere of natural growth. They were considered much more alert, balanced, attractive, and well-dressed. In fact, the values in these four dimensions are so different that you think you see two different types of people. Of course you are not. They simply see the difference between those raised by their families to show their best face to the world and those who have denied that experience.
Terman's findings are deeply disturbing. Let's not forget how talented her Group C was. If she had met her when she was five or six years old, she would have been struck by her curiosity, quick-wittedness and brilliance. They were true fugitives. However, the plain truth of Terman's study is that, in the end, almost none of the bright children from the lower social and economic classes left their mark.
But what was missing from the Cs? It is not something expensive or impossible to find; not something encoded in your DNA or connected to your brain circuitry. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we had known they needed it: a community around them that would properly prepare them for the world. The Cs were wasted talent. But they didn't have to be.
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6. Today, Chris Langan lives on a horse farm in rural Missouri. He moved there a few years ago after his marriage. He is in his fifties, but looks many years younger. He is built like a linebacker, with a big chest and massive biceps. His hair is combed back from his forehead. He has a very gray mustache and aviator glasses. If you look into their eyes, you can see the intelligence burning behind them.
“A typical day consists of getting up and making coffee. I go in, sit in front of the computer and start working on what I did the night before, ”he told me not long ago. "I've found that if I go to bed with a question in my head, all I have to do is focus on the question before I go to sleep, and I almost always have the answer in the morning. Sometimes I know the answer because I dreamed of the answer. and I can remember it. Sometimes I feel the answer, I start writing, and the answer appears on the page."
I had just finished reading the work of linguist Noam Chomsky. The books were stacked in his office. He was constantly ordering books from the library. "I always feel that the closer you get to the original sources, the better off you are," he said.
Langan seemed pleased. He had farm animals to care for, books to read, and a wife he loved. It was a much better life than being security.
"I don't think there is anyone smarter than me," he continued. "I have never met anyone like me, nor have I seen any indication that there is anyone who actually has better comprehension skills. I have never seen it and I don't think I ever will. It could - my mind is open to the possibility. If someone challenges, "Oh, I think I'm smarter than you," then I might have it.
What he said sounded arrogant, but it really wasn't. It was the opposite: a defensive touch. He had been working for decades on a project of enormous sophistication, but almost nothing of what he had done had been published, much less read by physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians who could judge its value. Here he was, a man with a mind of one in a million, and he had yet to make an impact on the world. He did not speak at academic conferences. He did not lead a graduate seminar at a prestigious university. He lived on a seedy horse farm in northern Missouri, sitting on his back porch in jeans and a cut-off T-shirt. He knew what he looked like: he was the great paradox of Chris Langan's genius.
"I haven't tried as hard as I should in traditional publishers," he admitted. "Walking around, consulting publishers, trying to find an agent. I didn't do it and I have no interest in doing it.
It was an admission of defeat. Any experience he had outside of his own mind ended in frustration. He knew he had to better navigate the world, but he didn't know how. He couldn't even talk to his math teacher, for God's sake. These were things that others with less brains could easily master. But that's because those others got help along the way and Chris Langan never did. It was not an apology. It was a fact. He had to do it alone, and no one, not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, not even geniuses, can do it alone.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Joe Flom's three lessons
"MARY HAS A ROOM".
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1. Joe Flom is the last living 'designated' partner in the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom. He has a corner office at the top of the Condé Nast Tower in Manhattan. He is small and slightly hunched. His head is large, framed by long, protruding ears, and his narrow blue eyes are covered by large aviator glasses. He is now thin, but in his prime, Flom was extremely overweight. He staggers as he walks. He scribbles when he thinks. He grumbles when he speaks, and as he makes his way through the halls of Skadden, Arps, the conversation falls silent.
Flom grew up in the Depression in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her father, Isadore, was a union member in the garment industry who later sewed shoulder pads for women's dresses. Her mother worked what was called piecework and made sconces at home. They were desperately poor. His family moved almost every year while he was growing up because it was common at that time for landlords to give new tenants a month's rent free, and without him his family couldn't make ends meet.
In elementary school, Flom passed the entrance exams to the elite Townsend Harris Public School on Manhattan's Lexington Avenue, a school that in just forty years of existence has produced three Nobel Prize winners, six Pulitzer Prize winners, and one Supreme Court Justice, not to mention are George Gershwin and Jonas Salk, the inventors of the polio vaccine. He came in. His mother gave him ten cents for breakfast that morning: three donuts, orange juice, and coffee at Nedick's. After school, he pushed a wheelbarrow through the Garment District. He attended night school at City College in Upper Manhattan for two years (weekdays to make ends meet), enlisted in the military, served time, and enrolled in Harvard Law School.
"I've wanted to be a lawyer since I was six years old," says Flom. He did not have a college degree. Harvard took it anyway. "Why? I wrote them a letter explaining why I am the answer to sliced bread," Flom explains with characteristic brevity. At Harvard in the late 1940s, he never realized that freshman idiocy of taking careful notes in the classroom and making an outline, then a synopsis, and then again on onion skin, on another piece of paper." he remembers. Charles Haar, Flom's classmate. “It was a routine attempt to find out about the cases. I do not. He wouldn't have had any of it. But he had this trait that we've always kind of called "thinking like a lawyer."
Flom was nominated for Law Review, an honor reserved for the valedictorian of the class. . "He was a clumsy, clumsy, fat kid. I didn't feel well," recalls Flom. “I was one of two students in my class who didn't have a job at the end of the hiring season. Then one day one of my professors said that these guys were just starting to enter the market. I visited them and the whole time I met them they told me about the risks of choosing a company that has no clients. The more they talked, the more I liked them. So I said, what the hell, I'll take my chances. They had to get three hundred and six hundred a year, that was the starting salary. At first, it was just Marshall Skadden, Leslie Arps, who had recently been turned down for partners at a major Wall Street law firm, and John Slate, who had worked for Pan Am Airlines. Flom was his partner. They had a small office suite on the top floor of the Lehman Brothers building on Wall Street. "What law have we made?" says Flom,
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Laughter. "Whatever came through the door!" In 1954 Flom took over as managing partner of Skadden and the company began to grow by leaps and bounds.
boundaries. He soon had a hundred lawyers. Then two hundred. When he reached three hundred, one of Flom's partners, Morris Kramer, approached him and told him that he felt guilty about hiring young law graduates. Skadden is so big, Kramer said, that it's hard to imagine the company growing beyond that and being able to support these new hires. Flom told him, "Ahhh, let's make a thousand." Flom was never without ambition.
Today Skadden, Arps has nearly two thousand lawyers in 23 offices around the world and earns more than $1 billion a year, making it one of the largest and most powerful law firms in the world. In his office, Flom has pictures of himself with George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton. He lives in a spacious apartment in a luxurious building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Over a period of nearly thirty years, Joseph Flom was his attorney and Skadden, Arpshas was his attorney, whether he was a Fortune 500 company about to acquire or trying to acquire someone else, or simply a big shot in some kind of trouble. . snug, and if they weren't, you probably wish they were.
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2. I hope by now you are skeptical about this kind of story. Brilliant immigrant boy overcomes poverty and depression, he can't get a job in sweltering downtown law firms, he does it only out of sheer haste and skill. It's a rags-to-riches story, and everything we've learned so far from hockey players, software billionaires, and termites suggests that success doesn't come that way. Successful people don't do it alone. Where they come from is important. They are products of specific places and environments.
As we did with Bill Joy and Chris Langan, let's start again with Joseph Flom, this time putting into practice everything we've learned in the first four chapters of this book. Enough about JoeFlom's intelligence, personality or ambition, although he obviously has those three things in spades. There are no glowing quotes from clients of him that attest to his genius. No more colorful stories about the meteoric rise of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom.
Instead, I will tell a series of stories from the immigrant world of New York that Joe Flom grew up in, from a law student, father and son named Maurice and Mort Janklow and an extraordinary couple named Louis and Regina. Don't borrow - hoping to answer a critical question. What options did Joe Flom have? Knowing that outliers always have help along the way, can we examine the ecology of Joe Flom and identify the conditions that contributed to his formation?
We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something endearing in the idea of a lone hero fighting against overwhelming odds. But the true story of Joe Flom's life turns out to be much more fascinating than the mythological version because all the things in his life that seem to have drawbacks: that he was a poor son of textile workers; that he was a Jew at a time when Jews were severely discriminated against; that he grew up in depression-unexpectedly turned out to be an advantage. Joe Flom is an outsider. But he's not an outsider for the reasons he might think, and his rise story provides a template for understanding success in his profession. In fact, by the end of the chapter, we'll see that it's possible to take Joe Flom's lessons, apply them to the legal world of New York City, and predict the family history, ages, and backgrounds of the city's most powerful. lawyers, without knowing a single additional fact about her. But we are making progress.
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Lesson number one: The importance of being Jewish
3. One of Joe Flom's classmates at Harvard Law School was a man named Alexander Bickel. Like Flom, Bickel was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants living in the Bronx. Like Flom, Bickel attended New York public school and then City College. Like Flom, Bickel was a star in his law school. Before his career was cut short by cancer, Bickel became perhaps the greatest constitutional scholar of his generation. And like Flom and the rest of his law students, Bickel went to Manhattan during "hiring season" on Christmas 1947 to find a job.
His first stop was Mudge Rose on Wall Street, as traditional and stuffy as any business at the time. The Mudge Rose was founded in 1869. This is where Richard Nixon practiced in the years before he took office in 1968. "We're like the lady who only wants her name in the paper twice: at her birth and at her death." said the famous phrase of the main partners. Bickel was shown around the company and interviewed by partner after partner until he was taken to the library to meet the company's senior partner. You can picture the scene: a dark-paneled room, a neatly worn Persian rug, rows and rows of leather-bound legal volumes, oil paintings of Mr. Mudge and Mr. Rose on the wall.
"After the whole interview and everything was explained to me," Bickel said many years later, "they took me to [the senior partner], who took it upon himself to tell me this to a child of my ancestors." Imagine how Bickel must have paused before repeating this euphemism for his immigrant background: “I certainly have come a long way. But you should understand how limited the opportunities were for a company like yours to hire a young man of my experience. And while he congratulated me on my progress, I have to understand that he certainly couldn't offer me a job. But everyone enjoyed seeing me and everything.
From the transcript of Bickel's memoirs, it appears that his interviewer isn't quite sure what to make of this information. At the time of the interview, Bickel was at the height of his reputation. He had brought a case before the Supreme Court. He had written brilliant books. MudgeRose, who turned down Bickel because of his "background," was like the Chicago Bulls, who turned down Michael Jordan because they were uncomfortable with black kids from North Carolina. It did not make sense.
"But for the stars?" asked the interviewer, that is, wouldn't they have made an exception for you? she
they were all headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, on Wall Street and beyond, in dingy granite-fronted buildings. Partners in major corporations graduated from the same Ivy League schools, attended the same churches, and spent summers in the same Long Island beach towns. They wore conservative gray suits. Their partnerships were known as "white shoe" firms: they ostensibly referred to whites who were favored at the country club or at a cocktail party, and they were very picky about who they hired. As Erwin Smigel wrote in The Wall Street Lawyer, his study of the New York legal system at the time, they were looking for:
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Lawyers who are Nordic, have pleasant personalities and "clean" appearance, are graduates of the "right schools", have the "right" social background and experience in world affairs, and are endowed with tremendous stamina. A former law school dean talking about the qualities students need to get a job offers a slightly more realistic picture: a combination of these. Something called acceptance is the sum of its parts. If a man has any of these things, he can get a job. If he has two, he can choose the job; when he's three, he can go anywhere.
Bickel's hair was not light, his eyes were not blue. He spoke with an accent, and his family connections consisted primarily of being the son of Solomon and Yetta Bickel of Bucharest, Romania, who last toured in Brooklyn. Flom's credentials were no better. He says he was "uncomfortable" going downtown for interviews, and of course he was: he was short, lanky, and Jewish, and spoke with the nasal monotone of his Brooklyn hometown, and you can imagine how he was viewed. some gray-haired patrick in the library. If you didn't have the right background, religion, and social class and dropped out of law school at the time, you'd walk into a smaller, second-rate law firm, a step below the big names downtown, or just started your own business. and they got “anything that would walk through the door,” meaning any legal work that the big inner-city law firms didn't want for them. That seems terribly unfair, and it was. But, as often happens with breakaways, behind this setback was a golden opportunity.
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4. Old Wall Street law firms had a very specific idea of what they did. They were corporate lawyers. They represented the largest and most reputable companies in the country, and "represent" meant that they did the legal and tax work behind the issuance of stocks and bonds, making sure their clients did not run afoul of federal authorities. You have not litigated; That being said, very few of them had a department dedicated to defense and filing of claims. As Paul Cravath, one of the founders of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, the white shoe company, once said, the lawyer's job was to resolve disputes in the conference room, not the courtroom. "Among my colleagues at Harvard, the bright young people worked in securities or tax," recalls another partner in white shoes. “Those were the different fields. The litigation was for radio amateurs, not for serious people. Corporations just didn't sue each other back then."
What traditional companies have also not done is hostile takeovers. It's hard to imagine today, when corporate thieves and private equity firms are constantly gobbling up one company after another, but until the 1970s it was considered scandalous for a company to buy another company without the target agreeing to the purchase. Places like Mudge Rose and other established Wall Street firms would not accept such a deal.
"The problem with hostile takeovers is that they were hostile," said Steven Brill, founder of American Lawyer magazine. "It wasn't chivalrous. When your best friend from Princeton is the CEO of Company X, and he's been sitting around for a long time, and a corporate stranger shows up and says this company sucks, you feel uncomfortable. You think: if he leaves, maybe I'll go too. It's this whole notion of not disturbing the basic, calm, stable order of things.”*
So the work that "came to the fore" for the generation of Jewish lawyers in the Bronx and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s was the work that the white shoe firms scorned: litigation and, more importantly, "power notarial". these were the legal maneuvers at the heart of any hostile takeover bid. An investor would be involved in a company; He denounced management as incompetent and sent letters to shareholders asking them to give him their "power of attorney" to remove executives from the company. And to handle the proxy fight, the only lawyer the investor could get was someone like Joe Flom.
In Skadden, legal historian Lincoln Caplan describes this primitive world of acquisitions:
In the snake pit, the winner of a power contest was determined. (Officially, it was called a polling place.) Lawyers for both sides met with election inspectors whose job it was to approve or remove questionable proxies. The event was often informal, contentious, and undisciplined. Opponents sometimes wore T-shirts, ate watermelon, or shared a bottle of whiskey. On rare occasions, Snake Pit results may affect the outcome of a contest and result in only one vote.
Sometimes lawyers tried to rig an election by rigging the appointment of inspectors who owed them something; The inspectors used to smoke cigars provided by each hand. The prosecutor denied the powers of the insurgents (“I deny that!”) and vice versa…. The lawyers who prevailed in the snake pit were excellent improvisers. There were lawyers who knew more about the power of attorney rules, but no one was better in a fight than JoeFlom...
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Flom was overweight (ten pounds overweight at the time, a lawyer said...), physically unattractive (he looked like a toad to his partner), and indifferent to social niceties (he would fart in public or carry a cigar near his face). face) by someone he spoke to without apologizing). But in the opinion of colleagues and some opponents, his will to win was unsurpassed and often sovereign.
Whiteshoe Law Firms also called Flom when a corporate thief attacked one of his firm's clients. They would not touch the case. But they were happy to outsource to Skadden, Arps. "Flom's early specialty was proxy fighting, and we didn't do that, nor did the marriage work out," said Robert Rifkind, a longtime partner at Cravath, Swaine and Moore. "So we pretended we didn't know anything about it. I remember one time we had a problem with a power struggle and one of my senior partners said, 'Well, let's find Joe. He went. And I said, 'We can do that too. , You know?' And the partner said, 'No, no, no, you can't. Let's not do that. We just don't have.
Then the 1970s came and the old aversion to lawsuits faded. It has become easier to borrow money. Federal regulations have been relaxed. Markets have internationalized. Investors became more aggressive, and the result was a boom in the number and size of acquisitions. two-thirds would have said no,” Flom said. "Now the vote would be almost unanimous yes." Companies had to defend themselves against the demands of competitors. Enemy suitors had to be defeated. Investors looking to gobble up reluctant targets needed help with their legal strategy, and shareholders needed formal representation. The dollar amounts involved were enormous. From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, the amount of money invested in mergers and acquisitions each year on Wall Street increased 2,000%, reaching almost a quarter of a trillion dollars.
Suddenly, the things that traditional law firms didn't want to do—hostile takeovers and litigation—were the things that every law firm wanted to do. And who was the expert in these two suddenly critical areas of the law? What were once second-rate law firms were founded by people who hadn't gotten jobs in downtown offices ten or fifteen years ago.
"[The white shoe companies] considered hostile takeovers despicable until a relatively late stage, and until they decided maybe we should be in this business, they left me alone," Flom said. "And if you build a reputation for this kind of work, the business comes first for you."
Think about how similar this is to the stories of Bill Joy and Bill Gates. Both worked in a relatively obscure field with little hope of mundane success. But then, boom! – the personal computer revolution happened and they had their ten thousand hours. They were ready. Flom had the same experience. For twenty years he honed his craft at Skadden, Arps. Then the world changed and he was ready. He did not triumph over adversity. Instead, what started as adversity turned into an opportunity.
"It's not like these guys are smarter lawyers than the rest," says Rifkind. "It's just that they had a skill they'd been working on for years that suddenly became very valuable."*
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Lesson number two: demographic luck
5. Maurice Janklow enrolled in Brooklyn Law School in 1919. He was the eldest son of Jewish immigrants from Romania. He had seven brothers and sisters. One ended up running a small department store in Brooklyn. Two others worked in haberdashery, one ran a graphic design studio, another made feather hats, and another worked in the finance department at TishmanRealty.
Maurice, however, was the intellectual of the family, the only one who went to university. He earned a law degree and opened an office on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn. He was a dapper man who wore Homburg and Brooks Brothers suits. In the summer he wore a straw hat. He married the beautiful Lillian Levantin, daughter of a prominent Talmudist. He was driving a big car. He moved to Queens. Then he and a partner took over a stationery company that looked poised to make a fortune.
Here was a man who everyone thought was the kind of person who would make it as a lawyer in New York City. He was smart and educated. He came from a family well educated in the rules of the system. He lived in the most economically dynamic city in the world. But here's the weird thing: It never happened. Maurice Janklow's career has not started as he expected. In his opinion, he never got past Court Street in Brooklyn. He fought and fought.
However, Maurice Janklow had a son named Mort who also became a lawyer and the son's story is very different from the father's. Mort Janklow built a law firm from scratch in the 1960s, then built one of the first cable TV franchises and sold it to CoxBroadcasting for a fortune. In the 1970s he opened a literary agency that is now one of the most renowned in the world.* He has his own plane. Every dream that eluded the father was realized by the son.
Why did Mort Janklow succeed where Maurice Janklow did not? There are, of course, a hundred possible answers to this question. But let's take a page from the analysis of business magnates born in the 1830s and software programmers born in 1955 and look at the differences between the two Janklows in terms of their generation. Is there a perfect time for a New York Jewish lawyer to be born? As it turns out, it is, and the same fact that explains Mort Janklow's success is also the second key to Joe Flom's success.
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6. Lewis Terman's brilliant study, as you'll remember from the chapter on Chris Langan, was an investigation into how some very high IQ children born between 1903 and 1917 became adults. And the study found that there was a true success group and a true failure group, and that the successes were much more likely to come from wealthier families. In this sense, Terman's study reinforces Annette Lareau's argument that it matters what your parents do for a living and the assumptions that go along with what class your parents belong to.
However, there is another way to look at Terman's findings, and that was when termites were born. If you divide the termites into two groups, with those born between 1903 and 1911 on one side and those born between 1912 and 1917 on the other, it turns out that Terman's failures were much more likely to be born in the earlier group.
The statement has to do with two of the great cataclysmic events of the 20th century: the Great Depression and World War II. If you were born after 1912, say 1915, dropped out of college after the worst of the depression had passed, and were drafted young enough that a three- or four-year war would be both an opportunity and a disruption (assuming you weren't killed, of course).
Yet the termites born before 1911 were graduating from college at the height of the Depression, when job opportunities were scarce, and they were in their early 30s when World War II broke out, meaning they had to suspend their educational careers when they arrived. they were redacted. and families and adult lives already in full swing. Being born before 1911 is demographically unlucky. The most devastating events of the 20th century hit you at the wrong time.
The same demographic logic applies to Jewish lawyers in New York like Maurice Janklow. The doors of the big downtown law firms were closed to them. So they were overwhelmingly individual practitioners dealing with wills, divorces, contracts, and minor disputes, and in the Depression, the work of individual practitioners all but disappeared. "Nearly half the natives earned less than the subsistence level of American families," writes Jerold Auerbach of the Depression years in New York. “A year later, 1,500 lawyers were willing to take the begging oath to be eligible for job aid. Jewish lawyers (about half the metropolitan bar) found that their practice had become a "dignified path to famine." . Maurice Janklow was born in 1902. When the Great Depression hit, he was newly married and had just bought his big car, moved to Queens, and made his big bet on stationery. His timing couldn't have been worse.
"He wanted to make a fortune," Mort Janklow says of his father. “But the depression killed him financially. He had no reservations and no family to turn to. And he's been a staff attorney ever since. After that, he no longer had the courage to take risks. It was too much for him. My father closed bonds for twenty-five dollars. He had a friend who worked at the Savings Bank of Jamaica who would get him some business. He'd kill himself for twenty-five bucks and do all the final front-page reporting. For twenty five dollars!
"I remember my mom and dad in the morning," Janklow continued. "He said to her:
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"I have a dollar seventy-five. I need a dime for the bus, a dime for the subway, a quarter for a sandwich," and he would give you the rest. You were so close to the edge.
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7. Now compare this experience to someone like Mort Janklow, who was born in the 1930s.
Take a look at the chart below, which shows birth rates in the United States from 1910 to 1950. In 1915 there were almost three million babies. By 1935, that number had dwindled to nearly six hundred thousand, and within a decade and a half the number had risen again to over three million. More specifically, in 1915, 29.5 babies were born for every 1,000 Americans. 18.7 babies born in 1935; and 24.1 babies born in 1950. The 1930s are known as the "demographic valley." In response to the economic hardships of the Depression, families simply stopped having children, and as a result, the generation born in this decade was significantly smaller than the generation before it and the generation immediately after it.
Year of birth A total of 1,000.1910 2,777,000 30,965,000 29,950,000 27.71925 25.11930 2.61935 2,377,000 2.70 1,500 193.31935, 2,377,000 2.5599.
This is what economist H. Scott Gordon once wrote about the special benefits of being one of those people born into a small generation:
When you first open your eyes, you find yourself in a large hospital well equipped to fill the previous vacancy. The team is generous with their time, as they have little to do during the short hiatus until the next wave. When she reaches school age, the magnificent buildings already welcome her; the large teaching team welcomes you with open arms. In high school, the basketball team isn't as good as it used to be, but it's okay to spend time in the gym. The university is a nice place; There is plenty of space in the classrooms and dormitories, the dining room is not crowded, and the teachers are helpful. Then it ends up on the job market. The supply of new entrants is low and the demand is high because they are followed by a big wave that creates a strong demand for goods and services from their potential employers.
In New York City in the early 1930s, the group was so small that class sizes were at least half what they were 25 years earlier. The schools were new, built for the great older generation, and the teachers had a job that was considered highly prized in the Great Depression.
"New York City public schools were considered the best schools in the country in the 1940s," says Diane Ravitch, a New York University professor who has written extensively on the city's educational history. “In the 1930s and 1940s there was a generation of educators who in another time and place would have been university professors. They were brilliant but they didn't get the jobs they wanted and public education was what they did because it was safe and you had a pension and you didn't get fired.
The same dynamic benefited members of this generation as they entered college. Here it is
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Ted Friedman, one of New York's leading trial lawyers in the 1970s and 1980s, grew up poor as Flom, the son of Jewish immigrants.
"My options were City College and the University of Michigan," Friedman said. City College was free, and Michigan, then as now one of America's top universities, was $450 a year. Friedman said. "So it was just the first year that I had to pay that if it works for me." Friedman's first inclination was to remain in New York. "Well, I went to City College for a day, I didn't like it. I figured I had four more years of Bronx Science [the high school he attended] left, and I went home, packed up my things and hitchhiked to Ann Arbor". He continued:
I had a few hundred dollars in my pocket from the summer. I worked in the Catskills to earn enough money to pay $450 for tuition, and I had some left over. Then there was this fancy restaurant in Ann Arbor where I got a job as a waiter. I also worked the night shift at River Rouge, the big Ford factory. That was real money. It wasn't that hard to get this job. The factories were looking for people. I also had another job that paid me the best salary I ever had before I became a lawyer and it was in construction. Over the summer we built the Chrysler Proving Ground in Ann Arbor. I worked there for a couple of summers while I was in law school. These jobs paid very well, probably because you worked so hard.
Think about this story for a moment. The first lesson is that Friedman was willing to work hard, take responsibility for himself, and enroll in school. But the second, perhaps more important lesson is that America came at a time when if you were willing to work hard, you could take responsibility for yourself and pay for your education. Friedman was then what we would now call "economically disadvantaged." He was a kid from the middle of the Bronx whose parents didn't go to college. But look how easy it was for him to get a good education. He graduated from his New York public school at a time when the New York City public school was the envy of the world. His first choice, City College, was free, and his second choice, the University of Michigan, was only $450, and the admissions process was apparently random enough that he could try out a school one day and another the next day.
And how did it get there? He hitchhiked, the money he had earned that summer in his pocket, and when he got there he soon found a series of very good jobs to help pay the bills, as the factories were "looking for people." And of course they were: they had to meet the needs of the great generation that came just before those born in the demographic peak of the 1930s, and the great generation of baby boomers that came after them. That sense of opportunity so necessary to succeed doesn't just come from ourselves or our parents. It comes from our time: from the special opportunities offered by our special place in history. For a young aspiring lawyer, birth in the early 1930s was a magical moment, as was birth in 1955 for a software programmer or birth in 1835 for a businessman.
Today, Mort Janklow has an office at the top of Park Avenue filled with beautiful modern art: a Dubuffet, an Anselm Kiefer. He tells funny stories. ("My mother had two sisters. One lived to be ninety-nine and the other died at ninety. The ninety-nine-year-old was an intelligent woman. She married my Uncle Al, the sales manager at Maidenform. He said, 'What is the rest?
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Country, huh, Uncle Al? And he said, 'Boy. When you leave New York, there's Bridgeport everywhere.'”) Feel that the world is at your fingertips. "I've always been a big risk taker," he says. “When I started the cable company, I made early deals that would have flopped if I hadn't. I had faith that I could do it."
Mort Janklow attended the New York City public schools when they were in their prime. Maurice Janklow attended the New York City public schools when they were busiest. Mort Janklow went to Columbia University Law School because babies get to choose schools that are demographically selective. Maurice Janklow attended Brooklyn Law School, which in 1919 was the best an immigrant boy could achieve. Mort Janklow sold his cable television business for tens of millions of dollars. Maurice Janklow closed the bonds for twenty-five dollars. The Janklows' history tells us that Joe Flom's meteoric rise to fame could never have happened. Even the most talented lawyers, armed with the best family lessons, cannot escape the limitations of their generation.
"My mother was constant until the last five or six months of her life," said Mort Janklow. And she in her delirium talked about things that she had never talked about before. She shed tears over the death of her friends in the flu epidemic of 1918. This generation, my parents' generation, lived a long time. You lived through this epidemic that led to what? ten percent of the world's population. panic in the streets friends die. And then World War I, then the Great Depression, then World War II. They barely had a chance. That was a very difficult moment. My father would have been much more successful in another world.
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Lesson number three: The garment industry and meaningful work
8. In 1889, Louis and Regina Borgenicht traveled to America in Hamburg aboard an ocean liner. Louis came from Galatia in what was then Poland. Regina came from a small town in Hungary. They had only been married a few years and had a young son and a second on the way. During the thirteen-day voyage, they slept on straw mattresses on a deck above the engine room, clinging to the bunks as the ship rocked and rocked. They knew someone in New York: Borgenicht's sister, Sallie, who had emigrated ten years before. They had enough money to last a few weeks at best. Like so many other immigrants to the United States in those years, it was a leap of faith.
Louis and Regina found a small apartment on Eldridge Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side for $8 a month. Louis then took to the streets in search of work. He saw street vendors and fruit vendors and sidewalks lined with wheelbarrows. The noise, activity, and energy dwarfed anything he had seen in the Old World. He was first impressed, then invigorated. He went to her sister's fishmonger in Ludlow Street and persuaded her to give him a load of herring on credit. He set up a sidewalk tent with two barrels of fish, jumped between them, and sang in German:
To grill To bake To cook Also good to eat Herring is good for every meal And every class!
At the end of the week he had netted $8, the second week $13, which was a considerable sum. But Louis and Regina could not imagine how selling herring on the street would turn into a constructive business. So Louis decided to try his luck as a wheelbarrow salesman. He sold towels and tablecloths without much luck. He switched to notebooks, then bananas, then socks and socks. Was there really a future for wheelbarrows? Regina gave birth to a second child, a girl, and Louis's situation increased. He now had four mouths to feed.
The answer came to him after five long days of wandering the streets of the Lower East Side when he was about to give up hope. He was sitting on an overturned box eating a late lunch of the sandwiches Regina had made for him. it was clothes. The shops were opening up around him: suits, dresses, jumpsuits, shirts, skirts, blouses, pants, all finished and ready to wear. .
"For me, the greatest wonder of all this was not the amount of clothing—although that in itself was a miracle," Borgenicht wrote years later, after becoming a successful manufacturer of women's and children's clothing—"but the fact that in America, even the poorest could save themselves the drudgery and time consuming work of making their own clothes simply by walking into a store and walking out with what they needed.There was a field to enter, a field to be inspired.
Borgenicht took out a small notebook. Wherever he went, he wrote what the people were
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Clothes and what was for sale: men's clothing, women's clothing, children's clothing. She wanted to find a "new" item, something that people would use and not be sold in stores. She walked the streets for four more days. When he returned to his house the night of the last day, he saw half a dozen girls playing hopscotch. One of the girls wore a tiny embroidered apron over her dress, low-cut in the front and tied in the back, and she suddenly realized that in her early days of tirelessly browsing the Lower East Side clothing stores, she had never seen one of these. sale of aprons
He came home and told Regina. She had an old sewing machine that they bought when they came to the United States. The next morning he went to a grocery store on Hester Street and bought a hundred yards of gingham and fifty yards of whiteboard. She returned to the small apartment and placed the items on the dining room table. Regina began cutting the ginghams, small sizes for babies, larger sizes for toddlers, until she had forty aprons. She began to sew. At midnight she went to bed and Louis picked up where she left off. At dawn she got up and began cutting buttonholes and adding buttons. At ten in the morning the aprons were ready. Louis joined them arm in arm and ventured up Hester Street.
"Boys' aprons! Girls' apron! Colorful, ten cents. White, fifteen cents! Girls' aprons!"
At one o'clock all forty had left.
Hesterstr. He grabbed her around the waist and started turning her over and over. "You have to help me," she yelled. "Let's work together! Mom, this is our problem.
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9. Jewish immigrants like the Floms, Borgenicht, and Janklow were not like the other immigrants who came to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Irish and Italians were farmers, tenant farmers in the impoverished rural areas of Europe. Not the Jews. For centuries they were prohibited from owning land in Europe, so they grouped together in towns and cities and dedicated themselves to the trades and jobs of the city. Seventy percent of the Eastern European Jews who passed through Ellis Island in the thirty years before World War I had some form of professional qualification. They owned small grocery stores or jewelry stores. They had been bookbinders or watchmakers. Mostly though, his background was in the clothing trade. They were tailors and seamstresses, hatters and caps, furriers and tanners.
Louis Borgenicht, for example, left his impoverished home at the age of 12 to work as a salesperson in a general store in Brzesko, Poland. When the opportunity to work in tailoring (literally, the handling of clothing and fabrics, or "piece goods" as they were known) arose, he jumped at it. "At the time, the parts dealer was the world's largest porter," he writes, "and of the three essentials needed to live in this simple society, food and shelter were modest. Clothing was the aristocrat. Practitioners of the art of costume, merchants of marvelous fabrics from all corners of Europe, merchants who visited the industrial centers on their annual shopping sprees: these were the merchant princes of my youth. Their voices were heard, their weight felt."
Borgenicht worked at the merchandise store for a man named Epstein and later moved to a store in the Jaslow area called Brandstätter's. There, young Borge did not learn all the dozens of types of fabrics until he could run his hand over a fabric and name the number of threads, the name of the manufacturer, and the place of origin. . A few years later Borgenicht moved to Hungary and met Regina. He had run a garment factory since he was sixteen. Together they opened a series of small grocery stores and learned the ins and outs of small business entrepreneurship.
So Borgenicht's big flash of inspiration that day in the overturned box didn't come out of nowhere. He was a veteran of the cut goods business and his wife was an experienced seamstress. This was his field. And at the same time that the Borgenichts were settling into his tiny apartment, thousands of other Jewish immigrants were doing the same, using their sewing, tailoring and tailoring skills to the point that by 1900, control over garments was the thing of the world. world. passed almost exclusively in the hands of newcomers from Eastern Europe. As Borgenicht says, "The Jews penetrated deep into the welcoming land and worked madly at what they knew."
Today, at a time when New York is the center of a vast and diverse metropolitan area, it's easy to forget the importance of the skills that immigrants like the Borgenichts brought to the New World. From the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, the clothing trade was the largest and most economically dynamic industry in the city. More people worked to make clothes in New York than anywhere else, and more clothes were made in New York than in any other city in the world. The distinctive buildings that still stand on the lower half of Broadway in Manhattan, from the ten- and fifteen-story industrial warehouses twenty blocks below Times Square to the cast-iron lofts of SoHo and Tribeca, were nearly all built to house the manufacturers of coats and coats. houses of hatters and linen weavers, and huge rooms with men and women bent over sewing machines. He came to New York City in the 1890s with experience in
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The stitching or stitching or draping action was an exceptional stroke of luck. It was like walking into Silicon Valley in 1986 with ten thousand hours of computer programming under your belt.
"There is no question that these Jewish immigrants with the perfect skills arrived at the right time," says sociologist Stephen Steinberg. “You had to have certain virtues to take advantage of this opportunity, and these immigrants worked a lot. you have sacrificed yourself He saved wisely, saved and invested. Still, you have to remember that the garment industry grew by leaps and bounds during those years. The business was desperate for the skills they had."
A unique opportunity presented itself for Louis and Regina Borgenicht and the thousands of people who boarded the ships with them. And to their children and grandchildren too, because the lessons these seamstresses brought home at night were fundamental to the progress of the world, after all.
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10. The day after Louis and Regina Borge had failed to sell their first batch of forty aprons, Louis went to H.B. Claflin and Company. Claflin was a "commissioned" dry goods store, the equivalent of the Brandstatter house in Poland. There, Borgenicht asked for a German-speaking vendor since his English was almost non-existent. He had his and Regina's life savings in hand—$12—and with that money he bought enough fabric to make ten dozen aprons. Day and night he and Regina cut and sewed. He sold all ten dozen in two days. He went back to Claflin for another round. They also sold them. Soon after, he and Regina hired another immigrant right off the boat to help with the kids so Regina could sew full-time, and then another for her to serve as an apprentice. Louis ventured into downtown Harlem and sold the moms out of tenements. He rented a shop on Sheriff Street with rooms in the back. He hired three more girls and bought all the sewing machines from him. He became known as "the man in the apron". He and Regina sold aprons as fast as they could.
Before long, the borrowers decided to diversify. They started by making adult aprons, then petticoats, and then women's dresses. In January 1892, the Borgenichts employed 20 people, mostly Jewish immigrants like themselves. They had their own factory on Manhattan's Lower East Side and a growing list of customers, including an uptown store owned by another Jewish immigrant family, the Bloomingdale brothers. Remember, Borrowers have only been in the country three years. They barely spoke English. And they were far from rich. All the profits they made went to his business, and Borgenicht says he only had $200 in the bank. But he was already responsible for his own fate.
This was the second great advantage of the clothing industry. It wasn't just that he was growing by leaps and bounds. He was also explicitly entrepreneurial. Clothes were not made in a big factory. Instead, various established companies would design patterns and prepare the fabric, and then the intricate sewing, ironing, and buttoning would be outsourced to small contractors. And when a contractor got big or ambitious enough, he started designing his own patterns and preparing his own fabric. By 1913 there were about sixteen thousand separate clothing store businesses in New York City, many like Borgenicht's store on Sheriff Street.
“The threshold to enter the business was very low. It's basically a sewing machine shop, and the sewing machines don't cost that much,” says Daniel Soyer, a historian who has written extensively on the garment industry. "So you didn't need a lot of capital. At the turn of the century it probably cost fifty dollars to buy a machine or two. All you had to do to be a contractor was have a few sewing machines, a few irons, and a few laborers. The profit margins were very small, but you could earn some money.”
Hear Borgenicht describe his decision to expand beyond aprons:
I learned from my market research that in 1890 only three men made children's clothing. One was a tailor on the East Side near me who only made to order, while the other two made an expensive product that I had nothing to do with and was minimally competitive. He wanted to do things at "popular prices": wash clothes, silk and wool. My goal was to produce clothes that the vast majority of people could afford, clothes that would be sold, from a commercial point of view, in big and small stores, both in the city and in the country. With the help of Regina - her
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I have always had excellent taste and common sense: I made a line of patterns. I showed them to all my "old" clients and friends and hammered every stitch at home - my dresses would save moms endless work, the materials and stitching were so good and probably better than anything you could do at home , the price was right for a quick removal.
On one occasion, Borgenicht realized that his only chance to lower the price of the larger firms was to persuade wholesalers to sell the fabric directly to him, thus cutting out the middlemen. He went to a Mr. Bingham at Lawrence and Company, a "tall, lean Yankee with a white beard and steel-blue eyes." Yankee. Borgenicht said that he wanted to buy forty boxes of cashmere. Bingham had never sold to a sole proprietorship, let alone a tight-knit Sheriff Street operation.
"You have the nerve to come here and ask me for a favor!" Bingham thundered. But in the end he said yes.
What Borgenicht received in his 18-hour days was a lesson in modern economics. He studied marketing research. He learned to manufacture. He learned to negotiate with the imperious Yankees. She learned to connect with popular culture to understand new fashion trends.
Irish and Italian immigrants who came to New York during the same period did not have this advantage. They had no special skills for the economy of the city. They went to work as day laborers, housekeepers, and construction workers, jobs you could work every day for thirty years and never learn market research and manufacturing, how to navigate popular culture, and how to deal with the Yankees who ran the world. . .
Or consider the fate of Mexicans who immigrated to California between the 1900s and the late 1920s to work on the farms of major fruit and vegetable producers. They simply traded the life of a feudal peasant in Mexico for the life of a feudal peasant in California. "Conditions in the garment industry were just as bad," continues Soyer. “But as a textile worker you were closer to the heart of the industry. If you work in a field in California, you have no idea what happens to the product once it gets on the truck. If you work in a small clothing store, your pay is low, your conditions are terrible, and your hours are long, you can see exactly what successful people are doing and how you can build your own work. ”*
When Borgenicht came home at night to see his children, he might be tired, poor, and despondent, but he was alive. He was his own boss. He was responsible for his own decisions and directions. His job was complex: it required his ingenuity and imagination. And in his work there was a relationship between effort and reward: the more time he and Regina spent sewing aprons, the more money they earned on the street the next day.
These three things—autonomy, complexity, and a link between effort and reward—are, according to most people, the three qualities that work must have to be fulfilling. It's not money that makes us happy between nine and five. It is about whether our work makes us happy. If I gave you the choice of becoming an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, what would you choose? I guess it's the former, because creative work involves complexity, autonomy, and an effort-reward ratio, and that's worth more than money to most of us.
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Work that meets these three criteria is significant. Being a teacher makes sense. Being a doctor makes sense. That's what it's like to be an entrepreneur, and the miracle of the garment industry, cruel and cruel as it was, was allowing people like the no-lenders, fresh off the ship, to also do something worthwhile.* When Louis Borgenicht returned home after seeing the boy's apron dance a jig for the first time. He hadn't sold anything yet. Still penniless and desperate, he knew it would take years of hard work to bring his idea to fruition. But he was excited because the prospect of those endless years of hard work didn't seem to overwhelm him. Bill Gates had the same feeling when he first sat down at the keyboard at Lakeside. And the Beatles weren't surprised when they heard they were going to be playing eight hours a night, seven days a week. They seized the opportunity. Hard work is just a prison sentence when it serves no purpose. Once this is done, it becomes like grabbing your woman around the waist and dancing.
The most important consequence of the garment industry miracle, however, was what happened to children who grew up in families where significant work was done. Imagine what it must have been like to see the meteoric rise of Regina and Louis Borgenicht through the eyes of one of their children. They learned the same lesson that little Alex Williams would learn nearly a century later, a crucial lesson for those who want to tackle the upper reaches of a profession like law or medicine: if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your ingenuity and imagination can shape the world according to your wishes.
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11. In 1982, a sociology student named Louise Farkas visited several nursing homes and residential hotels in New York City and Miami Beach. She was looking for people like the Borgenichts, or more specifically, the children of people like the Borgenichts who came to New York with the great wave of Jewish immigration at the turn of the century. And for each of the people she interviewed, she created a family tree showing how a line of parents, children, grandchildren and, in some cases, great-grandchildren made a living.
Here is his report on "Issue #18":
A Russian tailor comes to America, sells needles, works in a sweatshop for a small salary. Later, with the help of his wife and his older children, he brings clothes to finish at home. To supplement his salary, he works all night. Later he sews a garment and sells it on the streets of New York. He raises some capital and starts a business with his children. He opens a store to make men's clothing. The Russian tailor and his sons become manufacturers of men's suits and stock several men's stores. The children and the father become rich. Children's children become educated professionals.
Here's another one. He is a tanner who emigrated from Poland at the end of the 19th century.
Farkas's Jewish family trees continue for pages, each virtually identical to the last, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers, despite their humble beginnings, never became professionals. Due to their humble beginnings, they turned professional.
Ted Friedman, the noted trial lawyer of the 1970s and 1980s, remembers attending concerts at Carnegie Hall with his mother as a child. They were poor and lived in the most remote corners of the Bronx. How did you buy the tickets? "Mary got a quarter," says Friedman. “There was a Mary who charged admission and if she gave Mary a coin she would let you stand at the second counter without a ticket. Carnegie Hall didn't know that. It was just between you and Mary. It was quite a long journey, but we came back once or twice a month.”*
Friedman's mother was a Russian immigrant. She barely spoke English. But she started working as a seamstress at fifteen and became a leading garment union organizer, and what you are learning in this world is that you can make a difference through your own persuasion and initiative.
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their children to Carnegie Hall. There is no better lesson for a budding lawyer than this. The garment industry was a training ground for the professions.
What did Joe Flom's father do? He sewed shoulder pads for women's dresses. What did Robert Oppenheimer's father do? He was a clothing manufacturer like Louis Borgenicht. One floor above Flom's Skadden, Arps office is the office of Barry Garfinkel, who has worked in Skadden, Arps for almost as long as Flom and headed the firm's legal department for many years. What did Garfinkel's mother do? She was a seamstress. She made hats at home. What did two of Louis and Regina Borgenicht's children do? They went to law school, and no fewer than nine of their grandchildren also became doctors and lawyers.
Here is Farkas' most remarkable pedigree. He belongs to a Jewish family from Romania who had a small grocery store in Old Country and later came to New York and opened another on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It's the most elegant answer to the question where all the JoeFloms come from.
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12. Ten blocks north of Skadden, the Arps headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, is the office of JoeFlom's great rival, the law firm widely considered the best in the world.
The head office is located in the famous Black Rock office building. It takes a small miracle to get hired. Unlike other major New York law firms, all of which have hundreds of attorneys in major cities around the world, it operates out of this single building in Manhattan. He turns down far more jobs than he accepts. Unlike all of its competitors, it does not charge by the hour. Just mention a fee. When the company defended Kmart from a takeover, it once charged $20 million for two weeks of work. Kmart paid, thankfully. If your lawyers can't outsmart you, they cheat you, and if they can't outsmart you, they win by sheer intimidation. There is no law firm in the world that has made more money lawyer for lawyer in the last two decades. On Joe Flom's wall, along with photographs of Flom with George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, is a photo of him with the managing partner of the rival firm.
No one rises to the top of the New York legal profession unless they are smart, ambitious and hard-working, and the four men who founded Black Rock certainly fit that description. But we know a lot more than that, don't we? Success is not an accidental act, it comes from a powerful and predictable set of circumstances and opportunities, and at this point, after examining the lives of Bill Joy and Bill Gates, professional hockey players and geniuses, and Joe Flom, the Janklows and the Borrowers have, it shouldn't be that hard. to find out where the perfect lawyer comes from.
This person will have been born into a demographic depression, having experienced the best public schools in New York and the easiest time in the job market. Of course, he will be Jewish and thus will be banned from the old downtown law firms because of his "her origin". This person's parents worked hard at the clothing store, instilling in their children autonomy and complexity and the connection between effort and reward. He will have attended a good school, although it doesn't have to be a great school. He didn't have to be the smartest in the class, just smart enough.
In fact, we can be even more precise. Just as there is a perfect birth date for a 19th century business magnate and a perfect birth date for a software mogul, there is also a perfect birth date for a Jewish lawyer in New York. The year is 1930, because that would give the lawyer a blessed little generation. That would also give him forty years in 1970, when the legal revolution began, which in Hamburg means a healthy fifteen years in the acquisition business, while white-shoe lawyers lingered distractedly over their two-martini lunches. . If you want to be a great New York lawyer, it's an advantage to be an outsider, and it's an advantage to have parents who did significant work, and even better, it's an advantage, to be born in the early 1930s. dose of ingenuity and motivation, an unstoppable combination. It's like being a hockey player born on January 1st.
The Black Rock law firm is Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The firm's first partner was Herbert Wachtell. He was born in 1931. He grew up in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union across from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. His parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. His father worked with his brothers in the lingerie store on the sixth floor of what is now a luxurious loft at Broadway and Spring Street in SoHo. He attended the New York City Public Schools in the 1940s, then New York University and then New York University School of Law.
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The second partner was Martin Lipton. He was born in 1931. His father was a factory manager. He was descended from Jewish immigrants. He attended Jersey City public schools, then the University of Pennsylvania, and then New York University School of Law.
The third partner was Leonard Rosen. He was born in 1930. He grew up poor in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium. His parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. His father worked as a press in the Garment District in Manhattan. He attended New York City public schools in the 1940s, then City College in Northern Manhattan, and then New York University School of Law.
The fourth partner was George Katz. He was born in 1931. He grew up in a one-bedroom ground-floor apartment in the Bronx. His parents were the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father sold insurance. His grandfather, who lived a few blocks away, was a seamstress at a clothing store and did custom work from home. He attended New York City public schools in the 1940s, then City College in Upper Manhattan, and then New York University School of Law.
Imagine if we found one of these four fresh out of law school sitting in the fancy waiting room at Mudge Rose next to a blue-eyed Nordic boy from the "right" background. We would all have bet on the Nordic type. And we would be wrong, because the Katzens and the Rosens and the Liptons and the Wachtells and the Floms had something that the Nordic type didn't. Their world, their culture, generation and family history, has offered them the best opportunities.
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SECOND PART
LEGACY
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CHAPTER SIX
Harlan, Kentucky
"DIE LIKE A MAN, LIKE YOUR BROTHER!"
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1. In the southeast corner of Kentucky, on the stretch of the Appalachian Mountains known as the Cumberland Plateau, lies a small town called Harlan.
The Cumberland Plateau is a wild, mountainous region of flat ridges, mountain faces from 150 to 1,000 feet, and narrow valleys, some wide enough for a single track road and stream. When the area was first settled, the plateau was covered in dense jungle. Huge tulip poplars grew in the streams and at the foot of the hills, some with trunks from twenty to eight feet in diameter. Adjoining this were white oak, beech, maple, walnut, sycamore, birch, willow, cedar, pine, and fir, all entwined in a trellis of wild vines, forming one of the largest forest tree species in the northern hemisphere. Bears, cougars, and rattlesnakes lay on the ground; an impressive array of squirrels in the treetops; and under the earth one thick layer of coal after another.
Harlan County was founded in 1819 by eight immigrant families from the north of the British Isles. They arrived in Virginia in the 18th century and then headed west into the Appalachian Mountains in search of land. The county has never been rich. For the first hundred years it was sparsely populated, rarely exceeding ten thousand people. The early settlers raised pigs and herded sheep on the hillsides and made a living on small farms in the valleys. They made whiskey in backyard stills, cut down trees, and let the Cumberland River flow in the spring when the water was high. Until the mid-20th century, the journey to the nearest station was a two-day wagon ride. The only way out of town was up Pine Mountain, which consisted of nine miles of steep road that sometimes turned into a rocky, muddy trail. Harlan was a remote and strange place, unknown to the larger society around it, and might have remained so had it not been for the fact that two of the town's founding families, the Howards and the Turners, did not get along. all right.
The patriarch of the Howard clan was Samuel Howard. He built the city's courthouse and prison. His counterpart was William Turner, owner of a tavern and two general stores. Once, a storm tore down the fence on Turner's property and a neighbor's cow wandered onto his land. William Turner's grandson Devil Jim shot the cow. The neighbor was too scared to report it and fled the county. On another occasion, a man was trying to open a competitor to the Turners' general store. The Turners spoke to him. He closed his store and moved to Indiana. These people were not nice.
One night, Wix Howard and "Little Bob" Turner, the grandsons of Samuel and William, played a game of poker with each other. Each accused the other of treason. you fought. The next day they met in the street, and after a hail of shots, little Bob Turner fell dead from a shotgun to the chest. A group of Turners went to Howard's General Store and spoke rudely to Mrs. Howard. She took offense and told her son, Wilse Howard, and the following week shots broke out on the road to Hagan, Virginia, with another of Turner's grandsons, young Will Turner. That night, one of the gymnasts and a friend attacked Howard's house. The two families then clashed in front of the Harlan courthouse. Will Turner was shot to death in the shootout. A Howard contingent then went to Mrs. Turner, the mother of Will Turner and Little Bob, to call a truce. She refused: "You can't clean this blood," she said, pointing to the country where her son died.
Things quickly got worse and worse. Wilse Howard found "little George" Turner nearby
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Sulfur Springs and shot him. The Howards ambush three of the Turners' friends, the Cawoods, killing all of them. A train was sent in pursuit of the Howards. In the resulting firefight, six others were killed or wounded. Wilse Howard heard that the Turners were after him, and he and a friend rode to Harlan and attacked the Turner house. On the way back, the Howards were ambushed. Another person died in the fight. Wilse Howard rode to George Turner's house and shot him, but missed and killed another man. A group surrounded the Howard house. There was another shooting. More dead. The county was in crisis. I think you got the picture. There were places in 19th century America where people lived in harmony. Harlan, Kentucky was not one of them.
"Stop doing that!" Will Turner's mother screamed at him as he staggered home howling in pain after being shot at the courthouse and shooting with the Howards. "He Dies as a man, as your brother died!" She belonged to a world so familiar with fatal shots that she had certain expectations about how to deal with them. Will fell silent and died.
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2. Suppose you were sent to Harlan at the end of the 19th century to investigate the causes of the dispute between Howard and Turner. They lined up all the surviving contestants and questioned them as carefully as possible. He requested documents, took testimony, and reviewed court records until he created a detailed and accurate account of all phases of the deadly dispute.
How much do you know? The answer is not much. You would know that there were two families in Harlan that didn't like each other very much and you would confirm that Wilse Howard, responsible for much of the violence, should probably be behind bars. What happened in Harlan only becomes clear when you look at the violence from a much broader perspective.
The first critical fact about Harlan is that at the same time that the Howards and the Turners were killing each other, there were almost identical confrontations in other small towns throughout the Appalachian Mountains. In the famous Hatfield-McCoy dispute on the West Virginia-Kentucky border, not far from Harlan, dozens of people were killed in a cycle of violence that lasted for more than twenty years. In the dispute between the French and Eversole in Perry County, Kentucky, twelve were killed, six of whom were killed by "Bad Tom" Smith (a man, credits John Ed Pearce in Days of Darkness, who was "enough fool not to be afraid to be smart enough to be dangerous and a straight shot.) The dispute between Martin and Tolliver in Rowan County, Kentucky, in the mid-1880s, involved three shootouts, three ambushes, and two The rivalry between Baker and Howard in Clay County, Kentucky, began in 1806 with an elk hunt gone awry and only ended in the 1930s when two Howards killed three Bakers in an ambush.
And those were just the known fights. Kentucky legislator Harry Caudill once searched a county clerk's office in a town on the Cumberland Plateau and found a thousand counts of murder spanning from the end of the Civil War in the 1860s to the turn of the century. , and this for a region that never exceeded 15,000 people and where many acts of violence never came to trial. Caudill writes of a Breathitt County murder trial, or "Bloody Breathitt" as it came to be known, that ended abruptly when the defendant's father, "a man in his fifties with huge mustaches and two huge pistols," walked out. approached the court. He judged and seized the mallet from him:
The Feudist slammed the bench and announced, "The court is over and you can all go. We're not going to have courts here this semester, folks." The red-faced judge quickly acquiesced in this extraordinary order and left town at once. court convened in the following period, the court and bailiff were assisted by sixty militiamen, but at that time the defendant was not available for trial, he had been killed in an ambush.
When one family fights with another, it is an enmity. When many families fight each other in identical small towns along the same mountain range, that's a pattern.
What caused the Appalachian pattern? Many possible explanations have been explored and debated over the years, and the consensus seems to be that the region was plagued by a particularly vicious strain of what sociologists call a "culture of honor."
Cultures of honor tend to take hold in the highlands and other less fertile areas like Sicily or the Basque mountainous regions of Spain. If you live on a rocky mountain, the explanation
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go away, you can't farm. They probably keep goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows around the life of a shepherd is very different from the culture that grows around farming. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a shepherd is alone. Farmers also don't have to worry about their livelihood being stolen overnight, because crops can't be easily stolen, unless of course a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire crop. field by itself. But a pastor has to worry. Due to the loss of his animals, he is constantly threatened with ruin. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear with words and actions that he is not weak. He must be willing to fight for the slightest challenge to his reputation, and that means "culture of honor." It is a world where a man's reputation is at the heart of his livelihood and self-esteem.
"The turning point in the development of the young herdsman's reputation is his first struggle," writes ethnographer J. K. Campbell of a herdsman culture in Greece. “Fights are necessarily public. They can occur in the cafe, in the town square, or more commonly in a pasture where a curse or a stone directed at one of his sheep strayed by another shepherd is an insult that inevitably requires a violent response.
Why were the Appalachians the way they were? That was because of the origin of the indigenous people of the region. The so-called Mountain States of America, from the southern and western borders of Pennsylvania to Virginia and West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina, and the far north of Alabama and Georgia, were largely populated by immigrants. of one of the wildest cultures in the world. . honorary. They were "Scots-Irish", meaning from the Scottish Lowlands, the northern counties of England, and Ulster in Northern Ireland.
The borders, as this region was called, were remote and lawless territories that had been contested for hundreds of years. The people of the region were thrown into violence. They were herders and made their living in stony and arid lands. They were members of a clan, and they responded to the harshness and turmoil of their surroundings by forging close family ties and valuing blood loyalty above all else. And when they immigrated to North America, they moved into the American countryside, to remote, lawless, rocky, and barely fertile places like Harlan, allowing them to reproduce in the New World the culture of honor they created in the Old World.
"For early settlers, the American forests were a dangerous environment, just like the British frontiers," writes historian David Hackett Fischer in Albion's Seed.
Much of the southern highlands were "disputed land" in the sense of delineating disputed areas without established government or rule of law. Frontier workers were more at home than others in this lawless environment, which suited their family system, warrior ethic, farming and ranching, attitudes toward land and wealth, and ideas about work and power. Frontier culture was so well adapted to this environment that other ethnic groups tended to copy it. The spirit of Britain's northern frontiers dominated this "dark and bloody ground", partly by sheer power of numbers, but mainly because it was a means of survival in a harsh and dangerous world.*
The triumph of a culture of honor helps explain why the pattern of crime has always been so pronounced in the American South. Homicide rates are higher there than in the rest of the country. but
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Crimes against property and "foreign" crimes such as theft are lower. As sociologist John Shelton Reed wrote: "The murders in which the South seems to specialize are those in which someone is murdered by someone he (or often she) knows, for reasons common to both the murderer and an understanding of sacrifice." . Adds Reed: "Statistics show that the Southerner who can avoid fighting and adultery is as safe as any other American, and probably safer." It was personal. You fought for your honor.
Many years ago, Southern journalist Hodding Carter told the story of being a juror as a young man. As Reed describes:
The jury's case involved a hot-tempered gentleman who lived next door to a gas station. Despite his warnings and his notoriously short-tempered temperament, for several months he was the butt of many jokes from attendees and the various loafers that hung around the station. One morning he emptied both barrels of his shotgun into his tormentors, killing one, permanently maiming another and wounding a third. When the incredulous judge listened to the jury, Carter was the only juror to record his guilty verdict. As one of the others said: "he wouldn't have been a great man if he hadn't shot those guys."
Only in a culture of honor would it have occurred to the irascible lord that shooting was an appropriate response to a personal insult. And only in a culture of honor would a grand jury have realized that, under the circumstances, murder is not a crime.
I realize that we are often wary of making such generalizations about different cultural groups, and rightly so. This is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take. We want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic history.
But the simple truth is that if you want to understand what happened in these small Kentucky towns in the 1800s, you need to go back, and not just a generation or two. You have to go back two, three, or four hundred years, to a country across the ocean, and take a close look at what people in a very specific geographic area of that country were doing for a living. The culture of honor hypothesis states that where you come from matters, not only in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but also in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-grandparents grew up and even where they grew up. your great grandparents grew up. This is a strange and powerful fact. This is only the beginning, however, as a closer look reveals that cultural legacies are even stranger and more powerful.www.u
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3. In the early 1990s, two University of Michigan psychologists, Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett, decided to conduct an experiment on the culture of honor. They knew that what was happening in places like Harlan in the 19th century was in all probability the product of patterns established centuries before on the English borders. But his interest was in the present. Would it be possible to find traces of the culture of honor in modern times? So they decided to gather a group of young people and insult them. "We sat down and tried to figure out what kind of insult would go to the heart of an 18- to 20-year-old," says Cohen. "It didn't take me long to get to 'idiot'.
The experiment was like this. The Social Sciences building at the University of Michigan has a long, narrow hallway in the basement full of filing cabinets. The children were individually called into the class and asked to complete a questionnaire. They were then instructed to put the questionnaire down the hall and return to the classroom, a simple and seemingly innocent academic exercise.
For half of the teens, that was it, they were the control group. There was a trap for the other half. As they were walking down the corridor with the questionnaire, a man, an accomplice of the investigators, walked past them and opened a drawer in one of the files. The already narrow corridor became even narrower. As the boys tried to sneak in, the accomplice looked up irritably. He closed the file drawer, pushed the young men with his shoulder and in a low but audible voice said the code word: "idiot."
Cohen and Nisbett wanted to gauge as precisely as possible what it meant to be called that word. They looked into the faces of their subjects and calculated how much anger they saw. They shook hands with the young men to see if their grip was stronger than usual. They collected saliva samples from the students, both before and after the insult, to see if being called a jerk caused their levels of testosterone and cortisol, the hormones that drive arousal and aggression, to rise. Finally, they asked the students to read the following story and draw a conclusion:
It had only been twenty minutes since they arrived at the party when Jill pushed Steve aside, obviously worried about something.
"What is wrong?" Steve asked. "It's Larry. I mean, he knows that you and I are engaged, but he already tried twice.
for me tonight." Jill walked into the crowd and Steve decided to keep an eye on Larry. Safely,
Within five minutes, Larry reached out and tried to kiss Jill.
If you've been offended, would you rather imagine Steve doing something violent to Larry? The results were clear. There were clear differences in the boys' reactions.
be labeled as disreputable. For some, the insult changed their behavior. For some No. What mattered in their reaction was not how confident they were, whether they were intellectuals or athletes, or whether they were physically imposing or not. What mattered, and I think you can imagine where that is going, was where they came from. Most of the youth in the northern United States treated the incident with amusement. They laughed at it. From them
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Handshakes remained unchanged. Her cortisol levels actually dropped, as if they were subconsciously trying to calm her own anger. Few of them made Steve violent towards Larry.
But the southerners? Oh my goodness. They were angry. Cortisol and testosterone shot up. His handshake held firm. Steve was on Larry.
"We even played this chicken game," Cohen said. "We send the students back to the corridors and there's another confederate around the corner. The corridor is blocked so only one of them can get through. The type we used was two hundred and fifty pounds. He used to play football college American. He was now working as a bouncer at a college bar. He walked down the hall in business mode, like walking through a bar trying to resolve an argument. The question was how close do they get to the bouncer before getting out of the way? And believe me, they always get out of the way.
For northerners there was almost no effect. They moved away five or two meters before, offended or not. Southerners, on the other hand, were completely deferential under normal circumstances, being more than ten feet away. But what if they had just been insulted? Less than two feet. He calls a redneck an idiot and is eager for a fight. What Cohen and Nisbett saw in that long hallway was the culture of honor in action: Southerners reacted like Wix Howard when little Bob Turner accused him of cheating at poker.
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4. This study is strange, isn't it? It is one thing to conclude that groups of people who live in circumstances very similar to those of their ancestors behave very much like their ancestors. But the southerners of the Study of the Corridor did not live in circumstances similar to those of their British ancestors. They didn't even necessarily have British ancestry. Turns out they grew up in the south. None of them were shepherds. Not even his parents were pastors. They lived in the late 20th century, not the late 19th century. They were students at the University of Michigan in one of America's northernmost states, which meant they were cosmopolitan enough to travel hundreds of miles south for college. And none of that mattered. They still pretended to live in 19th century Harlan, Kentucky.
“The average student in these studies comes from a family that makes more than $100,000, and that's $1,990,” Cohen says. "The southerners we're seeing this effect in aren't Appalachian kids. They're more like the kids of top executives at Coca-Cola in Atlanta. And that's the big question. Why should we get this effect from them?" Why would anyone get it hundreds of years later, why are these suburban Atlantic kids acting in the spirit of the frontier?”*
* * *
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and a long life. They remain largely intact, generation after generation, even when the economic, social, and demographic conditions that produced them have disappeared, and they play such an important role in controlling attitudes and behavior that we cannot live in our world without them. let's understand.*
So far at Outliers, we've seen that success comes from the constant accumulation of advantages: when and where you were born, how your parents made a living, and the circumstances of your upbringing make a significant difference in how well you do in life. . the world. The question for the second part of Outliers is whether the traditions and attitudes we inherit from our ancestors can play the same role. Can we learn something about why people succeed and how we can make them better at what they do by taking cultural legacies seriously? i think we can
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CHAPTER SEVEN
The ethnic theory of plane crashes
"CAPTAIN, THE WEATHER RADAR HELPED US A LOT."
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1. On the morning of August 5, 1997, the captain of Korean Air Flight 801 woke up at six o'clock. His family later told investigators that he went to the gym for an hour, then returned home and studied the flight schedule for the overnight trip to Guam. He took a nap and had lunch. He left for Seoul at 3 p.m., early enough, his wife said, to continue his preparations at Kimpo International Airport. He was a Korean Air pilot for almost four years after coming from the Korean Air Force. He had 8,900 flight hours, of which 3,200 hours were jumbo jet experience. A few months earlier, he had received an aviation safety award from his airline for successfully handling a low-altitude jumbo engine failure. He was forty-two years old and was in excellent health except for a bronchitis diagnosed ten days earlier.
At seven in the evening the captain, his first officer and the flight engineer met and collected the travel documents. You would be flying a Boeing 747, the model known in the aviation world as the "Classic." The plane was in perfect condition. It was once the plane of the Korean president. Flight 801 passed through the gate at 10:30 p.m. and took off twenty minutes later. The launch was uneventful. Just before half past one in the morning, the plane broke out of the clouds and the crew saw lights in the distance.
"Is it Guam?" the flight engineer asked. Then, after a pause, he said, "It's Guam, Guam." The captain laughed. "Well!" The co-pilot informed air traffic control (ATC) that the aircraft was "clear of Charlie".
Bravo [cumulonimbus clouds]” and requested “Radar vectors for runway six to the left”. The plane began its descent towards the Guam airport. They would take a visual approach that
said the captain. He had previously flown from Kimpo to the Guam airport eight times, the last time a month ago, and knew the airport and its surroundings well. The landing gear lowered. The flaps were extended ten degrees. At 01:41 and 48 seconds the captain said "windshield wipers on" and the flight engineer turned them on. he rained The first officer then said, "Not in sight?" He searched for the clue. He couldn't see it. A second later, the ground proximity warning system called in his electronic voice: "Five hundred [feet]." The plane was five hundred feet from the ground. But how could that be if they couldn't see the track? Two seconds passed. The flight engineer said, "Huh?" in a surprised tone.
At 01:42 and 19 seconds the first officer said: "We will make a missed approach", which means: We will stop and make a big circle and try to land again.
A second later, the flight engineer said, "Not in sight." The first officer added: "Not in sight, missed approach."
At 01:42 and 22 seconds the flight engineer said again: "Turn around."
your descent At 01:42 and 26 seconds, the aircraft collided with the slope of Nimitz Hill, a mountain covered by dense vegetation three
Miles southwest of the airport: $60 million and 212,000 pounds of steel hitting rocky ground at 100 mph. The plane skidded 600 meters, cutting an oil pipeline and smashing pine trees before plunging into a ravine and bursting into flames. When rescuers arrived at the crash site, 228 of the 254 people on board were dead.
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2. Twenty years before the KAL 801 crash, a Korean Air Boeing 707 entered Russian airspace and was shot down by a Soviet military plane over the Barents Sea. It was an accident, that is, a rare and catastrophic event that, by the grace of God, can happen to any airline. It has been researched and analyzed. Lessons have been learned. The reports have been archived.
Then two years later, a Korean Air Boeing 747 crashed in Seoul. Two accidents in two years is not a good sign. Three years later, the airline lost another 747 near Sakhalin Island, Russia, followed by a Boeing 707 that crashed in the Andaman Sea in 1987, two more crashes in 1989 in Tripoli and Seoul, and another in 1994 in Cheju, South Korea. *
To put this record into perspective, the "error" rate for an airline like United Airlines was 0.27 per million departures over the period 1988-1998, which means they lost one plane in an accident for every four million flights. . Korean Air's churn rate was 4.79 per million departures during the same period, more than seventeen times higher.
Korean Air planes crashed so frequently that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the US agency responsible for investigating plane crashes within US jurisdiction. they occurred shortly after the investigation began: the Korean Air 747, which crashed in Kimpo, Seoul, almost a year after Guam; the jet plane that overran a runway at Ulsan airport in Korea eight weeks later; the Korean Air McDonnell Douglas 83 which crashed into an embankment at Pohang Airport the following March; and then, a month later, the Korean Air passenger plane that crashed in a residential area of Shanghai. If the NTSB had waited a few more months, it might have added another: the Korean Air cargo plane that crashed shortly after takeoff from London's Stansted Airport, despite a warning bell ringing no less than fourteen times on the night. cabin.
In April 1999, Delta Air Lines and Air France ended their association with Korean Air. Soon the US military, which has thousands of troops stationed in South Korea, banned its personnel from flying with the airline. The US Federal Aviation Administration downgraded South Korea's safety rating and Canadian authorities have informed Korean Air management that they are considering revoking the company's overflight and landing privileges in Canadian airspace.
Amid the controversy, an external audit of Korean Air's operations was leaked to the public. Korean Air officials were quick to denounce the 40-page report as sensational and unrepresentative, but by then it was too late to save the company's reputation. The audit identified instances of crew members smoking cigarettes during refueling and in the cargo area on the runway; and when the plane was in the air. "The crew read newspapers during the flight," the test states, "often with the newspapers raised so they would not notice when a warning light came on." The training standards for the "classic" 747 were so poor that "there is some concern that the classic fleet first officer could land the aircraft if the captain were completely incapacitated."
At the time of the fall of Shanghai, Korean President Kim Dae-jung felt compelled to speak out. "The Korean Air issue is not a single company issue, but a countrywide issue," he said. “The credibility of our country is at stake.” Kim then traded Korean Air's presidential plane to his latest rival, Asiana.
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But then a small miracle happened. Korean Air turned around. Today, the airline is a regular member of the renowned SkyTeam alliance. Its safety record since 1999 is impeccable. In 2006, Korean Air received Air Transport World's Phoenix Award in recognition of its transformation. Aviation experts will tell you that Korean Air is now as safe as any airline in the world.
In this chapter we carry out an accident investigation: Listen to the cockpit recorder "Black Box"; review flight logs; observe weather, terrain and airport conditions; And compare the Guam crash to other very similar plane crashes to understand exactly how the company went from being the worst kind of fugitive to one of the best airlines in the world. It is a complex and sometimes strange story. But it all comes down to one very simple fact, the same fact that runs through the tangled history of Harlan and the Michigan students. Korean Air was unsuccessful, not cleaned up, until it recognized the importance of its cultural heritage.
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3. Plane crashes rarely happen in real life like they do in the movies. Some parts of the engine fail to explode in a fiery roar. The rudder does not break suddenly under the force of the throw. The captain doesn't sigh, "OMG," as he's thrown back against the seat. The typical airliner is about as reliable as a toaster at this point in its development. Plane crashes are more likely to be the result of an accumulation of minor difficulties and seemingly trivial failures.*
For example, in a typical accident, the weather is bad, not necessarily terrible, but bad enough that the pilot feels a little more stressed than normal. In an overwhelming number of accidents, the plane is delayed, so the pilots are in a hurry. In 52 percent of the accidents, the pilot was awake for twelve hours or more at the time of the accident, that is, tired and unable to think clearly. And 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together, so they're not comfortable with each other. That's when the bugs start, and it's not just a bug. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the pilots does something wrong, which in itself is not a problem. Then one of them makes another mistake, which together with the first mistake is not a disaster. But then they make a third mistake, and then another, and another, and another, and another, and it's the combination of all those mistakes that leads to disaster.
Also, these seven mistakes are rarely knowledge or skill issues. It's not that the pilot has to complete a critical technical maneuver and fail. The types of mistakes that cause plane crashes are invariably errors in teamwork and communication. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn't tell the other pilot. One pilot makes a mistake and the other pilot doesn't realize the mistake. A difficult situation must be resolved through a complex series of steps, and somehow the pilots don't coordinate and lose one of them.
"The entire cabin design requires two people to operate, and this process works best when one person reviews the other or both people are willing to participate," says Earl Weener, who was Boeing's chief safety engineer for many years. “Airplanes are very unforgiving if you don't do things right. And it has long been understood that it is safer for two people to fly the plane cooperatively than for a single pilot to fly the plane and another person to take control only when the pilot is incapacitated. .
Consider, for example, the famous (in aviation circles, at least) crash of the Colombian airliner Avianca Flight 052 in January 1990. The Avianca crash so perfectly illustrates the characteristics of the "modern" plane crash that it is studied in the flight schools. In fact, what happened on that flight is so similar to what would happen in Guam seven years later that it's a good place to start our investigation into the mystery of the Korean Air plane crash problem.
The captain of the plane was Laureano Caviedes. His first officer was Mauricio Klotz. They were en route from Medellín, Colombia, to Kennedy Airport in New York. The weather that night was bad. A northeasterly wind swept up and down the east coast, bringing with it thick fog and strong winds. 203 flights were delayed at the Newark airport. 200 flights were delayed at LaGuardia airport, 161 at Philadelphia, 53 at Boston's Logan airport and 99 at Kennedy. Due to weather, Avianca was held up by air traffic control three times en route to New York. The plane flew nineteen minutes over Norfolk, Virginia, and twenty-five over Atlantic City.
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nine minutes and forty miles south of Kennedy Airport for another twenty-nine minutes. After an hour and fifteen minutes of delay, Avianca was cleared to land. When the plane flew towards his
During final approach, the pilots encountered strong wind shear. At one point, they flew into a strong headwind, forcing them to add extra power to maintain momentum on the descent. The next moment, without warning, the headwind dropped sharply and they were traveling too fast to reach the runway. Normally, the aircraft would fly on autopilot in this situation and react immediately and appropriately to the wind shear. But the plane's autopilot was faulty and it shut down. At the last moment, the pilot stopped and turned. The plane made a wide arc over Long Island and once again approached Kennedy Airport. Suddenly, one of the plane's engines failed. Seconds later, a second engine failed. "Show me the runway!" the pilot yelled, desperately hoping to get Kennedy close enough to glide his crippled plane to a safe landing. But Kennedy was sixteen miles away.
The 707 crashed into the estate of tennis champion John McEnroe's father in the luxurious Long Island town of Oyster Bay. 73 of the 158 passengers on board died. It took less than a day before the cause of the accident was determined: "Out of fuel." There was nothing wrong with the plane. There was nothing wrong with the airport. The pilots were not drunk or high. The plane ran out of gasoline.
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4. "This is a classic case," said Suren Ratwatte, a veteran pilot who has spent years studying human factors, which is how people interact with complex systems like nuclear power plants and airplanes. Hailing from Sri Lanka, Ratwatte is a lively man in his forties who has flown commercial aircraft throughout his adult life. We were sitting in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan. He had just landed at Kennedy Airport in a jumbo jet after a long flight from Dubai. Ratwatt knew the Avianca case well. He began to list the typical preconditions of an accident. A northern easter. The delayed flight. The small glitch with the autopilot. The three long holding patterns meant not only an extra eighty minutes of flight time, but also extra flights at low altitudes, where a plane burns much more fuel than it does in the thin air above the clouds.
"They flew a seven zero seven, which is an older aircraft and very difficult to fly," Ratwatte said. “This requires a lot of work. The flight controls are not hydraulically operated. They are connected to the physical metal surfaces of the aircraft by a series of pulleys and tie rods. You have to be very strong to fly this plane. You raise it above the sky. It is as much physical effort as rowing a boat. I fly my current plane with the tips of my fingers. I use a joystick. My instruments are huge. His were the size of coffee cups. And your autopilot is gone. So the captain had to look around him with these nine coffee cup-sized instruments while his right hand controlled the speed and his left hand steered the plane. He was nervous. He had no more resources to do otherwise. That's what happens when you're tired. His ability to make decisions diminishes. You start to miss things, things you would pick up on any other day.
In the black box recovered from the crash site, Captain Caviedes can be heard repeatedly asking for ATC instructions for the final time of the flight to be translated into Spanish, as if he no longer had the energy to use English. Nine times he also asked to repeat the instructions. "Tell me louder," he said near the end. "I'm not listening." As the plane circled southeast of Kennedy for forty minutes, when everyone in the cabin knew full well that he was running out of fuel, the pilot could easily have asked to land in Philadelphia, just sixty miles away. But he didn't: it was as if he had closed in New York. In the aborted landing, the aircraft's ground proximity warning system fired no fewer than fifteen times, informing the captain that he was lowering the aircraft too far. He seemed clueless. When he aborted the landing, he should have turned immediately, and he didn't. He was exhausted.
Meanwhile, the cabin was filled with a heavy silence. His first officer, Mauricio Klotz, is sitting next to Caviedes, and for long periods there is nothing but creaks and engine noises on the flight recorder. Klotz was responsible for all communications with ATC, which means his role that night was absolutely critical. But his demeanor was strangely passive. It wasn't until the third holding pattern southwest of Kennedy Airport that Klotz told ATC that he didn't think the plane had enough fuel to make it to another airport. The next thing the crew heard from ATC was "Just wait" and then "Cleared for Kennedy Airport." Investigators later surmised that the Avianca pilots must have assumed that ATC put them at the front of the line, ahead of dozens of other planes circling over Kennedy. In fact, they were not. They were just added to the end of the line. It was a crucial misunderstanding on which the fate of the plane would ultimately depend. But did the pilots raise the question again and seek clarification? No. They also didn't mention the subject of fuel for another thirty-eight minutes.
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5. The silence in the cabin made no sense to Ratwatte. And to explain that, Ratwatte began to tell what happened to him that morning when he came from Dubai. "We had this lady back there," she said. "We thought she was having a stroke. Learning. Throwing up. In poor condition. She was an Indian woman whose daughter lives in the United States. Her husband spoke neither English nor Hindi, only Punjabi. No one could communicate with him. He seemed to have just They came from a village in Punjab and they had absolutely no money. I was actually in Moscow when it happened, but I knew we couldn't go to Moscow. I didn't know what would happen to these people if we did. I said to the co-pilot, 'You're flying the plane. We have to go to Helsinki.'”
The immediate problem Ratwatte faced was that they were less than halfway through a very long flight, which meant they had much more fuel in their tanks than normal when it came time to land. "We were sixty tons over the maximum landing weight," he said. "So now I had a decision to make. I could drain the fuel. But countries hate when you dump fuel. It's a complicated thing and they would have sent me somewhere in the Baltic Sea, it would have taken forty minutes and you would probably have died. So I decided landing anyway. My choice."
This meant that the plane "landed hard". They couldn't use the autolanding system because it wasn't set up for such a heavy aircraft.
"It was at that moment that I took control," he continued. “I had to make sure the plane landed safely; otherwise, there is a risk of structural damage. It could have been a real disaster. There are also performance issues when you are heavy. If you have to go off the track and turn around, you may not have enough momentum to get back up.
"That was a lot of work. You juggle a lot of balls. You have to do it right. Because during the flight there were two other pilots. So I picked them up and they also participated in everything. We had four people upstairs who helped a lot to coordinate everything. There had never been before Been to Helsinki I had no idea what the airport was like, no idea if the runways were long enough I had to find an approach, figure out if we can get there, figure out the performance parameters and tell the company what we're At one point, I spoke to three different people: Dubai, MedLink, a service in Arizona where they provided a doctor on call, and I spoke to the two doctors who were taking care of the lady in the background.It went on non-stop for forty minutes.
"We were lucky that the weather in Helsinki was really nice," he said. "Trying to fly in bad weather, plus a heavy plane, plus an unknown airport, that's not good. For Finland, a first world country, they were well positioned and very flexible. I told them, 'I'm heavy. I'd like to land against the wind. You want to slow down in this situation. They said no problem. They take us in the opposite direction that they normally use. We pass through the town that they usually avoid because of the noise.
Remember what was asked of Ratwatte. He had to be a good pilot. Needless to say, he had to have the technical skills to land hard. But almost everything else Ratwatte did to make the crash landing a success fell outside the strict definition of pilot skill.
He had to weigh the risk of damaging his plane against the risk to the woman's life, and once that decision was made, he had to think about the implications of Helsinki vs. Moscow for the sick passenger in the back seat. He had to quickly familiarize himself with the parameters of an airport he had never seen before: could it handle one of the largest planes in the sky with sixty tons in excess of its normal range?
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landing weight? But above all he had to talk: with the passengers, with the doctors, with his co-pilot, with the second crew upon waking up, with his superiors in Dubai, with ATC in Helsinki. It is safe to say that in the forty minutes between the passenger's arrival and landing in Helsinki, there was no more than a handful of seconds of cabin silence. What was required of Ratwatte was that he communicate, and communicate as clearly and transparently as possible, not just in the sense of commanding, but in the sense of encouraging, persuading, reassuring, negotiating, and sharing information.
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6. Here, on the other hand, is the transcript of Avianca 052 as the plane heads for its first aborted landing. The problem is the weather. The fog is so thick that Klotz and Caviedes cannot see where they are. However, pay attention not to the content of the conversation, but to the form. In particular, note the length of the pauses between lines and the tone of Klotz's comments.
CAVIEDES: The line, where is it? I do not see it. I do not see it.
You take the landing gear. The captain asks Klotz to order another traffic circuit. Ten seconds pass.
CAVIEDES [apparently to himself]: We don't have gas...
17 seconds pass while the pilots give each other technical instructions.
CAVIEDES: I don't know what happened to the catwalk. I have not seen. KLOTZ: I didn't see it.
Air traffic control arrives and tells them to turn left.
CAVIEDES: Tell them we're in an emergency! KLOTZ [To ATC]: That's on course for one-eight-zero and, oh, let's try again.
We're running out of fuel.
Imagine the scene in the cockpit. The plane is dangerously low on fuel. You just fired the first shot on a landing. You have no idea how long the plane can fly. The captain is desperate: "Tell them we're in an emergency!" And what does Klotz say? That's correct for one-eight-zero in the header, and oh, let's try again. We're running out of fuel.
First of all, the phrase "run out of fuel" has no meaning in air traffic control terminology. All aircraft, by definition, run out of fuel as they approach their destination. Did Klotz mean that 052 didn't have enough fuel left to get to another alternate airport? Did he mean that they were starting to worry about fuel? Next, consider the structure of the critical sentence. Klotz begins a routine scan of the ATC instructions, not mentioning his fuel concerns until the second half of the sentence. It's like saying in a restaurant, "Yeah, I'll have another coffee and oh, I'll choke on a chicken bone." How seriously would the waiter take you? The air traffic controller Klotz spoke to later said he "just took it as a side note." On stormy nights, air traffic controllers constantly hear pilots talking about running out of fuel. Furthermore, the "ah" that Klotz inserts between the two halves of his sentence serves to diminish the meaning of what he is saying. According to another air traffic controller involved with 052 that night, Klotz spoke "in a very nonchalant manner... There was no urgency in the voice.
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7. The term linguists use to describe what Klotz was doing at the time is "soft speech," which refers to any attempt to minimize or disguise the meaning of what was said. We soften when we are polite, or when we are embarrassed or embarrassed, or when we bow down to authority. If you want your boss to do you a favor, don't say, "I need this by Monday." You say, "Don't worry if it's too much trouble, but if you have a chance to check it out over the weekend, that would be wonderful." In such a situation, a reduction is entirely appropriate. However, in other situations, such as a cabin on a stormy night, it is a problem.
Linguists Ute Fischer and Judith Orasanu once presented the following hypothetical scenario to a group of captains and first officers and asked how they would react:
You see an area of heavy precipitation on weather radar 25 miles away. [The pilot] is maintaining his current heading at Mach 0.73, although embedded storms have been reported in his area and he will encounter moderate turbulence. He wants to make sure that his plane doesn't enter that area.
Question: What do you say to the pilot?
In the minds of Fischer and Orasanu, there were at least six ways to convince the pilot to change course and avoid inclement weather, each with a different degree of mitigation.
1. Command: "Turn right 30 degrees" This is the most direct and explicit way of saying something imaginable. It's zero mitigation.
2. Crew Commitment: "I think we need to detour now." Notice the use of "we" and the fact that the request is now much less specific. This is a bit softer.
3. Crew suggestion: "Let's work around the weather." Implicit in this statement is "we are in this together".
4. Question: "In which direction would you like to veer?" This is even smoother than a team suggestion, since the speaker admits that they are not in charge.
5th preference: "I think it would be wise to turn left or right."6. Note: "That 25-mile turn looks bad." That is the mildest statement of all.
Fischer and Orasanu noted that most captains said they would issue an order in this situation: "Turn right 30 degrees." You spoke with a subordinate. They were not afraid to be frank. The first officers, on the other hand, talked to their boss and therefore opted for the softer alternative. They hinted.
It's hard to read Fischer and Orasanu's study and not be in the least bit alarmed, because a clue is the hardest type of request to crack and the easiest to reject. In the 1982 Air Florida crash outside Washington, DC, the copilot tried three times to tell the captain that the plane had a dangerous amount of ice on its wings. But he listens to how he says it to himself. They are all tips:
FIRST MATE: See the ice hanging from his back, oh, back there, see that?
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After:
FIRST MATE: See all those icicles back there and everything?
And so:
FIRST MATE: Wow, this is a losing battle here trying to unfreeze these things, that [gives] a false sense of security, that's all it does.
Finally, upon receiving takeoff clearance, the first officer updates two steps at the crew's suggestion:
FIRST MATE: Let's check those [wing] tips again since we've been here a while. CAPTAIN: I think we'll be here in a minute.
The last thing the copilot says to the captain just before the plane crashes into the Potomac River is not a clue, a suggestion, or an order. It's a simple statement of fact, and this time the captain agrees.
FIRST MATE: Larry, let's go down, Larry. CAPTAIN: I know.
Mitigation explains one of the great anomalies of air accidents. On commercial airlines, captains and first officers share flight duties equally. But historically, accidents are much more likely to occur when the captain is in the "flying seat." This doesn't seem to make sense at first since the captain is almost always the more experienced pilot. But consider the Air Florida crash. If the first mate was the captain, would he have hinted three times? No, he would have ordered, and the plane would not have crashed. Planes are safer when the less experienced pilot is flying because it means the second pilot is not afraid to speak up.
The fight against mitigation has become one of the great crusades of commercial aviation in the last fifteen years. All major airlines now have what is known as "Crew Resource Management" training, designed to teach young crew members how to communicate clearly and assertively. For example, many airlines teach a standard procedure for co-pilots to challenge the pilot if they think something has gone wrong. ("Captain, I'm concerned..." Then: "Captain, I'm not comfortable with..." And if the Captain still doesn't respond, "Captain, I think the situation is unsafe." And if that fails, you you need the copilot to take control of the plane.) Aviation experts will tell you that it is not the success of this reduction war that explains the extraordinary drop in aviation accidents in recent years.
"At a very basic level, one of the things we insist on at my airline is that the first officer and captain call each other by first name," Ratwatte said. "We think that helps. It's harder to say 'Captain, you're doing something wrong' than it is to use a name." Ratwatte took damage control very seriously.
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Serious. You cannot be a student of the Avianca accident and not feel like it. He continued: "One thing I personally try to do is put myself down a bit. I tell my co-pilot, 'I don't fly often. Three to four times a month. You fly a lot more. If you see me doing something stupid, it's because I don't fly much. Well, tell me. Help me.' I hope this helps you talk.
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8. Back in the cockpit of Avianca 052. The plane is now moving away from Kennedy after the first failed attempt to land. Klotz just radioed ATC trying to figure out when they can try to land again. Caviedes turns to him.
CAVIEDES What did he say? KLOTZ: I already told you we'll try again because now we can't..."
Four seconds of silence pass.
CAVIEDES: Tell him we're in an emergency.
Another four seconds of silence pass. The captain tries again.
CAVIEDES Did you tell him? KLOTZ: Yes, sir. I advise.
Klotz starts talking to ATC - goes over routine details.
KLOTZ: One-five-zero, two thousand Avianca zero-five-two Heavy.
The captain is obviously on the verge of panic.
CAVIEDES: Tell him we don't have gas.
Klotz is back on the radio with ATC.
KLOTZ: Up and hold three thousand and, ah, we're running out of fuel, sir.
There it is again. There is no mention of the magic word "emergency" that air traffic controllers are trained to use. Just "running out of gas, sir" at the end of a sentence, preceded by an extenuating "ah". If you count the errors, Avianca's crew is now in double digits.
CAVIEDES: Have you already warned us that we don't have fuel? KLOTZ: Yes, sir. I already advised him... CAVIEDES: Good.
If it weren't for the prelude to tragedy, their comings and goings would resemble an Abbott and Costello.
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comedy routine A little over a minute goes by.
ATC: And Avianca zero-five-two heavy, oh, I'll take it about fifteen miles northeast and then return it on approach. How are you and your fuel?
KLOTZ: I think so. Many thanks.
I think. Many thanks. You are about to fall! One of the stewardesses enters the cabin to find out the seriousness of the situation. The flight engineer points to the empty fuel gauge and gestures with his finger to slit her throat.* But she doesn't say anything. No one will do that in the next five minutes either. There's radio talk and routine business, and then the flight engineer yells, "Shut down engine number four!"
Caviedes says, "Show me the track," but the track is sixteen miles away. Thirty-six seconds of silence pass. The plane's air traffic controller calls for the last time.
ATC: Do you, uh, do you have enough fuel to get to the airport?
Finish the transcript.
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9. "What you need to know about this crash," Ratwatte said, "is that New York air traffic controllers are notorious for being rude, aggressive and intimidating. They're pretty good too. They handle a phenomenal amount of traffic in an environment very limited. There is a famous story about a pilot who got lost while smuggling near JFK. You have no idea how easy it is to do that in JFK once you're in place. It's a maze. However, one controller got mad at him and said, "Stop. do nothing Don't talk to me until I talk to you.” And he left it there. Finally, the pilot takes the microphone and says: “Ma'am. Was I married to you in a past life?
"You're amazing. The way they see it is 'I'm in control'. Shut up and do what I tell you. "They'll attack you. And if you don't like what they tell you, you have to defend yourself. And then they'll say, 'Okay, then. But if you don't, they will criticize you. I remember there was a British Airways flight going to New York. They were cornered by New York Air Traffic Control. British pilots said, "You should go to Heathrow and learn to fly a plane." If you're not used to this kind of give and take, ATC in New York can be very, very intimidating. And those Avianca guys were intimidated by rapid fire.”
It's impossible to imagine Ratwatte not supporting the Kennedy ATC, not because he's obnoxious, aggressive or has a big ego, but because he sees the world differently. If he needed help in the cockpit, he'd wake up the second crew. If he thought Moscow was wrong, he'd just go to Helsinki, and if Helsinki did it downwind, well, he'd convince them to do it downwind. That morning, as they were leaving Helsinki, he put the plane on the wrong runway, and his co-pilot was quick to point out the mistake. The memory made Ratwatte laugh. “Masa is Swiss. He was very happy to correct me. He gave me shit all the way back.
Ratwatte continued: "All the guys had to do was tell the controller, 'We don't have the fuel to do what you're trying to do.'" All they had to do was say, "We can't do that. We have to land in the next ten minutes. I couldn't relay this to the controller.
At this point, Ratwatte began to speak cautiously, on the verge of making cultural generalizations that often make us uncomfortable. But what happened to Avianca was so bizarre, seemingly inexplicable, that he needed a fuller explanation than Klotz's simple incompetence and the captain's exhaustion. Something deeper, more structural, was going on in this cabin. What if something from the Colombian pilot caused this accident? “You see, no American pilot would put up with that. That's it," Ratwatte said. "They'd say, 'Listen, mate. I have to land.'”
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10. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede worked for the human resources department at IBM's European headquarters. Hofstede's job involved traveling the world and interviewing employees, asking them how they solved problems, how they worked together, and how they felt about authority, among other things. The questionnaires were long and complicated, and over time Hofstede was able to build a huge database to analyze how cultures differ from one another. Today, the "Hofstede dimensions" are among the most widespread paradigms in intercultural psychology.
Hofstede, for example, argued that cultures can usefully be differentiated by how much they expect individuals to take care of themselves. He called this measure the "Individualism-Collectivism Scale." The country with the highest individualism score on this scale is the United States. Not surprisingly, the United States is also the only developed country in the world that does not offer universal health care to its citizens. At the other end of the scale is Guatemala.
Another Hofstede dimension is "Avoiding uncertainty." How well does a culture tolerate ambiguity? Here are the top 5 countries for "uncertainty avoidance" according to the Hofstede database, i.e. the countries most reliant on rules and plans and most likely to follow procedures regardless of circumstances:
1. Greece2. Portugal3. Guatemala4. Uruguay5. Belgium
The last five, that is, the cultures most capable of tolerating ambiguity, are: 49. Hong Kong50. Sweden51. Denmark52. Jamaica53. Singapore
It is important to note that Hofstede did not suggest that there is a right or wrong place on any of these scales. He also did not say that the position of a culture in any of its dimensions is a predictor of how someone from that country behaves: it is not impossible, for example, that someone from Guatemala is highly individualistic.
What he said instead was something very similar to what Nisbett and Cohen had argued after studying careers at the University of Michigan. Each of us has our own personality. But beyond that lie biases, assumptions, and reflexes that have been passed down to us through the history of the community in which we grew up, and these differences are extraordinarily specific.
For example, Belgium and Denmark are only an hour's flight from each other. Danes are a lot like Belgians and if you were dropped off on a street corner in Copenhagen you wouldn't think it was so different from a street corner in Brussels. But when it comes to avoiding uncertainty, the two nations agree.
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it couldn't be further away. In fact, Danes have more in common with Jamaicans when it comes to tolerating ambiguity than they do with some of their European peers. Denmark and Belgium may share a kind of broad European liberal democratic tradition, but they have different histories, different political structures, different religious traditions, and different languages, food, architecture, and literature, going back hundreds and hundreds of years. And the sum of all these differences is that Danes tend to react very differently to Belgians in certain situations that require dealing with risk and uncertainty.
However, of all Hofstede's dimensions, perhaps the most interesting is what he called the "Power Distance Index" (PDI). Power distance is related to attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically how much a particular culture values and respects authority. To measure this, Hofsted asked questions such as "In your experience, how often does the following problem arise: Are employees afraid of contradicting their superiors?" To what extent do "less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect an unequal distribution of power"? To what extent are older people respected and feared? Do those in power have special privileges?
“In countries with a low power distance index,” Hofstede wrote in his classic text Consequences of Culture:
Power is something that the powerful will almost be ashamed of and try to minimize. I once heard a Swedish university official (low PDI) say that he was trying not to appear powerful in order to exercise power. Leaders can increase their informal status by avoiding formal symbols. In Austria (low PDI), Prime Minister Bruno Kreisky was known to sometimes take the tram to work. In 1974 I saw the Prime Minister of the Netherlands (under PDI), Joop denUyl, on vacation in Portugal with his motorhome. Such behavior by those in power would be highly unlikely in Belgium or France with high POIs.*
You can imagine the impact Hofstede's discoveries had on people in the aviation industry. After all, what was his big battle over softened language and teamwork all about? It was an attempt to reduce the force distance in the cockpit. Hofstede's power distance question: "In his experience, how often does the following problem arise: Employees are afraid of contradicting their superiors?" And Hofstede's work suggested something that had never occurred to anyone in the aviation world: that the task of persuading first officers to assert themselves would depend heavily on their culture's division of power distance.
That is what Ratwatte meant when he said that no American had ever been so mortally intimidated by the air traffic controllers at Kennedy Airport. America is a classic low power distance culture. When the moment of truth arrives, Americans fall back on their Americanness, and that Americanity means that the air traffic controller is seen as an equal. But which country is on the other side of the power distance scale? Colombia.
After the Avianca crash, psychologist Robert Helmreich, who more than anyone has campaigned to defend the role of culture in explaining pilot behavior, wrote a brilliant analysis of the crash, arguing that Klotz's behavior could not be explained. without him being able to understand.
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his nationality, that his situation that day was uniquely that of someone who had a deep and abiding respect for authority. Helmreich wrote:
The high power distance of the Colombians may have caused frustration on the part of the first officer because the captain has not demonstrated the kind of clear (if not autocratic) decision-making expected in high power distance cultures. The first and second officers may be waiting for the captain to make decisions, but they may not be ready to suggest alternatives.
Klotz sees himself as a subordinate. It's not his job to solve the crisis. He is from the captain, and the captain is exhausted and says nothing. Then there are the dominant air traffic controllers at Kennedy Airport who give orders to the planes. Klotz tries to tell them that he is in trouble. But he uses the language of his own culture, he speaks as a subordinate would speak to a superior. However, the inspectors are not Colombian. They are New Yorkers with low energetic distance. They do not see a hierarchical gulf between themselves and the pilots in the air, and for them a pilot's discreet speech does not mean that the speaker is adequately deferential to a superior. This means that the pilot has no problems.
At one point in the transcript, the cultural miscommunication between the controllers and Klotz becomes so apparent it's almost painful to read. It is the last exchange between Avianca and the control tower, minutes before the accident. Klotz simply said, "I think so. Thanks" when asked about the fuel status by the pilot. Captain Caviedes then turns to Klotz.
CAVIEDES What did he say? KLOTZ: The guy is crazy.
Disgusted! Klotz's feelings are hurt! Your plane is minutes away from disaster. But he cannot escape the dynamics dictated by his culture, in which subordinates must respect the dictates of their superiors. According to him, he tried unsuccessfully to communicate his situation and his only conclusion is that he must have insulted his superiors in the control tower in some way.
After the Kennedy accident, the management of the Avianca airline performed an autopsy. Avianca had just suffered four accidents in quick succession -Barranquilla, Cúcuta, Madrid and New York- and the four cases, the airline concluded, "had to do with aircraft that were in perfect flight condition, with a crew without physical disabilities." rated average or above. average flight capability, and accidents still occurred.” (my italics)
In the company accident in Madrid, the report continues, the co-pilot tried to warn the commander of the danger of the situation:
The copilot was right. But they died because... when the co-pilot asked questions, his implied suggestions were too weak. The captain's response was to ignore him completely. Perhaps the copilot did not want to appear rebellious and question the captain's judgment, or perhaps he did not want to embarrass himself because he knew the pilot had a lot of experience flying over the area. The co-pilot should have defended his own opinion more strongly ...
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Our ability to be successful in what we do depends largely on where we come from and being a good runner and coming from a high power distance culture is a tough combination. By the way, Colombia does not have the highest PDI. Helmreich and his colleague Ashleigh Merritt once measured the POI of pilots around the world. Number one was Brazil. Number two was South Korea.*
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11. The National Transportation Safety Board, the US agency responsible for investigating plane crashes, is headquartered in a squat 1970s office building on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, DC. Outside the long corridors of the agency are laboratories littered with aircraft wreckage: a crushed chunk of an engine turbine, a damaged chunk of a helicopter rotor. On a shelf in one of the labs is the cockpit voice and data recorder, the so-called black box, from the devastating 1996 ValuJet crash in Florida, which killed 110 people. The recorder is housed in a shoebox-sized casing of thick, hardened steel, and there is a jagged hole in one end of the box, as if someone, or rather something, had staked it with a knife. Some of the NTSB investigators are engineers who reconstruct accidents from physical evidence. Others are pilots. However, a surprising number of them are psychologists whose job it is to listen to the cockpit recorder and reconstruct what the flight crew said and did in the last few minutes before the crash. One of the NTSB's top black box experts is a lanky fifty-year-old psychologist named Malcolm Brenner, and Brenner was one of the investigators for the Korean Air crash in Guam.
"Normally this approach is not difficult on Guam," Brenner began. The Guam airport has something called a Glidescope, which is like a giant beam of light that extends from the airport into the sky, and the pilot just follows the beam to the runway. But on this particular night the glideslope was low. "He was out of commission," Brenner said. “It had been sent to another island to repair it. So there was a message to the aviators that the glideslope was not working."
In general, this shouldn't have been a big problem. There were approximately 1,500 safe landings at the Guam airport in the month the glider was serviced. It was just a little thing, actually an inconvenience, that made the landing a bit more difficult.
"The second complication was the weather," Brenner continued. “Usually in the South Pacific there are these brief weather events. But they go fast. You don't have storms. It is a tropical paradise. But that night there were some small cells, and it happened that that night they wanted to fly to one of those small cells a few kilometers from the airport. So the captain has to decide how accurate my landing procedure is? Well, they've been cleared for the so-called VOR/DME approach. It's complicated. It's a pain in the ass. It requires a lot of coordination to set it up. You have to go down in stages. But then, miles away, the captain accidentally spots the lights of Guam. Then he relaxes. And he says, "We're taking a visual approach."
The VOR is a beacon that emits a signal that pilots can use to calculate their altitude when approaching an airport. This is what pilots relied on before the glider was invented. The commander's strategy was to approach the aircraft through the VOR and visually land the aircraft once he could see the runway lights. It seemed to make sense. Pilots make visual landings all the time. But every time a pilot chooses a plane, he has to prepare a backup in case something goes wrong. And not this captain.
“They should have coordinated. I should have reported the [DME] declines,” Brenner continued. "But he doesn't talk about it. The storm cells are all around him, and what the captain seems to do is assume that eventually he'll come out of the clouds and see the airport, and if he doesn't see it five hundred and sixty feet away, he'll let it go." it will just turn around now that would work except for one more thing the VOR you base this strategy on is not at the airport your
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two points five miles away on Nimitz Hill. There are several airports in the world where this is true. Sometimes you can follow the VOR down and it will take you directly to the airport. If you follow the VOR here, you'll go directly to Nimitz Hill.
The pilot knew the VOR. He was clearly indicated on the airport charts. He had previously flown to Guam eight times and he specifically mentioned it in the pre-briefing. But then again, it was 1 am. m. and he had been up since 6 a.m. m. the previous day.
"We think there was fatigue," Brenner continued. "It's a delayed flight. He flies in and arrives at 1am Korean time. Then you spend a few hours on the ground and fly back when the sun rises. The captain had flown with him a month earlier. In this case he slept in first class Now he's flying and says he's very tired."
So there they are, three classic preconditions for a plane crash, the same three that set the stage for Avianca 052: a minor technical glitch; bad weather; and a tired pilot. None of them alone would be enough for an accident. But all three together require the combined efforts of everyone in the locker room. And that's when Korean Air 801 ran into trouble.
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12. Here is the flight recorder recording of the last thirty minutes of KAL Flight 801: It begins with the captain complaining of exhaustion.
01:20:01. CAPTAIN: If this round trip takes more than nine hours, we might get something. We gain nothing with eight hours. Eight hours does not help us at all…. They make us work to the maximum, even to the maximum. Probably...cabin crew hotel costs will be saved and flight hours maximized. However, they force us to give our best.
The sound of a man shifting in his seat is heard. A minute passes.
0121:13. CAPTAIN: Uh... I really... dream. [words unintelligible] FIRST OFFICER: Of course.
Then comes one of the most critical moments of the flight. The co-pilot decides to speak:
FIRST MATE Don't you think it's going to rain more? In this area, here?
The co-pilot must have thought long and hard before making this comment. He didn't fly with the relaxed camaraderie of Suren Ratwatte's cockpit. Korean Air crew often waited at layovers for junior officers to serve the commander to the point of cooking him dinner or buying him gifts. As a former Korean Air pilot put it, the sensibility in many of the airline's cabins was that "the captain makes the decisions and does what he wants, when he wants, how he wants, and everyone is quiet and doing nothing." ". The Korean Air report, which was leaked anonymously to the Internet, one of the examiners tells the story of a seat on a Korean Air flight where the co-pilot got confused when he heard air traffic control and diverted the plane onto another plane. . Airplane. “The flight engineer noticed something was wrong, but he didn't say anything. The co-pilot wasn't happy either, but he didn't say anything... Despite the [good] visibility, the crew didn't check and saw that the current heading would not take them to the airfield. Eventually, the plane's radar picked up the mistake, and then came the catchphrase: "The captain hit the co-pilot with the back of his hand for making the mistake."
Hit him with the back of your hand? When the three pilots met at Kimpo that night to prepare for the flight, the co-pilot met
and the engineer would have bowed to the captain. Then they all shook hands. "Cheeoom boeb seom ni da," the co-pilot might have said respectfully. "It's the first time I've seen you." The Korean language has no less than six different levels of conversation depending on the relationship between the addressee and the addressee: formal bowing, informal bowing, direct, familiar, intimate, and simple. The copilot would not have dared to use any of the more intimate or familiar forms when addressing the captain. This is a culture where a lot of attention is paid to the relative position of two people in a conversation.
Korean linguist Ho-min Sohn writes:
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At a dining table, a person of lower rank must wait until a person of higher rank sits down and starts eating, while the reverse is not true; do not smoke in the presence of a social superior; when he drinks with a social superior, the subordinate hides the glass from him and distances himself from the superior; ...a Korean bow when greeting a social superior (but not inferior); a Korean must step up when an obvious social superior appears, and he cannot step up when an obvious social superior appears. All behavior and social action is carried out in order of seniority or rank; As the saying goes, chanmul to wi alay ka ita, there is even an order to drink cold water.
So if the copilot says, "Don't you think it's going to rain more? In this area, here? We know what you mean by that, captain. We were committed to a visual approach, without any plan, and outside the weather is terrible Do you think we'll get out of the clouds in time to see the runway, but what if we don't, it's pitch black outside, it's pouring with rain, and the visor has failed.
But he can't say that. He insinuates, and in his mind he tells everything he can to a superior. The co-pilot will not mention the time again.
Shortly after this moment, the plane briefly emerges from the clouds and in the distance the pilots see lights.
“Is it Guam?” asks the flight engineer. Then after a pause, he says, "It's Guam, Guam." The captain laughs. "Well!" But it's not good. It is an illusion. They came out of the clouds for a moment. but they still are
Twenty miles from the airport and still very bad weather ahead. The flight engineer knows this because it is his job to monitor the weather, so he now decides to talk.
"Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot," he says. Did the weather radar help us a lot? A second piece of advice from the cabin. what the engineer
means exactly what the first mate meant. This is not a night to rely on your eyes alone to land your plane. See what the weather radar tells us: there's trouble.
To western ears, it seems strange that the flight engineer only raised this issue once. Western communication has what linguists call "sender-oriented," that is, it is seen as the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. Even in the tragic case of the Air Florida disaster, where the co-pilot only hints at the danger of ice, he hints at it four times and phrases his comments in four different ways to make it clear what he means. He may have been constrained by the power distance between himself and the captain, but he still operated within a Western cultural context that says that when mix-up occurs, the speaker is to blame.
But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver-oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said. In the engineer's mind, he said a lot.
To illustrate this, Sohn presents the following conversation, an exchange between an employee (Mr. Kim) and his boss, a department head (kwachang).
KWACHANG: It's cold and I'm hungry. [meaning: why don't you buy something to drink or eat?]
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MR. KIM: How about a drink? [Is: I'll buy you a drink.] KWACHANG: It's okay. Without worries. [Meaning: I will accept your offer if you repeat it.] MR. KIM: You must be hungry. how about we go [Meaning: I insist on treating him.] KWACHANG: Should I do that? [Meaning: I accept.]
There is a beauty in the subtlety of this exchange, the attention each party must pay to the motives and desires of the other. It is civilized in the strictest sense of the word: it does not tolerate insensitivity or indifference.
But powerful distance communication only works when the listener can listen carefully, and it only works when both interlocutors have the luxury of unraveling the other's meaning. It doesn't work in an airplane cockpit on a stormy night when an exhausted pilot tries to land at an airport with broken binoculars.
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13. In 2000, Korean Air finally took action and hired an outsider from Delta Air Lines, David Greenberg, to run operations.
Greenberg's first move was something that wouldn't make sense unless you understood the real root of Korean Air's problems. He rated the English skills of all airline crews. "Some were fine, some weren't," she recalls. “So we created a program to support and improve aviation English proficiency.” His second move was to get a Western company, a Boeing subsidiary called Alteon, to take over the company's education and training programs. "Alteon conducted their training in English," says Greenberg. “They didn't speak Korean.” Greenberg's rule was simple. Korean Air's new language was English, and if you wanted to continue as a pilot for the company, you had to be fluent in that language. "It wasn't a purge," he says. “Everyone had the same opportunities, and those who found the language problem difficult were allowed to go and study on their own. But the language was the filter. I don't recall anyone being fired for lack of flying skills.
Greenberg's reasoning was that English was the language of the aviation world. When pilots sat in the cockpit to review the written checklists that flight crews follow at each key point in the procedure, those checklists were in English. Every time they spoke to air traffic control anywhere in the world, those conversations were in English.
"If you're trying to land at JFK during rush hour, there's no nonverbal communication," Greenberg says. "People talk to people, so you have to make sure you understand what's going on. You can tell two Koreans next to each other don't have to speak English. But if they're arguing about what the guys outside said in English , then the language matters.”
Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. His problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural heritage. They needed an opportunity to break out of those roles when they were in the locker room, and language was key to that transformation. In English, they would be free of the clearly defined gradients of the Korean hierarchy: formal deference, informal deference, direct, familiar, intimate, and simple. Instead, the pilots were able to participate in a culture and language with a very different heritage.
However, the crucial part of Greenberg's reform is what he did not do. He didn't throw up his hands in despair. He didn't fire all of his Korean drivers and started over with drivers from a low power distance culture. He knew that cultural legacies matter, that they are powerful and ubiquitous, and that they endure long after their original usefulness has passed. But he didn't assume that legacies are an indelible part of who we are. He believed that if Koreans were honest about where they came from and were willing to confront aspects of their heritage that didn't fit into the world of aviation, they could change. He offered his pilots what everyone from hockey players to software moguls to acquisition lawyers has offered on the road to success: a chance to make their relationship his job.
After leaving Korean Air, Greenberg helped found a cargo airline called Cargo 360, taking several Korean pilots with him. They were all flight engineers who had been number three after the captain and first officer in the strict hierarchy of the original Korean Air. "These were people who operated in the old Korean Air environment for fifteen to eighteen years," he said. “They have accepted this subservient role. They were at the bottom of the stairs. us
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he reorganized them and placed them with the western team. They were a great success. They all changed their style. You take the initiative. They pull their share of the load. They do not wait for someone to guide them. They are people over 50 years of age, with a long history in a context, who have been retrained and are now successfully doing their job in a western cabin. We take them out of their culture and normalize them again.
This is an extraordinarily liberating example. If we understand what it really means to be a good pilot, if we understand how much culture, history, and the world outside of the individual it takes to be successful on the job, then we shouldn't despair of an airline where pilots fly downed planes. on the slopes of the mountains. We have a way of turning failure into success.
But first we must speak openly about a subject that we often prefer to ignore. When Boeing first published safety data in 1994 showing a clear correlation between a country's plane crashes and its score on the Hofstede dimensions, the company's researchers were practically wedded and tried not to offend. "We're not saying there's something here, but we think there's something there," Boeing's chief flight safety engineer said. Why are we so sensitive? Why is it so difficult to recognize that each of us comes from a culture with our own unique mix of strengths and weaknesses, inclinations and dispositions? Who we are cannot be separated from where we came from, and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.
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14. Back to the cabin.
“Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot.” No pilot would say that now. But that was in 1997, before Korean Air seriously addressed its problems of distancing from power. The captain was tired, and the true meaning of the engineer went over the captain's head.
"Yes," replies the captain. "You are very helpful." He is not listening. The plane flies towards the VOR lighthouse and the VOR is on the side of a mountain. The weather
it did not break. So the pilots can't see anything. The captain lowers the landing gear and extends the landing flaps.
At 1:41:48 the captain announces "wipers on" and the flight engineer turns on the wipers. He is raining now.
At 1:41:59 the co-pilot asks, "Not in sight?" He is looking for the clue. He can't see it. He has had a sinking feeling in his stomach for some time. A second later, the ground proximity warning system calls out in its toneless electronic voice, "Five hundred [feet]." The plane is five hundred feet from the ground. The terrain in this case is the side of Nimitz Hill. But the crew is confused because they think the ground means the runway, and how can that be if they can't see the runway? The flight engineer says, "Huh?" in a surprised tone. You can imagine them all thinking furiously, trying to reconcile their guess of where the plane is with what their instruments were telling them.
At 1:42:19 the copilot says: "We will make a missed approach." He has finally passed from the tip to the service of the crew: he wants to abort the landing. Later in the accident investigation, it was determined that if he had taken control of the aircraft at that point, he would have had sufficient time to climb up and out of Nimitz Hill. This is what first officers are trained to do when they believe a captain is clearly at fault. But it's one thing to learn this in a classroom and another to do it on the air with someone who can hit you back if you make a mistake.
1:42:20. ENGINEER Not in sight.
Finally, when the disaster looked them in the face, both the co-pilot and the engineer spoke. They want the captain to turn around, stop and land again. But it's too late.
1:42:21. FIRST OFFICER Not in sight, missed approach. 1:42:22. FLIGHT TECHNICIAN: Turn around. 1:42:23. CAPTAIN: Turn around. 1:42:24:05. GROUND PROXIMITY WARNING SYSTEM (GPWS): Cem.1:42:24:84. GPWS: Fifty.1:42:25:19. GPWS: Forty.1:42:25:50. GPWS: 30.1:42:25:78. GPWS: twenty.1:42:25:78. [initial impact sound]
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1:42:28:65. [tom's am] 1:42:28:91. [I'm groaning] 1:42:30:54. [Count on me]
END OF RECORDING
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CHAPTER EIGHT
Rice fields and math tests.
"No one who gets up before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year will not make his family rich."
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1. The gateway to the industrial heart of southern China runs through the broad, green chain of the Pearl River Delta. The country is shrouded in a thick, polluted fog. The roads are full of trailer trucks. Power lines crisscross the landscape. Factories making cameras, computers, watches, umbrellas and T-shirts stand alongside densely populated apartment blocks and fields of bananas and mangoes, sugar cane, papayas and pineapples destined for the export market. Few landscapes in the world have changed so much in such a short time. A generation ago, the sky would have been clear and the road would have been a two-lane highway. And a generation before that, you would only have seen rice paddies.
Two hours later, at the headwaters of the Pearl River, is the city of Guangzhou, and beyond Guangzhou, the remains of ancient China are easier to find. The scenery becomes unbelievably beautiful, rolling hills with limestone cliffs against the backdrop of the NanLing Mountains. Here and there stand the traditional khaki mud-brick huts of Chinese farmers. In the small towns there are open-air markets: chickens and geese in elaborate bamboo baskets, vegetables arranged in rows on the ground, pieces of pork on the tables, tobacco sold in logs. And there is rice everywhere, miles away. In winter, the rice fields are dry and covered with stubble from the previous year's crop. As soon as the plants are planted in spring, when the humid winds start to blow, they turn a magical green, and by the time of the first harvest, when the grains emerge from the tips of the rice shoots, the soil becomes a sea of yellow endless.
Rice has been cultivated in China for thousands of years. From China, rice farming techniques spread throughout East Asia: Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. Year after year, for as long as recorded history, farmers in Asia have engaged in the same relentless and intricate pattern of farming.
Rice fields are "cultivated" not "developed" like a wheat field. They don't just clear the trees, bushes and rocks and then plow. Rice fields are carved into the mountainsides in an elaborate series of terraces or meticulously constructed from swamps and river plains. It is necessary to irrigate a paddy field and then build a complex system of dikes around the field. Channels should be dug at the nearest water source and locks built in the dikes so that the flow of water can be adjusted to just the right amount of plants.
The rice field itself, in turn, must have hard clay soil; Otherwise, the water will simply seep into the ground. But, of course, rice seedlings cannot be planted in hard clay, so there must be a thick, soft layer of mud on top of the clay. And the terracotta pot, as it is called, must be carefully designed to drain properly and also to keep submerged plants at the optimal level. The rice has to be fertilized over and over again, which is another art. Traditionally, farmers used "night soil" (man-made) and a combination of burned compost, river mud, bean cakes, and hemp, and had to be careful not to over-fertilize or apply the right amount at the wrong time. it can be just as bad as a tool.
When it came time to plant, a Chinese farmer had hundreds of different varieties of rice to choose from, each offering a slightly different compromise between, say, yield and how fast it grew or how well it grew in seasons. of drought, drought or how poor soil fared. A farmer can grow a dozen or more different varieties at the same time, adjusting the mix from season to season.
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to manage the risk of crop failure. He or she (or more specifically the whole family since rice farming was a family affair)
Plant the seed in a specially prepared seedbed. After a few weeks, the seedlings were transplanted into the field in rows carefully spaced 15 cm apart and then meticulously tended.
Weeding was done by hand, diligent and incessant, because the seedlings could easily be suffocated by other plants. Sometimes each rice shoot was treated individually with a bamboo comb to repel insects. Meanwhile, the farmers had to keep checking the water levels and make sure the water didn't get too hot in the summer sun. And when the rice was ripe, the farmers would gather all their friends and relatives and harvest it in one fell swoop as quickly as possible so they could get a second crop before the winter dry season began.
Breakfast in southern China, at least for those who could afford it, consisted of porridge: white rice porridge,
with lettuce and hazelnut paste and bamboo shoots. Lunch was more congee. Dinner was rice with "toppings". Rice was what was sold in the market to buy the other necessities of life. This was how wealth and status were measured. She dictated almost every moment of each day's work. "Rice is life," says anthropologist Gonçalo Santos, who has studied a traditional village in southern China. "You can't survive without rice. If you want to be someone in this part of China, you have to eat rice. It went around the world."
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2. Look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6. Read them aloud. Now look away and spend twenty seconds memorizing this sequence before repeating it out loud.
If you speak English, you have a 50% chance of memorizing this sequence perfectly. However, if you're Chinese, you'll almost certainly always get it right. Why is that? Because humans store digits in a memory loop that lasts about two seconds. It's easier for us to remember anything we can say or read in that two-second window of time. And Chinese speakers hit this list of numbers (4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6) almost every time because their language, unlike English, allows them to put all seven numbers in two seconds.
This example is from the book The Number Sense by Stanislas Dehaene. As Dehaene explains:
Chinese numbers are remarkably short. Most of them can be pronounced in less than a quarter of a second (for example, 4 is "si" and 7 is "qi"). Its English equivalents - "four", "seven" - are longer: their pronunciation lasts about a third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese seems to be entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible relationship between the time it takes to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory range of its speakers. In this area, the prize for efficiency goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity gives Hong Kong residents an astonishing memory capacity of around 10 digits.
It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number naming systems are constructed in Western and Asian languages. In English we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so we might expect to say sixteen, sixteen, thirteen, and fifteen as well. But not us. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen and fifteen. Likewise, we have forty and sixty, which sound like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say fifty-thirty-twenty, which sounds like five and three and two, but not exactly. By the way, for numbers greater than twenty we put the “decade” first and then the unit number (twenty-one, twenty-two), while for adolescents we do the opposite (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). . The number system in English is very irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten and one. Twelve is ten and two. Twenty-four is two tens of four, and so on.
This difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count to forty on average. American children can only count to fifteen at this age, and most do not reach forty until they are five years old. In other words, by the age of five, American children are already a year behind their Asian peers in the most basic math skills.
The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children are much easier to perform basic functions like addition. Ask an English-speaking 7-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two from her memory and convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can you do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which is 59. Ask an Asian child to add three tens of sevens and two tens of twos and then the necessary equation is integrated into the sentence. No numerical translation needed: that's five tens and nines.
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"The Asian system is transparent," says Karen Fuson, a psychologist at Northwestern University who has closely studied the differences between Asia and the West. “I think that makes the whole attitude towards mathematics different. Instead of memorizing it, there is a pattern that I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. There is an expectation that it is reasonable. For fractions, say three fifths. Chinese is literally "of five parts, take three." This tells you conceptually what a fraction is. Distinguish the denominator and the numerator.”
The much talked about math disenchantment among Western kids begins in third and fourth grade, and Fuson argues that part of that disenchantment may be because math doesn't seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its ground rules seem arbitrary and complicated.
Asian children, on the other hand, don't feel the same confusion. They can remember more numbers and do math faster, and the way fractions are expressed in their languages is exactly what a fraction really is, and maybe that makes them a little more likely to like math, and maybe, because they like math a bit. Also, they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, etc. in a kind of virtuous circle.
In other words, when it comes to math, Asians have an inherent advantage. But it's an unusual advantage. For years, students from China, South Korea, and Japan, and the children of immigrants from those countries, have significantly outperformed their Western peers in math, and the typical assumption is that this has something to do with some sort of Asian bias. towards mathematics. * Psychologist Richard Lynn went so far as to propose an elaborate theory of evolution that incorporates the Himalayas, really cold weather, pre-modern hunting practices, brain size, and special vowels to explain why Asians have higher IQs .† This is how we think about mathematics . We assume that if you're good at things like calculus and algebra, it all comes down to how smart someone is. But the differences between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something entirely different: that math credits may also be embedded in a group's culture.
For the Koreans, some kind of ingrained heritage got in the way of the cutting-edge task of flying an airplane. Here we have a different heritage that is proving perfectly suited to the challenges of the 21st century. Cultural legacies are important, and once we've seen the startling implications of things like power distance and numbers that can be said in a quarter of a second instead of a third of a second, it's hard to imagine how many other cultural legacies have Dyed. an impact on our twenties. - Spiritual tasks of the first century. What if, coming from a culture shaped by the demands of growing rice, you also did better in math? Can the rice field make a difference in the classroom?
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3. The most impressive thing about a rice field, which you can only understand once you are in it, is its size. it is tiny. The typical rice paddy is as big as a hotel room. A typical Asian rice farm may consist of two or three paddy fields. A village of 1,500 people in China can feed itself entirely on 450 acres of land, which would be the size of a typical Midwestern US family farm at this scale, with families of five and six living on one Farm the size of two hotel rooms, agriculture is changing dramatically.
Historically, Western agriculture has been "mechanically" oriented. When a western farmer wanted to be more efficient or increase his yield, he introduced increasingly sophisticated devices that allowed him to replace human labor with mechanical labor: a thresher, a hay baler, a combine, a tractor. He cleared another field and increased his planted area because now his machines allowed him to till more land with the same effort. But in Japan or China, farmers had no money to buy equipment, and there was no additional land that could easily be converted into new fields anyway. Rice farmers have increased their yields by becoming smarter, better managing their own time, and making better decisions. As anthropologist Francesca Bray puts it, growing rice is "skill-based": if you're willing to be a little more diligent about weeding and getting better at fertilizing, and spending a little more time monitoring water levels and tending better of the Keep the clay pot perfectly level and use every square inch of your rice paddy, you will get a bigger harvest. Not surprisingly, people who grow rice have worked harder than any other type of farmer throughout history.
This last statement may seem a bit strange because most of us feel that everyone in the pre-modern world worked a lot. But that's not true. For example, we are all descended from hunter-gatherers at some point, and many hunter-gatherers seem to have lived fairly uneventful lives. Among the last remaining practitioners of this way of life, the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana ate a diet rich in fruits, berries, roots, and nuts, particularly the mongongo nut, an incredibly abundant protein source. of food that condenses in the terrestrial. You don't grow anything, and growing (preparing, planting, weeding, harvesting, storing) takes time. They also do not raise animals. Occasionally the male !Kung hunts, but mainly for sport. In general, !Kung men and women work no more than twelve to nineteen hours a week and spend the rest of the time dancing, entertaining, and visiting family and friends. Maximum 1,000 hours of work per year. (One Bushman, when asked why his people did not farm, seemed puzzled, saying, "Why should we plant when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?")
Or think about the life of a farmer in 18th century Europe. The men and women of that time probably worked two hundred days a year from morning to noon, which corresponds to about twelve hundred hours of work per year. During the spring harvest or planting, the day may be longer. Significantly less in winter. In Discovering France, historian Graham Robb argues that peasant life in a country like France itself in the 19th century essentially consisted of short periods of work followed by long periods of inactivity.
"Ninety-nine percent of all human activities described in this and other accounts [of French rural life]," he writes, "occurred between late spring and early fall."
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April. The same pattern continued in the more temperate regions of France, where winter temperatures rarely dropped below freezing. Rob continues:
The fields of Flanders were deserted most of the year. An official account from the Nièvre of 1844 described the strange mutation of the Burgundian laborers after the grape harvest began and the vines were burned: "Having made the necessary repairs to their tools, these strong men will now spend their days in bed, their "Bodies unite to stay warm and eat less. They consciously weaken."
Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevents starvation from depleting supplies...People shuffled and walked, even in summer...stupid idleness."
As a farmer in southern China, on the other hand, you would not sleep during the winter. During the short break from November to February, which was marked by the dry season, he was busy with sideline activities. They made baskets or hats out of bamboo and sold them in the market. You repaired the dikes in your paddy field and rebuilt your mud hut. You sent one of your children to a nearby town to work for a relative. You made tofu and tofu and you caught snakes (they were a delicacy) and you caught bugs. When Lahp Cheun (the "spring turn") arrived, they were back in the fields at dawn. Working in a paddy field requires ten to twenty times more labor than working in a field of corn or wheat of the same size. Some estimates put the annual workload of a wet rice farmer in Asia at 3,000 hours per year.
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4. Think for a moment what life must have been like as a rice farmer in the Pearl River Delta. Three thousand hours a year is an impressive amount of work, especially when many of those hours consist of crouching in the sun, planting a paddy field, and weeding.
However, what redeemed the life of a rice farmer was the nature of the work. It was very similar to the garment work that Jewish immigrants did in New York. It was significant. First, there is a clear relationship between effort and reward in rice cultivation. The more you work in a paddy field, the more it contributes. Second, it is a complex job. The rice farmer is not limited to planting in spring and harvesting in autumn. He or she effectively runs a small business, manages a family workforce, mitigates uncertainty through seed selection, builds and manages an elaborate irrigation system, and coordinates the complicated process of harvesting the first crop while preparing the second crop. . .
And above all, it is autonomous. Peasants in Europe essentially worked as low-paid slaves to an aristocratic landlord, with little control over their own destiny. But China and Japan never developed that kind of oppressive feudal system because feudalism just doesn't work in a rice economy. Rice farming is too complicated and complicated for a system that requires farmers to be coerced and intimidated into going to the field every morning. In the 14th and 15th centuries, landlords in central and southern China enjoyed almost total freedom with their tenants: they received a fixed rent and let the landlords run their business.
"The thing about growing paddy rice is that it's not only a phenomenal amount of work, but it's also very demanding," says historian Kenneth Pomerantz. "You have to take care of yourself. It is very important that the field is perfectly level before it floods. Getting close to level, but not quite, makes a big difference in terms of yield. It is very important that the water is in the fields at the right time. There's a big difference between stringing seedlings the right distance and doing it carelessly. It's not like you plant your corn in mid-March and as long as it rains at the end of the month is fine. You control all the inputs very directly. And when you have something that requires so much care, the overlord needs to have a system that gives the actual worker a variety of incentives where the farmer gets a bigger share if the crop is good.That's why you get fixed rents, where the landlord says that I'll get twenty bushels no matter the year, and if it's really good, you'll get the nod. It's a culture that doesn't do very well with anything like slavery or wage labor. It would be too much. It would be easy to leave the gate that controls the irrigation water open for a few more seconds and your field would disappear.
Historian David Arkush once compared Russian and Chinese peasant sayings, and the differences are striking. "If God does not give, the earth does not give" is a typical Russian proverb. This is the kind of fatalism and pessimism typical of a repressive feudal system in which peasants have no reason to believe in the efficacy of their own labor. On the other hand, Arkush writes, Chinese proverbs impress with their belief that "hard work, wise planning, and working on your own or working with a small group will pay off over time."
Here are some of the things destitute farmers would say to themselves working three thousand hours a year in the heat and humidity of Chinese rice paddies (which, by the way, are full of leeches):
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"Without blood and sweat there is no food." “Farmers are busy; the peasants are busy; If farmers weren't busy, where would the grain go?
Where does winter come from?' 'In winter the sloth freezes to death'. 'Don't depend on heaven to eat, trust your own hands to carry the load.' Ask, it all depends on hard work and fertilizer.” "If man works hard, the land will not be idle."
And, most revealing, "No one who gets up before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year fails to enrich his family." Until sunrise? 360 days a year? To the !Kung who peacefully gathers mongongo nuts, or the French farmer who sleeps in winter, or anyone else who does not live in the world of rice cultivation, this proverb would be unthinkable.
Obviously, this is not an unfamiliar observation about Asian culture. Walk to any Western college campus and you'll find that Asian students have a reputation for staying in the library long after everyone else has left. People of Asian descent are sometimes offended when their culture is described in this way, feeling that the stereotype is being used as a form of put down. But believing in work has to be something beautiful. Virtually every success story we've seen in this book so far involves someone or a group working harder than their peers. Bill Gates was addicted to computers when he was a child. Bill Joy too. The Beatles practiced in Hamburg for thousands of hours. Joe Flom worked for years perfecting the art of acquisition before he got this opportunity. Hard work is what makes successful people, and the genius of rice paddy culture is that hard work gave farm workers a way to find meaning in the midst of great insecurity and poverty. This lesson has served Asians well in many endeavors, but seldom as perfectly as in the case of mathematics.
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5. A few years ago, Alan Schoenfeld, a math professor at Berkeley, recorded a video of a woman named Renée trying to solve a math problem. Renee was in her early twenties, with long black hair and round silver glasses. On the tape, she plays with a software program designed to teach algebra. There is a y axis and an x axis on the screen. The program prompts the user to enter a set of coordinates and then draws a line from those coordinates on the screen. For example, when you entered 5 on the y axis and 5 on the x axis, the computer did the following:
I'm sure a vague memory of your high school algebra comes to mind right now. But rest assured, you don't have to remember any of this to understand the importance of Renee's example. In fact, as you listen to Renee in the following paragraphs, focus not on what she is saying, but on how she talks and why she talks the way she talks.
The purpose of the computer program created by Schoenfeld was to teach students how to calculate the slope of a line. Incline, as I'm sure you remember (or more specifically, since I bet you don't; I certainly haven't), is uphill rather than sprint. In our example, the slope of the straight line is 1 because the slope is 5 and the slope is 5.
So there's Renée. She sits at the keyboard and tries to figure out what numbers to type so that the computer will draw a perfectly vertical line that lies directly on the y axis. Well, those of you who remember math from high school will know that this really is impossible. A vertical line has an undefined slope. Its ascent is infinite: each number on the y-axis, starting from zero and endless. It runs on the x-axis, but it is zero. Infinity divided by zero is not a number.
But Renee doesn't realize that what she's trying to do can't be done. Instead, she's caught up in what Schönfeld calls a "magnificent misunderstanding," and the reason Schönfeld likes to show this particular tape is because it's a perfect demonstration of how that misunderstanding was resolved.
Renee was a nurse. She was not someone who had been particularly interested in mathematics in the past. But somehow she got the software and she loved it.
"Now I want to use this formula to draw a straight line parallel to the y axis," he begins. Schönfeld is sitting next to him. She looks at him anxiously. "I haven't done anything like this in five years."
Start playing with the program, writing different numbers. "Now if I change the slope like this...minus 1...now I intend to make the line work
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Direct." As you type the numbers, the line on the screen changes. "Wow. It won't help. She seems confused. - What are you trying to do? Schoenfeld asks. "I'm trying to draw a straight line parallel to the y axis. What do I have to do here? I
I think what I need to do is change it up a bit. Point to the number on the Y axis. "That was something I discovered. That there's been a big change going from 1 to 2. But now, when you get to the top, you have to keep changing.
That's Renee's glorious mistake. She realized that the higher the y-coordinate is, the steeper the line becomes. So she thinks that the key to creating a vertical line is to make the y-coordinate large enough.
“I think 12 or even 13 could do it. Maybe even 15. She frowns. She and Schönfeld come and go. She asks him questions. he pushes her gently
the right direction. She keeps trying, one approach at a time. At one point she writes 20. The line gets a little steeper.
She writes 40. The tail becomes even steeper.
"I see there's a relationship there. But why, that doesn't seem understandable to me... What if I turn 80? If 40 gets me in the middle, then 80 should get me in the middle of the y-axis. Let's see what happens.
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She writes in 80. The line is steeper. But it's still not quite vertical. "Oh. It's infinite, isn't it? It will never get there. Renee is close. But then she comes back again.
your original mistake. "So what do I need? 100? Every time you double the number, you get to the middle of the y axis. But that
never arrives..." She writes 100.
"She's closer. But I'm not there yet. She starts thinking out loud. It's obvious she's up to something."
that, although... but... I knew that. For each one that ascends, so many ascend. I'm still a bit confused as to why..."
It pauses and flashes on the screen. "I'm confused. It's a tenth of the way to one. But I don't want to…" And then she saw him. "Oh! It's any number above and zero above. It's any number divided by zero! Her face lights up."
A vertical line is anything that is divided by zero, and that is an undefined number. Oh. IT'S OKAY. Now I understand. The slope of a vertical line is undefined. Ahhhh It means something now. I will not forget!"
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6. Throughout his career, Schoenfeld has filmed countless students solving math problems. But Renée's tape is one of his favorites because it beautifully illustrates what he believes is the secret to learning math. Twenty-two minutes elapse from the time Renee starts playing the computer program to the time she says, “Ahhhh. It means something now. That is a long time. "This is eighth grade math," Schönfeld said. "If I put the average eighth grader in the same position as Renee, I imagine after the first few tries they'll say, 'I don't get it. You have to explain it to me.'” Schoenfeld once asked a group of high school students how long they would work on a task before deciding the solution was too difficult for them.Their responses ranged from thirty seconds to five minutes, with an average response time of two minutes.
But Renee insists. She tries. She keeps coming back to the same problems. She thinks out loud. She runs and runs. She just doesn't give up. She knows on a vague level that something is wrong with her theory of how to draw a vertical line, and she won't stop until she's absolutely sure she's right.
Renee was not a born mathematician. Obviously, abstract terms like "oblique" and "indefinite" were not easy for her. But Schönfeld couldn't have found them more impressive.
"There's a drive to make sense that drives what he does," says Schoenfeld. “She wouldn't take a superficial 'yes, you're right' and walk away. She's not like that. And that's really unusual.” She rewound the tape and pointed to a moment when Renee reacted with genuine surprise to something on the screen.
"Look," he said. "She takes it twice. A lot of students would just let it be. Instead, she thought, 'That doesn't match what I think. I don't understand. This is important. I want an explanation.' And when she finally gets the explanation, she says, "Yeah, that fits."
At Berkeley, Schoenfeld teaches a problem-solving course that he says is intended to help his students unlearn the math habits they picked up in college. "I choose a problem that I don't know how to solve," he says. "I tell my students, 'You're going to do a two-week test at home. I know your habits. First week you won't do anything and next week you'll start, and I want to warn you right now: if you spend just one week doing this, there will be no resolution. On the other hand, if you start working the day I give you the test, you will be frustrated. You will come to me and say, 'This is impossible.' Second, you will find that you will make significant progress."
Sometimes we think that being good at math is an innate ability. Either you have "it" or you don't. But for Schönfeld, it's less skill than attitude. You will master math if you are willing to try. That is what Schönfeld tries to teach his students. Success is a function of perseverance and tenacity and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to understand something that most people would give up after thirty seconds. Put a group of Renees in a classroom and give them space and time to explore math on their own and you could go a long way. Or imagine a country where Renee's sense of purpose is no exception, but a cultural trait as ingrained as the culture of honor in the Cumberland Highlands. Well, that would be a good country for math.
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7. Every four years, an international group of educators conducts a comprehensive math and science test for primary and secondary students around the world. This is the TIMSS (the same test you read about earlier in the discussion of differences between fourth graders born near the beginning of a school term and those born near the end of the school term), and the purpose of the TIMSS is to compare the educational performance of one country to that of another.
When students sit for the TIMSS test, they must also complete a questionnaire. He asks her all sorts of things, like her parents' educational level, her opinion on math, and what her friends are like. It is not a trivial exercise. There are around 120 questions. In fact, it's so boring and demanding that many students leave ten or twenty questions unanswered.
Well here is the interesting part. It turns out that the average number of questions answered in this questionnaire varies from country to country. In fact, it is possible to rank all the participating countries according to the number of questions that their students answer in the questionnaire. What do you think happens when you compare test scores to TIMSS math scores? They are exactly the same. In other words, the countries whose students are willing to focus and sit still long enough and concentrate on answering each question in an endless quiz are the same countries whose students are better at solving math problems.
The person who discovered this fact is an education researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe, and he stumbled across it. "It just happened out of the blue," he says. Boe couldn't even publish his findings in a scientific journal because, he says, it's a bit weird. Remember, he is not saying that the ability to finish the test and the ability to excel on the math test are related. He says that they are the same: if you compare the two classifications, they are identical.
Imagine it another way. Imagine if every year there was a Math Olympiad in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in the world sent their own team of 1,000 eighth graders. Boe's point is that without asking a single math question, we could accurately predict the order in which each country would finish in the Math Olympiads. All we would have to do is give them a task to gauge how hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn't even have to give them an assignment. We should be able to predict which countries are better at math by looking at which national cultures value effort and hard work more.
Which places top the two lists? The answer shouldn't surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan. Of course, what these five have in common is that they are all cultures steeped in traditions of rice cultivation and meaningful work. For 1,000 hours a year they said things like: "Anyone who gets up before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year will not enrich his family."†
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CHAPTER NINE
marita's bargain
"ALL MY FRIENDS ARE KIPP NOW."
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1. In the mid-1990s, an experimental public school called KIPP Academy opened on the fourth floor of Lou Gehrig Junior High School in New York City.* Lou Gehrig is located in the Seventh School District, also known as South Bronx, one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York. It's a squat gray building from the 1960s facing a drab-looking group of skyscrapers. A few blocks away is the Grand Concourse, the neighborhood's main thoroughfare. These are not paths you would want to walk alone after dark.
KIPP is a secondary school. Classes are large: fifth grade has two classes of 35 students each. There are no entrance exams or admission requirements. Students are selected by lottery, and any fourth-grader living in the Bronx is eligible to apply. Approximately half of the students are African American; the rest are Spanish. Three quarters of the children come from single-parent families. Ninety percent are entitled to "free or reduced lunch," meaning their families earn so little that the federal government contributes to helping kids eat properly at lunchtime.
KIPP Academy feels like the kind of school in the kind of neighborhood with the kind of students that would send educators into despair, except as soon as you walk into the building, it's clear that something is different. The students march silently through the halls in single file. In the classroom, they are taught to turn and address anyone who speaks to them in a protocol known as "SSLANT": smile, sit, listen, ask questions, nod when spoken to, and stare. Hundreds of banners from the colleges KIPP graduates attended hang on the walls of the school's hallways. Last year, hundreds of families in the Bronx entered the lottery for KIPP's two fifth graders. It is no exaggeration to say that in just over a decade of its existence, KIPP has become one of the most desirable public schools in New York City.
KIPP is best known for math. In the South Bronx, only about 16 percent of all high school students reach at least their grade level in mathematics. But at KIPP, math is the favorite subject for many students by the end of fifth grade. In seventh grade, KIPP students begin high school algebra. By the end of eighth grade, 84 percent of students are at least at grade level, which means this mixed bag of low-income kids has been picked at random from dingy apartments in one of the worst neighborhoods in the country. , whose parents still have an overwhelming number of cases never set foot in college—are as good at math as privileged eighth-graders in America's wealthy suburbs. "Our kids' reading is on point," said David Levin, who founded KIPP in 1994 with another teacher, Michael Feinberg. “They struggle a bit with their writing skills. But if you leave here, you will destroy mathematics."
There are now more than fifty KIPP schools in the United States, with more planned. The KIPP program represents one of the most promising new educational philosophies in the United States. But its success is not best understood in terms of curriculum, faculty, resources, or any kind of institutional innovation. Rather, KIPP is an organization that has managed to take the idea of cultural heritage seriously.
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2. At the beginning of the 19th century, a group of reformers decided to establish a system of public education in the United States. What passed as a public school at the time was a haphazard conglomeration of locally run one-room schools and crowded city classrooms scattered across the country. In rural areas, schools closed in the spring and fall and stayed open all summer to allow children to help out during the busy planting and harvest season. In the city, many schools reflected the long and chaotic hours of parents of working-class children. The reformers wanted to make sure that all children attended school and that public education was comprehensive, meaning that all children had enough education to learn to read and write, do basic arithmetic, and function as productive citizens.
But as the historian Kenneth Gold pointed out, early educational reformers were also very concerned that children were not well educated. In 1871, for example, the United States Commissioner of Education published a report by Edward Jarvis on the "Relation of Education to Madness." Jarvis had studied 1,741 cases of insanity and concluded that "overstudy" was responsible for 205 of them. "Education lays the foundation for much of the root of mental disorders," Jarvis wrote. Similarly, Massachusetts public education pioneer Horace Mann believed that overwork on students would have "a very detrimental effect on character and habits...". It is not uncommon for health itself to be destroyed by overstimulation of the mind." Educational magazines of the day were concerned that students would be overwhelmed or their natural abilities dulled by too much schoolwork.
The Reformers, Gold writes:
he looked for ways to shorten study time because long rest periods could protect the mind from injury. Hence the abolition of Saturday classes, the shortening of the school day and the lengthening of vacations, all this happened throughout the 19th century. Teachers were warned that "when [students] are engaged in learning, their bodies should not be exhausted by long confinement and their minds should not be confused by prolonged practice." Rest also offered specific opportunities to strengthen cognitive and analytical skills. As one Massachusetts Teacher staff member suggested, "When boys and girls, men and women are released from the state of tension that is inherent in real learning, they become accustomed to thinking and reflecting independently of it and drawing their own conclusions." de is what is required of them, taught and subject to the authority of others.
Of course, this notion that effort must be compensated by rest couldn't be more different from Asian notions of study and work. On the other hand, the Asian worldview is shaped by the rice field. In the Pearl River Delta, the rice farmer planted two and sometimes three crops a year. The soil fell fallow only for a short time. In fact, one of the unique characteristics of rice cultivation is that the more a piece of land is cultivated, the more fertile it becomes, the more nutrients it carries for irrigation.
But in Western agriculture the opposite is true. If a field of wheat or corn is not left fallow every few years, the soil will run out. Every winter the fields are empty. The hard work of planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall is followed like clockwork by the slower pace of summer and winter.
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This is the logic that the Reformers applied to the cultivation of young minds. We formulate new ideas through analogy, we move from what we know to what we don't know, and what the reformers knew were the rhythms of the agricultural seasons. A mind needs to be cultivated. But not too much so that it doesn't run out. And what was the antidote to the dangers of burnout? The long summer vacation: a peculiar and distinctive American legacy that has had a profound impact on the learning patterns of today's students.
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3. Summer vacation is a rarely mentioned topic in American educational debates. It is considered an integral and untouchable part of school life, much like high school football or prom. But take a look at the following sets of elementary school test scores and see if your belief in the value of long summer vacation hasn't been profoundly shaken.
These numbers come from research led by Johns Hopkins University sociologist Karl Alexander. Alexander tracked the progress of 650 first graders in the Baltimore public school system and noted how they did on a widely used test of math and reading skills called the California Achievement Test. These are reading performance for the first five years of elementary school, broken down by socioeconomic class: low, middle, and high.
Grade 1st Year 2nd Year 3rd Year 4th Year 5th Year Low 329 375 397 433 461 Medium 348 388 425 467 497 High 361 418 460 506 534
Look at the first column. Students start first grade with significant, but not overwhelming, differences in knowledge and skills. First graders from the richest families have a 32-point advantage over first graders from the poorest families, and by the way, first graders from the poorest families in Baltimore are really poor. Now look at the fifth degree column. Now, four years later, the initially modest gap between rich and poor has more than doubled.
This "achievement gap" is a phenomenon that has been observed time and time again, and it generally provokes one of two responses. The first answer is that disadvantaged children simply do not have the same innate capacity to learn as children from more advantaged backgrounds. You're not that smart. The second, slightly more optimistic conclusion is that our schools are somehow failing poor children: we're just not doing a good job of teaching them the skills they need. But this is where Alexander's study gets interesting, because neither of these explanations ring true.
Baltimore City didn't just give kids the California Achievement Test at the end of each school year in June. He also tried them in September, just after the end of the summer vacation. What caught Alexander's attention was that the second set of test results gave him a slightly different analysis. On June 1, he was able to accurately measure how much this student learned during the school year. And if he looked at the difference between a student's score in June and the following September, he could see how much that student had learned over the summer. In other words, she was able to figure out, at least in part, how much of the performance difference is the result of events during the school year and how much has to do with what happens during summer vacation.
Let's start with the income for the school year. This table shows how many points students' test scores improved from the start of school in September to the end of school in June. The Total column represents the cumulative learning in the classroom over the five years of elementary school.
Grade 1st Grade 2nd Grade 3rd Grade 4th Grade 5th Grade Total Low 55 46 30 33 25 189 Medium 69 43 34 41 27 214 High 60 39 34 28 23 184
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There is a very different story here than the first table might suggest. Early test results made it appear that low-income children were somehow failing in the classroom. But here we clearly see that this is not true. Note the Total column. In five years of primary school, poor children "learn" 189 to 184 points "more than" richer children. They lag slightly behind middle-class children and actually learn more in a year of second grade than middle-class or upper-class children.
Next, let's see what happens when we look at how reading scores change over summer break.
Class After 1. After 2. After 3. After 4. TotalLow -3.67 -1.70 2.74 2.89 0.26Medium -3.11 4.18 3.68 2.34 7.09High 15.38 9.22 14.51 13.38 52.49
Can you see the difference? See the first column, which measures what happens after first grade in the summer. The richest kids returned in September, and their reading scores rose more than 15 points. The poorest children returned from vacation and their reading performance dropped almost 4 points. Poor children can learn more during the school year than rich children. But in summer they lag far behind.
Now look at the final column, which summarizes all the summer earnings for grades one through five. Children's reading difficulties increase by 0.26 points. When it comes to reading, poor children don't learn anything if the school doesn't work. Rich kids' reading scores, on the other hand, rise by an impressive 52.49 points. Virtually all of the advantages that rich students have over poor students are the result of differences in how privileged children learn when they are not in school.
What are we seeing here? One very real possibility is that these are the pedagogical consequences of the differences in parenting styles discussed in the chapter on Chris Langan. Think of Alex Williams, the nine-year-old boy that Annette Lareau studied. Your parents believe in hybrid cultivation. They take him to museums and he enrolls in special programs and attends a summer camp where he takes classes. When he is bored at home, there are many books to read and his parents see it as his responsibility to actively involve him in the world around him. It's not hard to see how Alex would improve in reading and math over the summer.
But not Katie Brindle, the girl on the other side of the tracks. There is no money to send them to summer camp. Her mother doesn't put her in special classes and there are no books in her house to read when she gets bored. There is probably only one TV. She can still have wonderful vacations, make new friends, play outside, go to the movies, have those carefree summer days we all dream of. None of this will improve her arithmetic and reading skills, however, and with each passing carefree summer day, she leaves Alex further and further behind. Alex isn't necessarily smarter than Katie. He simply learns more than she does: he puts in a few months of solid study over the summer while she watches TV and plays outside.
Alexander's work suggests that the way education is discussed in the United States is in decline. A great deal of time is spent talking about reducing class sizes, revising curricula, buying a new laptop for every student, and increasing school funding, all under the assumption that something is fundamentally wrong with job schools. But he considers the second table, which shows what happens between September and June. schools work. The only problem with school for unsuccessful kids is that there aren't enough of them.
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Alexander did a very simple calculation to show what would happen if the children of Baltimore went to school all year. The answer is that poor kids and rich kids would be about the same level in math and reading by the end of elementary school.
Suddenly, the causes of Asia's mathematical superiority become even more obvious. Asian students do not have long summer vacations. Why should they? Cultures that believe that waking up before dawn 360 days a year is the path to success are unlikely to give their children three consecutive months off in the summer. The average school year in the United States lasts 180 days. The South Korean school year lasts 220 days. The Japanese school year lasts 243 days.
One of the questions test takers were asked on a recent math test given to students around the world was how many algebra, calculus, and geometry questions covered the topic they had previously studied in class. For Japanese 12th grade students, the response was 92%. That's the value of going to school 243 days a year. You have time to learn everything there is to learn, and less time to unlearn. For US 12th grade students, the comparable figure was 54%. America has no school problems for its poorest students. There's a problem with summer vacation, and that's what KIPP schools wanted to fix. They decided to take the lessons from the paddy field to Central America.
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4. "They go to school at 7:25," says David Levin of KIPPAcademy students from the Bronx. "Everyone is taking a class called Thinking Skills until 7:55. They do 90 minutes of English and 90 minutes of math every day, except in fifth grade, where they do two hours of math a day. At least twice per week, one hour of science, one hour of social sciences, one hour of music, plus one hour and fifteen minutes of orchestra. Everyone plays the orchestra. The day lasts from seven twenty-five to five in the afternoon. After five there are clubs homework, detention clubs, sports teams. The kids are here from 7:25 to 7:00 p.m. If you take a typical day and include lunch and rest, our kids spend fifty to sixty percent spend more time studying than traditional public school students.
Levin was standing in the main hall of the school. It was lunchtime and the students marched quietly in orderly lines, all wearing their KIPP Academy T-shirts. Levin stopped a girl with her shirttail hanging down. "Do me a favor if you get the chance," she called out, mimicking a tuck motion. He continued: “Saturdays they come from nine to one. In summer it is eight to two. Over the summer, Levin touched on the fact that KIPP students will have an extra three weeks of school in July. After all, it's the very low-income kids Alexander says are losing ground during the long summer vacation, so KIPP's response is simply not to take the long summer vacation.
"The beginning is difficult," he continued. "At the end of the day, they're restless. Part of it is perseverance, part of it is motivation. Part of it is incentives and rewards and fun stuff. Part of it is good old-fashioned discipline. You throw it all in the pot. We talk a lot about determination and self-control here, the kids know what these words mean.”
Levin walked down the hall toward an eighth-grade math class and stood quietly in the background. A student named Aaron was at the front of the class, doing a puzzle page problem that all KIPP students must solve every morning. The professor, a ponytailed man in his thirties named Frank Corcoran, sat in an adjacent chair, stepping in only occasionally to direct the discussion. It was the kind of scene that played out in American classrooms every day, with a difference. Aaron was up front, working on this problem for twenty minutes, methodically, carefully, with class participation, working not only on the answer but also on whether there was more than one way to get the answer. . It was Renee who meticulously rediscovered the concept of indefinite slope.
"This extra time allows for a more relaxed environment," Corcoran said after class ended. “I think the problem in math class is the sink or swim approach. Everything is fast, and the kids who get there first will be rewarded. This creates the feeling that there are people who know mathematics and others who are not mathematicians. I think more time gives you as the teacher a chance to explain things and more time for the kids to sit and digest everything that's going on, reviewing, doing things at a much slower pace. It seems counterintuitive, but we do things more slowly and therefore spend a lot more time. There's a lot more retention, a better understanding of the material. It makes me a little more relaxed. We have time for games. The kids can ask whatever they want, and when I explain something, I don't run out of time. I can get back to the material and I don't feel pressed for time." The extra time gave Corcoran a chance to make math meaningful: let his students see the clear.
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Relationship between effort and reward. Dozens of transcripts from the New York State Regents exams hung on classroom walls,
Witness first class honors for Corcoran students. "We had a girl in that class," Corcoran said. “She was a terrible fifth grade math student. She cried every Saturday when we did corrections. Big tears and tears. Corcoran was also a little touched by the memory. He looked down. “She sent us an email just a few weeks ago. She is in college now. She has a degree in accounting.
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5. The story of the miracle school that turns losers into winners is, of course, all too familiar. It's the stuff of inspirational books and cheesy Hollywood movies. But the reality of places like KIPP is much less glamorous. To get an idea of what 50-60% more study time means, listen to a typical day in the life of a KIPP student.
The student's name is Marita. She is an only child and lives in a single parent home. Your mother never went to college. The two share a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx. Marita used to attend a parochial school down the street from her house until her mother found out about KIPP. "When I was in fourth grade, me and another of my friends, Tanya, enrolled in KIPP," Marita said. “I remember Mrs. Owens. She interviewed me and the way she spoke made it sound so difficult that I thought she was going to jail. I almost started crying. And she said if you don't want to sign that, you don't have to sign that. But then my mother was there, so I signed.
This changed his life. (As you read the following, she remembers that Marita is twelve years old.)
"I get up at 5:45 in the morning to get started," he says. "I brush my teeth, I take a shower. I eat breakfast at school when I'm late. I usually get yelled at for taking too long. I meet my friends Diana and Steven at the bus stop and we get on the first bus.
Waking up at 5:45 am is very typical for KIPP students, especially given the long bus and subway rides many have to take to get to school. Levin once walked into a seventh grade music class of seventy students and asked them to raise their hands when the students woke up. A handful said that he woke up after six. Three quarters said they woke up before six. And nearly half said they woke up before 5:30 a.m. m. A classmate of Marita's, a boy named José, said that he would sometimes wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning, do his homework the night before, and "sleep a little."
Marita continued:
I leave school at five in the afternoon and if I don't get silly I get home at around half past five. So I say hello to my mom real quick and start homework. And if there isn't much homework that day, I put in two or three hours and finish around nine at night. Or, if we have rehearsals, I finish at 10 p.m. m. or at 10:30 p.m. m.
Sometimes my mother invites me to dinner. I tell her I want to go straight but she says I need to eat something. Then around eight she lets me stop for dinner for a half hour and then I go back to work. After that, my mother usually wants to know about school, but I have to hurry because I have to go to bed at eleven o'clock at night. So I pack up all my things and go to bed. I tell her all about the day and what happened and by the time we're done she's almost asleep so it must be around eleven fifteen. Then I go to sleep and the next morning we do everything from scratch. we are in the same room but it is a huge room and you can divide it into two parts and we have beds on the other side. My mother and I are very close.
He spoke in a very practical way about children not knowing how unusual their situation is. She had the hours of a lawyer trying to become a partner or a resident. All she lacked were bags under her eyes and a steaming cup of coffee, except she was too young for either.
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"Sometimes I don't sleep when I should," Marita continued. “I go to sleep around noon and the next afternoon he hits me. And I'll take a nap in class. But then I have to wake up because I have to get the information. I remember I was in a class and I was falling asleep and the teacher saw me and said, 'Can I talk to you after class?' And he asked me, 'Why did you take a nap?' And I told him that I went to bed late. And he said, 'You have to sleep early.' ”
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6. Marita's life is not the typical life of a 12-year-old girl. It's also not what we would want for a 12 year old. We like to believe that children should have time to play, dream and sleep. Marita has responsibilities. What is required of her is the same as what is required of Korean pilots. To succeed, they had to shed part of their own identity, because the deep respect for authority that pervades Korean culture just doesn't work in the booth. Marita had to do the same because the cultural legacy she received doesn't fit her circumstances either, not when middle- and upper-class families use weekends and summer vacations to strengthen their children. Her community is not giving her what she needs. So what is she to do? She gives up your nights, weekends, and friends, all elements of your old world, and replaces them with KIPP.
Here is Marita again, in an almost moving passage:
Well, when we got to fifth grade, I hung out with one of the girls from my old school, and when I got home from school on Fridays, I would go over to her house and stay there until my mom got home from school. she works. She then she would be at her house and do my homework. She would never have homework. And she'd be like, "Oh my gosh, you're going to be staying there a long time." She then said that she wanted to go to KIPP, but then she said that KIPP was too hard and she didn't want to do it. And I said, "Everyone says KIPP is hard, but once you get the hang of it, it's not that hard." She told me, "It's because you're smart." And I said, "No, we're all smart." And she was so down because we stayed until five and we had a lot of homework, and I told her that a lot of homework would help us do better in class. And she told me that she didn't want to hear the whole speech. None of my friends know KIPP.
Is it too much to ask of a child? That is. But he looks at things from Marita's point of view. She made a deal with her school. She gets up at 5.45 am, goes to work on Saturdays and does her homework until 11 am. In return, KIPP promises to give kids like her trapped in poverty a chance to get out. This means that 84% of them are at or above their grade level in math. Based on this achievement, 90% of KIPP students receive scholarships to private or religious schools instead of attending their own seedy high schools in the Bronx. And based on that high school experience, more than 80% of KIPP graduates will go on to college, in many cases the first in their families to do so.
How can this be a bad deal? Everything we learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable path. It's not as bright as it seems. If it were, Chris Langan would be there with Einstein. Success is not just the sum of the choices and efforts we make for ourselves. Rather, it is a gift. The outliers are those who were given opportunities and who had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. For hockey and soccer players born in January, there is a better chance of making the all-star team. For the Beatles it was Hamburg. Bill Gates was lucky to be born on time and received a computer terminal in elementary school. The founders of Joe Flom and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz, had several opportunities. They were born at the right time to the right parents and ethnicity, allowing them to practice acquiring.
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Law for twenty years before the rest of the legal world caught up. And what Korean Air did when it finally changed its operations was to give its pilots a chance to escape the constraints of their cultural heritage.
The lesson here is very simple. But it's surprising how often this is forgotten. We're so caught up in the myths of the best, the brightest, and the homey that we think runaways spring naturally out of the ground. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel at how our world made it possible for this thirteen-year-old boy to become a fabulously successful businessman. But that is the wrong lesson. In 1968, our world only allowed a 13-year-old boy unlimited access to a time-share terminal. If a million teenagers had the same opportunity, how many Microsoft would we have today? To build a better world, we must replace the patchwork of random fortunes and advantages that determine success today—lucky birth dates and lucky coincidences from history—with a society that offers opportunity for all. If Canada had a second hockey league for kids born in the last half of the year, it would have twice as many adult hockey stars today. Now multiply this sudden bloom of talent in all fields and professions. The world could be so much richer than the world we settle for.
Marita doesn't need a new school with huge playgrounds and shiny facilities. She doesn't need a laptop, a smaller class, a professor with a Ph.D., or a bigger department. She doesn't need a higher IQ or a mind as quick as Chris Langan. All of these things would be nice, of course. But you miss the point. Marita just needed a chance. And she looks at the opportunity she had! Someone brought part of the rice field to the South Bronx and explained the wonder of meaningful work.
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EPILOGUE
a jamaican story
"IF THE CHILDREN ARE PRODUCED BY LITTLE CHILDREN OF COLOR, THEY ARE EMANCED".
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1. On September 9, 1931, a young woman named Daisy Nation gave birth to twins. She and her husband Donald were teachers in a small town called Harewood in the community of Saint Catherine in central Jamaica. They named her daughters Faith and Joyce. When Donald learned that he was the father of twins, he fell to his knees and turned the responsibility of his life over to God.
The Nations lived in a small cottage on the grounds of the Harewood Anglican Church. Next door was the school, a long, one-room barn that stood on concrete stilts. Some days there are up to three hundred children in the room, other days there are fewer than two dozen. Children read or recite the multiplication table. Written on blackboards. Classes were held outdoors under the mango trees whenever possible. When the kids got out of control, Donald Nation would walk from one end of the room to the other, waving the leash from left to right as the kids returned to their seats.
He was an imposing man, calm and dignified, and a great lover of books. His small library contained works of poetry, philosophy, and novels by writers like Somerset Maugham. Every day he carefully read the newspaper and followed the development of events around the world. In the evenings his best friend, Archdeacon Hay, the Anglican minister who lived on the other side of the hill, would come and sit on Donald's porch and together they would explain the problems of Jamaica. Donald's wife, Daisy, was from Saint Elizabeth Parish. His maiden name was Ford and his father owned a small grocery store. She was one of three sisters and was known for her beauty.
At the age of eleven, the twins received scholarships to a boarding school called Saint Hilda's near the North Shore. It was a former Anglican private school founded for the daughters of the English clergy, proprietors and superintendents. They applied to Saint Hilda's and were accepted at University College London. A short time later, Joyce attended the 21st birthday celebration of a young English mathematician named Graham. She got up to recite a poem and forgot the lines about him, and Joyce was embarrassed for him, even though it didn't make sense to her that she was embarrassed that she didn't know him. Joyce and Graham fell in love and got married. They moved to Canada. Graham was a math teacher. Joyce became a successful writer and family therapist. They had three children and built a beautiful house on a hill in the country. Graham's last name is Gladwell. He is my father and Joyce Gladwell is my mother.www.u
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2. This is my mother's success story, and it's not true. It is not a lie in the sense that the facts were fabricated. But it's just as bad as telling the story of Bill Gates without mentioning the computer at Lakeside, or explaining Asian math skills without going back to the rice fields. It overlooks my mother's many opportunities and the importance of her cultural heritage.
For example, in 1935, when my mother and her sister were four years old, a historian named William M. MacMillan visited Jamaica. He was a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. MacMillan was a man ahead of his time: deeply concerned with the social problems of South Africa's black population, he came to the Caribbean to make the same arguments that he had made in South Africa.
MacMillan's main concern was Jamaica's educational system. Formal education—if what happened in the wooden barn next to my grandparents' house can be called “formal school”—lasted only until I was fourteen. Jamaica had no public schools or universities. Those with academic inclinations took tutoring lessons from the rector in their youth and, with any luck, made their way onto the faculty. Those with broader aspirations somehow had to find their way to a private school and from there to a university in the United States or England.
But scholarships were few and far between, and the cost of private tuition was prohibitive for all but a privileged few. The "bridge from grammar school" to high school, MacMillan later wrote in a scathing critique of England's handling of its colonies entitled West Indies Warning, "is narrow and uncertain." The school system did nothing for the "lower" grades. He continued: "At the very least, these schools are a factor that deepens and sharpens social differences." If the government doesn't give its people a chance, there will be trouble, he warned.
A year after MacMillan published his book, a wave of riots and riots swept across the Caribbean. In Trinidad, 14 people died and 59 were injured. In Barbados, 14 died and 47 were injured. In Jamaica, a series of violent strikes paralyzed the country and a state of emergency was declared. In a panic, the British government took MacMillan's regulations to heart and, among other reforms, proposed a series of island scholarships for academically interested students to attend private schools. The scholarships began in 1941. My mother and her twin sisters applied for the exam the following year. That's how they finished high school; If they had been born two, three, or four years earlier, they may never have received a full education. My mother owes the turning point of her life to the moment of her birth, the rioters of 1937, and W. M. MacMillan.
I described my grandmother, Daisy Nation, as "renowned for her beauty." But the truth is, that was a careless and condescending way of describing it. She was a force. The fact that my mother and her sister left Harewood for St. Hilda's was my grandmother's fault. My grandfather may have been an imposing and cultured man, but he was an idealist and a dreamer. He buried himself in his books. If he had ambitions for his daughters, he didn't have the vision or the energy to make them happen. My grandmother did. Santa Hilda was her idea: some of the wealthiest families in the region sent her daughters there, and she saw what a good school meant. Her daughters did not play with the other children in town. You read. She required Latin and algebra for high school, so she had her daughters under the tutelage of Archdeacon Hay.
"If you asked him about his goals for the kids, he'd say he wants us out.
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there,” my mother recalls. “She felt that the Jamaican context was not offered enough. And if there was a chance to move on and you could take it, then the sky was the limit for them.
When the scholarship test result came out, only my aunt got a scholarship. Not my mother. This is another fact that my first story was careless with. My mother remembers her parents standing at the door and talking. "We ran out of money" They paid the tuition for the first semester, bought the uniforms and spent their savings. What would you do if you won my mother's sophomore tuition? But then again, they couldn't send one daughter and not the other. My grandmother was tough. She sent them both, and she prayed, and at the end of the first semester it turned out that one of the other girls at the school had won two scholarships, so the second one went to my mother.
When it was time to go to college, my aunt, the academic twin, was awarded a Centennial Scholarship. The "centennial" refers to the fact that the grant was introduced one hundred years after the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. It was reserved for graduates of public grammar schools and, recognizing the deep sentiment of the British people to honor the memory of abolition, an Island-wide Centenary Scholarship was awarded each year at large, with the award going to the best girl and valedictorian in alternate years. The year my aunt applied was one of the "girl" years. She was lucky. She was not my mother. My mother had to pay for a ticket to England, food, lodging and living expenses in addition to London University tuition. To give you an idea of how terrifying that number was, the value of the centennial scholarship my aunt won was probably the sum of my grandparents' annual salaries. There were no student loan programs or banks with lines of credit for rural teachers. "If she had asked my father," my mother says, "she would have told me, 'We don't have any money.'
who made daisy He went to the Chinese grocer in a neighboring town. Jamaica has a very large Chinese population, which has dominated the commercial life of the island since the 19th century. In Jamaican language, a company is not a company, but a "Chinese company". Daisy went to the china shop, Mr. Chance's, and borrowed the money. No one knows how much she borrowed, although it must have been a huge sum. And no one knows why Mr. Chance lent it to Daisy, other than, of course, that she was Daisy Nation, paid her bills on time, and taught Chance's children at Harewood School. It wasn't always easy being a Chinese kid in a Jamaican schoolyard. Jamaican children made fun of Chinese children. "Chinee nyan [eat] dog." Daisy was a kind and beloved character, an oasis in the midst of hostility. Mister. Chance may have felt indebted to her.
"Did he tell me what he's doing? I didn't even ask him," my mother recalls. "It just happened. I just applied to college and got in. I completely acted on the belief that I could count on my mother without even realizing that I was counting on her."
Joyce Gladwell owes her college education first to W. M. MacMillan, then to the Saint Hilda student who gave up her scholarship, then to Mr. Chance, and most importantly, to DaisyNation.
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3. Daisy Nation originated in the far northwest of Jamaica. His great-grandfather was William Ford, of Irish origin, who came to Jamaica in 1784 after buying a coffee plantation. Not long after his arrival, he bought a slave girl and took her as his concubine. He saw them on the docks at Alligator Pond, a fishing village on the South Shore. She was a woman from the Igbo tribe of West Africa. They had a son they named Juan. He was a "mulatto" in the language of the time; he was black, and all Fords from that point on fell into the black Jamaican class.
In the southern United States during the same period, it would have been highly unusual for a white landowner to have such a public relationship with a slave. Sexual relations between blacks and whites were considered morally repugnant. Legislation prohibiting racial mixing has been passed, the last of which was not struck down until 1967 by the United States Supreme Court. A plantation owner who openly cohabited with a slave would have been socially ostracized, and any descendants of the union of blacks and whites would have been enslaved.
In Jamaica, attitudes varied greatly. The Caribbean was little more than a vast slave colony in those years. Blacks outnumbered whites more than ten to one. There were few, if any, white women of marriageable age, and as a result, the overwhelming majority of white men in the West Indies had black or brown mistresses. The British plantation owner in Jamaica, famous for keeping an accurate journal of his sexual exploits, has slept with 138 different women in his 37 years on the island, almost all of them slaves and not all, it is suspected, willing partners. And whites saw mulattoes, the children of those relationships, as potential allies, a buffer between them and the island's large slave population. Mulatto women were valued as lovers, and their sons, brighter again, rose even higher on the social and economic ladder. Mulattoes rarely worked in the fields. They lived life much easier working in the "house". They were the most likely to be released. So many mulatto lovers received substantial fortunes in the wills of white landowners that the Jamaican legislature once passed a law limiting bequests to £2,000 (which was a huge sum at the time).
"When a European comes to the West Indies and settles, or settles for a while, he finds it necessary to take a governess or mistress," wrote an eighteenth-century observer. "The choice you can make is varied, a Black, a Tawney, a Mulatto or a Mestee, one of which can be bought for £100 or £150... When colored children are produced, they are emancipated and sent, for the most part, by parents who can pay at the age of three or four to be educated in England.
This is the world Daisy's grandfather, John, was born into. He was a generation away from a slave ship, living in a country that can best be described as an African penal colony, and a free man with all the benefits of an education. He married another mulatto woman, a woman who is half European and half Arawak, which is the indigenous tribe of Jamaica, and had seven children.
"These people, the mestizos, had a lot of status," says Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson. “At eighteen and twenty-six they had full civil liberties. In fact, they are getting full civil liberties at the same time as the Jews in Jamaica. you could vote Do whatever a white man can do, and do it in the context of what was still a slave society.
“The ideal would be to try your luck as a craftsman. Remember, Jamaica has sugarcane plantations that are very different from the cotton plantations of the southern United States. cotton predominates
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agricultural persecution. You harvest these things, and most of the processing was done in Lancashire or the North. Sugar is an agro-industrial complex. You have to have the factory right there because sugar starts to lose sucrose hours after it's harvested. They had no choice but to have the sugar mill right there, and sugar mills require a variety of trades. The Coopers. The Boilermakers. Carpenters, and many of those jobs were filled by people of color.
It also happened that Jamaica's English elite, unlike their counterparts in the United States, had little interest in the great nation-building project. They wanted to earn money and return to England. They had no desire to stay in a country they considered hostile. So the task of building a new society with its many opportunities fell to the mestizos.
"In the 1850s, the mayor of Kingston [Jamaica's capital] was a colored person," Patterson continued. "And also the founder of the Daily Gleaner [Jamaica's main newspaper]. They were colored and dominated the professional classes from the beginning. Whites were involved in the business or the plantation. The people who became doctors and lawyers were these people of color. These were the people who ran the schools. The Bishop of Kingston was a classic dark man. They weren't the business elite. But they were the cultural elite."
The chart below shows a breakdown of two categories of Jamaican professionals - lawyers and parliamentarians - in the early 1950s. Categorization is based on skin colour. "White and fair" refers to people who are either pure white or, more likely, have a black heritage that is no longer visible. "Olive" is one notch below, and "tan" is one notch below (although the difference between these two shades isn't apparent to anyone but a Jamaican). The fact to keep in mind is that in the 1950s, "blacks" made up about 80% of Jamaica's population, five to one more than the mixed race.
Ethnicity Lawyers (percent) Parliamentarians (percent) Chinese 3.1 East Indian - Jewish 7.1 Syrian - White and Light 38.8 10 Olive 10.2 13 Tan 17.3 19 Dark Brown 10.2 39 Black 5.1 10 Unknown 8.2
See the extraordinary advantage that the small white gave to the colored minority. Having an ancestor who worked at home and not in the fields, who gained full citizenship in 1826, who was valued rather than enslaved, who was given the opportunity for meaningful work rather than sent to the cane fields de azúcar made the difference professionally. Success two and three generations later.
In other words, Daisy Ford's ambition for her daughters didn't come out of nowhere. She was the heir to a privileged legacy. Her older brother, Rufus, whom she moved in with as a child, was a teacher and an educated man. Her brother Carlos hers went to Cuba and then returned to Jamaica and opened a clothing factory. Her father, Charles Ford, was a merchandise wholesaler. Her mother, Ann, was a Powell, another upbringing and educated family, and the same Powell that would produce Colin Powell two generations later. Her uncle Henry owned a farm. Her grandfather John, son of William Ford and his African concubine, became a preacher. No fewer than three members of the extended Ford family have won Rhodes Scholarships. When my mother W.M. MacMillan and the 1937 protesters and Mr. Chance and his mother Daisy Ford, also Daisy
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Rufus and Carlos and Ann and Charles and John.
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4. My grandmother was an extraordinary woman. But it's important to remember that the steady upward trend the Fords embarked on began with a morally complicated act: William Ford looked longingly at my great-great-grandmother in a slave market on Alligator Pond and bought her.
The slaves who were not thus chosen lived short and unhappy lives. In Jamaica, plantation owners found it more sensible to squeeze as much expense as possible out of their human property while the property was young, working their slaves until they were useless or dead, and then simply buying another round at the market. . They had no problem with the philosophical contradiction of valuing the children they had with a slave while viewing slaves as property. Thomas Thistlewood, the plantation owner who cataloged his sexual exploits, had a lifelong relationship with a slave named Phibbah, whom he supposedly adored and who bore him a son. But to his "land" slaves, she was a monster whose preferred punishment for those who tried to escape was what he called a "derby dose." They beat the fugitive and rubbed his open wounds with salt, lemon juice and black pepper. Another slave defecated in the mouth of the delinquent, who was gagged for four or five hours.
It is not surprising, then, that the swarthy classes of Jamaica came to fetishise their levity. That was his great advantage. They checked each other's skin tone and ended up playing the color game just as ruthlessly as the white ones. “When, as is often the case, the children in a family have different skin colors,” the Jamaican sociologist Fernando Henriques once wrote:
The lighter ones are preferred over the others. Through adolescence and up to marriage, darker family members are left behind when entertaining the couple's friends or lighter-colored family members. The blond boy is considered a lifter of the color of the family and nothing should stand in the way of his success, that is, a marriage that will further raise the value of the color of the family. A light-skinned person will try to break any social relationships she may have with darker relatives... darker members of a black family will encourage a very light-skinned relative's efforts to "pass" as white. Family relationship practices underlie the public manifestation of racial prejudice.
My family was not immune to this. Daisy was very proud that her husband was lighter than she was. But the same prejudice was turned against her: "Daisy is nice, you know," said her mother-in-law, "but she's very dark."
A relative of my mother's (I call her Aunt Joan) was also at the top of the color totem pole. She was "white and beautiful." But her husband was what is known in Jamaica as a "Native American"—a dark-skinned man with fine, straight black hair—and his daughters were black like his father. One day after her husband's death, she was traveling by train to visit her daughter and she met and became interested in a light-skinned man in the same carriage. Years later, Aunt Joana told my mother what happened next, only with great shame. Stepping off the train, she walked past her daughter and denied her own flesh and blood because she did not want a man with such desirable white skin to know that she had given birth to such a brown daughter.
In the 1960s, my mother wrote a book about her experiences. It was titled Brown Face, Big
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Master, the "dark guy" who refers to oneself and the "great teacher" who refers to God in the Jamaican dialect. At one point, he describes a time just after my parents got married when they were living in London and my older brother was just a baby. They were looking for an apartment and after a long search, my father found one in a suburb of London. However, the day after the move, the landlady ordered them to leave. "You didn't tell me your wife was Jamaican," she angrily told my father.
In her book, my mother describes her long struggle to understand this humiliation, to reconcile her experience with her faith. In the end, she had to admit that anger was not an option and that, as a Jamaican of color whose family has benefited from generations of racial hierarchies, she could hardly blame the other for the impulse to divide people based on their color. . Fur:
I complained to God with so many words: "Here I was, the wounded representative of the black race in our struggle, to be considered free and equal to the dominant white man!" And God had fun; My sentence did not ring true to him. He would try again. And then God said, "Didn't you do the same? Remember this and that, people you looked down on or avoided or treated with less respect than others because they were different on the surface and you were ashamed to identify with them. Aren't you glad you weren't more colorful than you? Grateful not to be black?" My anger and hatred for the landlady vanished, I was no better or worse than her… We were both guilty of the sin of self-esteem, pride and exclusivity with which we separate people from ourselves.
It is not easy to honestly say where we come from. It would be easier for my mother to portray his success as a direct triumph over victimhood, just as it would be easier for me to look at Joe Flom and call him the greatest lawyer of all time, even though their individual achievements are so impossibly intertwined. with his ethnic affiliation, his generation, the details of the garment industry, and the particular biases of downtown law firms. Bill Gates could accept the title of genius and leave it at that. It doesn't take a small amount of humility to look back on his life and say, "I've been very lucky." The Lakeside Academy Mother's Club bought her a computer in 1968. It's impossible for a hockey player, Bill Joy, Robert Oppenheimer, or any other stranger to look down from their high seat and honestly say, "I did it myself." . seems to be a common place. But they are not. They are products of history and community, opportunity and legacy. His success is neither extraordinary nor mysterious. It is built on a web of benefits and legacies, some deserved, some not. some deserved, others simply lucky, but all are essential to make them what they are. The fugitive, after all, is not a fugitive.
My great great grandmother was bought by Alligator Pond. This act, in turn, gave his son John Ford the privilege of a skin color that saved her a life of slavery. The culture of possibility that Daisy Ford so brilliantly embraced and applied to her daughters was transmitted to her through the peculiarities of the West Indian social fabric. And my mother's upbringing was a product of the riots of 1937 and Mr. Chance. These were the gifts of history to my family, and if the resources of that grocery store, the fruits of that riot, the opportunities of that culture, and the privileges of that race had been extended to others, how many more would live now? of realization, in a beautiful house on a hill?
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Thank you
I'm happy to say that Outliers lives up to its own thesis. It was a very collective effort. I was inspired, as it always seems to me, by the work of Richard Nisbett. Reading Culture of Honor started many of the thoughts that led to this book. Thank you Professor Nisbett.
As usual, I persuaded my friends to criticize various drafts of the manuscript. Fortunately, they stuck to it, and Outliers is infinitely better for it. 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 conducted Yeoman's fact-checking and research work. Suzy Hansen performed the usual editorial magic on her. David Remnick was kind enough to give me time off from my New Yorker duties to complete this book. Thanks, 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've worked with Henry for so long that I now have what I like to call an "inner seeker," which is a self-correcting voice in my head that gives me the benefit of Henry's wisdom even when he's not around. Both internal and external search engines were invaluable.
Bill Phillips and I are two for two so far and I'm so grateful to have had his Midas touch once again. thanks bill here's hoping we go three for three. Will Goodlad and Stefan McGrath of Penguin, England, as well as Michael Pietsch and, especially, Geoff Shandler of Little, Brown, read this manuscript from cover to cover. Thanks also to the rest of the Little, Brown team: Heather Fain, Heather Rizzo and Junie Dahn. My Canadian colleague Pamela Marshall is a magician with words. I can't imagine publishing a book without her.
Two last words of thanks. Tina Bennett, my agent, has been with me from the beginning. She is insightful, thoughtful, encouraging and unfailingly wise, and thinking about what she has done for me makes me as happy as a January 1 hockey player.
Above all, I owe a debt of gratitude to my parents, Graham and Joyce. This is a book about the meaning of work and I learned from my father that work can be meaningful. Everything he does, from his most complex academic math to digging in the garden, he approaches with joy, determination and enthusiasm. My first memories of my father are watching him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I didn't know it at the time, but it was one of the most precious gifts a parent can give a child. My mother, on the other hand, taught me to express myself; She taught me that saying something clearly and simply is nice. She read every word of this book and tried to hold me to that standard. Dedicated to the Outliers, my grandmother Daisy gave my mother the gift of opportunity. My mother did the same to me.
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About the Author
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. Before joining The New Yorker, he was a reporter for the Washington Post. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He now lives in New York.
gladwell.com
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Malcolm Gladwell's books
the critical point
Flee
the blink
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what the dog saw
David y Goliath
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Cheer for Malcolm Gladwells
OutlierThe success story
"In a never-ending quest to explain ourselves, Malcolm Gladwell once again points his intellectual wand at a common but mysterious cultural phenomenon: in this case, the lives of the outliers, those extraordinary individuals whose success millions of us seek to emulate. What is the difference, Gladwell asks, between those who make something special of their lives and everyone else?From software billionaires to professional athletes, Gladwell uses his counterintuitive logic to explain how the habits of highly successful people happen. to the background, where, when and how they grew... measurement.
– Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair
"In the wide world of nonfiction writing, Malcolm Gladwell is the closest thing to a singular talent there is today... Outliers is a joy to read and will keep you pondering his imaginative theories for days... Outliers it represents a new generation of books for Gladwell… It's almost a manifesto.”
– David Leonhardt, New York Times book reviewer
“Unabashedly inspiring…. A provocative and practical book on the landscape of success.” — Jonah Raskin, San Francisco Chronicle
"A must have for educators, recruiters and parents... Outlier is Mr. Gladwell's evidence.
– Joanne McNeil, Sunday Times
"An important new book...Gladwell deftly captures a broader trend of thought: the growing appreciation of the power of cultural patterns, social contagions, memes...Gladwell's social determinism is a useful corrective to the homosexual view." oeconomicus of human nature.
–David Brooks, New York Times
"Outliers is a compelling read with an important message: if we better understand what makes people successful, we should be able to create more successful (and happier) people."
-Economist
"The explosively entertaining Outliers is perhaps Gladwell's best and most useful work to date... Brilliant stories and life lessons, Outliers is fascinating science, self-help, and entertainment all rolled into one.
—Gregory Kirschling, Entertainment Weekly
“No other book I have read this year combines such a distinctive prose style with truly thought-provoking content. Gladwell somehow writes with a high degree of dazzle, while still being as clear and direct as Strunk or White might have hoped.
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—Frank Reiss, Atlanta Magazine-Constitution
"A fascinating and entertaining book that uncovers the rarely recognized forces behind success."
— James F. Sweeney, Cleveland Plain chief negotiator
"Gladwell's arguments are worth pondering." -Workweek
"Revealing... Perhaps if enough people read and thought about the impact of outliers, it could help begin the much-needed process of reversing current self-defeating attitudes toward education and life.
—Thomas Sowell, Washington Times
"Malcolm Gladwell has a rare ability: he can turn academic research into gripping fables involving real people... With its entertaining psychology and sociology, Outliers is captivating and beautifully written."
– Stephen Kotkin, New York Times
"Malcolm Gladwell is hard to resist... Reading one of his books is like sitting at the kitchen table as you run around the house pulling research papers from cupboards, thick biographies from shelves, and spreadsheets from your laptop." "Look at that!" he exclaims, and "Can you believe that?" Then he turns serious. "You know how important this is, don't you?" he asks...Ultimately, Outliers is a book. about the 20th century. It offers a fascinating insight into how certain people become successful.”
–Rebeca Steinitz, Boston Globe
“Provocative, funny and irresistibly debatable…. Outliers is another winner for this agile social observer.”
– Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor
"Gladwell's writing is always accessible and compelling, and her insights, drawn from science, imbued with research, are intriguing."
—Margaret Sullivan, Buffalo News
"Gladwell turns conventional wisdom on its head...His talent for tracking curious discoveries in the social sciences makes him stand out among contemporary writers. Gladwell reveals his particular genius in this remarkable trilogy, completed by Outliers...Identifies remarkable gems in the vast collection of social science research and skillfully places it in exquisite surroundings.
–Howard Gardner, Washington Post
"As with Blink and The Tipping Point, the anecdotes are amazing and the dates mysterious." —Max Ross, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“No other writer today can do this so well. If he hadn't finished reading Gladwell's book, he would have
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Be jealous of your talent, not your luck." —Jerry Adler, Newsweek
"An eye-opening book... Essential reading for anyone interested in the psychology of performance." —Connie Glaser, Atlanta Business Chronicle
"Mr. Gladwell's drive is perfect...He passionately emphasizes the need to cultivate great minds that may be limited by their circumstances or environment.
—David A. Shaywitz, Wall Street Journal
“Totally fun and informative…. Malcolm Gladwell invites reflection. Is there a better compliment for an author?
–Al Hutchison, Tampa Tribune
"Readable and fun...Malcolm Gladwell is a successful practitioner of what we might call a new wave of social science (sociology, economics, psychology, history) for a general audience. The success stories Gladwell tells are inspiring, and the success stories, whether about hockey players, computer geniuses, corporate lawyers or entrepreneurs, are masterfully told.”
– Crispin Sartwell, Philadelphia researcher
"Provocative... Gladwell is well traveled, anecdotal and always readable... The hodgepodge of information and characters in the book is fun.
-New Scientist
"Outliers is probably Malcolm Gladwell's most important book to date...Gladwell offers a new way of looking at the world.
– Michael Bond, Nature magazine
"Gladwell's unique perspective challenges readers to think about intelligence, success, and fame in new ways... Outliers is a clever and entertaining book that stimulates readers' minds and broadens their perspectives. It's incredible in its own right. way".
– John T. Slania, page of book
“Outliers will sell billions of copies in the time it takes you to read this paragraph. And while thousands of her readers are business students and corporate executives looking to Gladwell to demystify surprising behavior, Outliers' target audience may also include very concerned parents in America.
—Joel Lovell, GQ
"With Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell has done it again: he has taken what could have been a dry and pedantic subject and crafted in its place a pleasant, almost light-hearted treatise on the extraordinary... that marks Gladwell's best work. ".
—Scott Coffman, Louisville Courier-Journal
“Gladwell knows how to weave a story out of what might otherwise be sociological and dry.
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psychological studies weaving anecdotes and interviews that illustrate his theories on maximizing human potential.”
–Michelle Archer, USA Today
“I like the way Malcolm Gladwell makes me think… Gladwell uses his quirky brand of pop sociology and a collection of fascinating anecdotes to make the case that timing is as much about success as it is about bravery and intelligence.
–Susan Reimer, Baltimore Sun
"Gladwell is proving once again that he is a master of a genre he pioneered: the book that sheds light on secret patterns behind everyday phenomena... Gladwell debunks the myth of individual merit to examine how culture, Circumstance, timing, birth, and luck are responsible for success, and how historical legacies can hold others back despite numerous individual donations.Even knowing how long many of these stories end, Gladwell brings back the suspense and randomness that they make them new and surprising.”
— Weekly Editors
"Outliers is a provocative and thought-provoking book, a pleasure to read for its clear language and lively intelligence. Gladwell's time is once again impeccable and, thanks to his strong Canadian background, he is ready to share his understanding of the zeitgeist with an enlightened audience.
– John Strawn, resident of Portland and Oregon
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guide reading group
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A conversation with Malcolm Gladwell
What is an outlier?
"Outlier" is a scientific term used to describe things or phenomena that are outside of normal experience. In summer in Paris, we expect most days to be hot to very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature dropped below freezing. This day would be an outlier. And while we understand very well why summer days in Paris are hot or hot, we know much less about why a summer day in Paris can be very cold. In this book I am interested in atypical people: men and women who, for one reason or another, are so successful, so extraordinary, and so far removed from ordinary experience that they are as fascinating to the rest of us as a cold August day. . . .
Why did you write outliers?
I write books when I keep coming back to the same themes. I wrote Tipping Point because I was fascinated by the sudden drop in crime in New York City, and that fascination turned into an interest in the idea of epidemics and epidemic processes. I wrote Blink because I was starting to become similarly obsessed with the way we all form opinions about other people on the fly, without really thinking.
In the case of Outliers, the book grew out of my frustration with the way we explain the careers of truly successful people. You know how you can hear someone say, "You're very smart" or "You're very ambitious" about Bill Gates or a rock star or some other stranger? Well, I know a lot of people who are really smart and very ambitious, and they're not worth $60 billion. I realized that our understanding of success was really approximate, and that there was an opportunity to dig deeper and find better explanations.
How are our "raw" success statements?
This is a bit confusing because we're certainly not missing the point. If you go to the bookstore you will find a hundred success guides or celebrity biographies or self-help books that promise to outline the six keys to great success. (Or is it seven?) So we're going to have to be pretty inventive about it. However, in writing Outliers, I found that we focused too much on the individual, on describing the traits, habits, and personality traits of those who live further back in the world. And that's the problem, because to understand outliers, I think you have to look around you: at your culture, community, family, and generation. We look at tall trees and I think we should look at the forest.
Can you give some examples?
On the right. For example, one of the chapters discusses the fact that a surprising number of the most powerful and successful corporate lawyers in New York City come from almost exactly the same background: they are Jewish, born in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the mid-1970s. 1930's. Children of immigrants. parents who worked there
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textile industry. Now you could call it a coincidence. Or you're wondering, like me, what does it have to be Jewish and be part of the generation that was born in the Depression and have parents who worked in the garment industry, what does that have to do with something that could make someone a person? very, very successful lawyer? And the answer is that you can learn a lot about why someone rises to the top of this profession by asking these questions.
Doesn't it sound like success is beyond the individual's control?
I have no intention of going that far. But I think we grossly underestimate the extent to which success comes from things that the individual has nothing to do with. For example, Outliers begins by examining why a grossly disproportionate number of ice hockey and soccer professionals were born in January, February, and March. I won't spoil things for you by giving you the answer. But the point is that the best hockey players are talented, hard-working people, but they also benefit from the weird, untested, and quirky ways their world works. It is organized
I actually have a lot of fun with birthdays on Outliers. Did you know that if you want to be a software entrepreneur, there is a magical birth year? And another magical birth year if you really want to get rich? In fact, one nine-year period has produced more outliers than any other period in history. It's amazing how many patterns you can find in the lives of successful people if you look closely.
What is the most surprising pattern you discovered in the book?
It's probably the chapter towards the end of Outliers where I talk about plane crashes. It turns out that the quality of a pilot has a lot to do with where that pilot came from, that is, what culture he grew up in. I was really impressed by the strength of the connection between culture and accidents, and something I never dreamed of in a million years.
Wait. Does that mean there are some airlines I should avoid?
Yes. Although, as I show in Outliers, by recognizing the role culture plays in piloting, some of the more insecure airlines have really begun to clean up their modus operandi.
In The Tipping Point you had a whole chapter on suicide. At Blink you ended the book with a long chapter on the Diallo shooting, and now the plane crashes. Do you have a macabre side?
Yes! I'm a frustrated thriller writer! But seriously, there's a good reason for that. I think we learn more from extreme circumstances than from anything else; Disasters tell us something about our thoughts and actions that we cannot learn from everyday life. That is the premise of Outliers. It is those outside of ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.
How does this book compare to Blink and The Tipping Point?
It's different in the sense that it focuses much more on people and their stories. The subtitle "The Success Story" is meant to point this out. Much of the book is an attempt to describe the life of
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successful people who tell their stories in a different way than we are used to. I have a chapter devoted in part to explaining the extraordinary success of Bill Gates. But I don't care what happened to him after he was seventeen. Or I have a chapter that explains why Asian students are so good at math. But it focuses almost exclusively on what the grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-grandparents of these schoolchildren did. You will meet more people in Outliers than in my previous two books.
What was your most memorable experience investigating outliers?
There were so many! I will never forget the time I spent with Chris Langan, who may be the smartest man in the world. Never before had he been able to feel someone's intellect like I could with them. It was an intimidating experience, but also deeply moving, as I hope the chapter "The Problem of Geniuses" makes clear. I also went to southern China and stood in the rice paddies and went to this strange little town in eastern Pennsylvania where no one has ever had a heart attack and deciphered the "black box" recordings from the planes with the researchers from accidents. I must warn all potential readers that once you get into the world of plane crashes, it becomes very difficult to unravel. I'm still obsessed.
What should people get out of the outliers?
I think it's very similar to Outliers Blink and The Tipping Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with The Tipping Point was to help the reader understand that real change is possible. With Blink, he wanted people to take seriously the tremendous power of their intuition. My wish with Outliers is that we understand how successful a group project is. When outliers become outliers, it's not just through their own efforts. It is due to the contributions of many different people and many different circumstances, and that means that as a society we have more control over who succeeds, and how many of us succeed, than we realize. This is an incredibly hopeful and uplifting idea.
I noticed that the book is dedicated to "Daisy". Who is she?
Daisy is my grandmother. She was a remarkable woman who was responsible for my mother's success: my mother's ability to leave the small rural Jamaican town where she grew up, obtain a college education in England, and eventually meet and marry my father. . The final chapter of Outliers is an attempt to understand how Daisy managed to achieve this, using all the lessons learned throughout the book. I have never written something so personal. I hope readers find her story as moving as I do.
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questions and discussion topics
1. Malcolm Gladwell argues that there is no such thing as a self-made man and that high achievers succeed because of their circumstances, family, and appetite for hard work. How does this perspective differ from the way he has thought and understood success in the past?
2. In The Ethnic Theory of Air Crashes, Gladwell discusses an extreme form in which different "cultural languages" manifest themselves. In your opinion, what is our “cultural language”? How did it come about and how did it develop? Does it work in our favor in terms of our social structure?
3. Discuss what Gladwell means when he says that biologists often talk about "the 'ecology' of an organism" (here). How is this similar to "cumulative benefit" (here)?
4. Do you think there is an innate talent? According to Gladwell, what is the difference between talent, preparation, and opportunity? How is practice related to success?
5. Who are the "Termites" and why did they get this nickname? In Gladwell's opinion, what was Terman's fault?
6. What does Gladwell believe are the consequences of the way we think about and personalize success? What opportunities are we missing out on as a result? Do you think that as a society we should rethink our definition of success and how it is achieved?
7. Do you think the 10,000 hour rule is an encouraging or fatalistic lens to view the possibility of individual success? How does this rule change our vision of the American Dream?
8. Gladwell writes about meritocracies influenced by the advantages some people have over others due to opportunity, education, and training. As the income gap in the US widens, does he think social mobility, which is a key ingredient for success, will continue to suffer?
9. Are there exceptions in your life? Who are they and what are their stories? Has reading this book changed your attitude towards your stories?
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In October 2013, Little, Brown and Company will premiere Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath.
The following is an excerpt from the first pages of the book.
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Goliath
"I AM A DOG, WHY DO I HAVE STICKS?"
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1.
At the heart of ancient Palestine lies the region known as Shephelah, a series of ridges and valleys that connect the Judean mountains to the east with the broad, flat plain of the Mediterranean plain. It is an area of breathtaking beauty, home to vineyards, fields of wheat, and forests of bananas and terebinths. It is also of great strategic importance.
Countless battles for supremacy have been fought in the region over the centuries, as the valleys rising from the Mediterranean plain offer coastal dwellers a clear route to the cities of Hebron, Bethlehem and Jerusalem on the Judean highlands. The most important valley is Aijalon in the north. But the most famous is Elah. In Elah, Saladin faced the Knights of the Crusades in the 12th century. It played a central role in the Maccabean Wars with Syria over a thousand years earlier, and most notably in Old Testament days it was the site of the fledgling kingdom of Israel against the armies of the Philistines.
The Philistines came from Crete. They were a seafaring people who emigrated to Palestine and settled on the coast. The Israelites gathered in the mountains under the leadership of King Saul. In the second half of the 11th century B.C. The Philistines began to move eastward, meandering up the river along the valley floor of Elah. His goal was to conquer the mountaintop near Bethlehem and split Saul's kingdom in two. Dangerous and battle-hardened, the Philistines were the sworn enemies of the Israelites. Worried, Saul gathered his men and hurried down the mountains to meet them.
The Philistines camped along the southern mountain range of Elah. The Israelites pitched their tents on the other side of the northern ridge, allowing the two armies to face each other on the other side of the ravine. None of them dared to move. Attacking meant descending the hill and then making a suicidal climb to the enemy peak on the other side. At last the Philistines had had enough. They sent their best warrior to the valley to settle the confrontation one by one.
He was a giant, at least two meters tall, with a bronze helmet and full armor. He carried spear, spear and sword. A servant preceded him, carrying a large shield. The giant turned to the Israelites and shouted, "Choose a man and let him come down to me! If he wins the battle against me and defeats me, we will be his slaves. But if I prevail and win you, you will be our slave and serve us.
No one moved in the Israelite camp. Who could win against such a terrible opponent? Then a shepherd boy who had come down from Bethlehem came forward to bring food for his brothers and offered himself. Saul objected: "You cannot go up against this Philistine to fight him, because you are young, and he was a man of war from his youth." But the shepherd was stubborn. He has faced tougher opponents, he argued. “When a lion or a bear came and took a sheep from the flock,” he told Saul, “I would go after it and kill it and free it from its clutches.” Saul had no other choice. He gave up and the shepherd boy ran down the hill towards the giant who was standing in the valley. "Come to me, and I will give your meat to the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field," the giant shouted when he saw his adversary approaching. Thus began one of the most famous battles in history. The giant's name was Goliath. The shepherd boy's name was David.
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2.
David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people meet giants. By "giants" I mean powerful adversaries of all kinds, from mighty armies and warriors to disability, calamity, and oppression. Each chapter tells the story of a different person, famous or unknown, ordinary or brilliant, who was faced with a huge challenge and forced to respond. Should I follow the rules or follow my own instincts? Should I persevere or give up? Should I defend myself or forgive?
Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much of what we find valuable in our world arises from this kind of unequal conflict, because the act of facing overwhelming adversity produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we constantly misinterpret this type of conflict. We misunderstand them. We misunderstand them. Giants are not what we think they are. The very qualities that seem to give you strength are often the source of great weakness. And being an outsider can transform people in ways we often don't appreciate: it can open doors, create opportunities, educate, enlighten, and make possible the otherwise unthinkable. We need a better guide to facing the giants, and what better place to start this journey than with the epic showdown between David and Goliath 3,000 years ago in the Valley of Elah.
When Goliath called for the Israelites, he demanded what is known as "single combat." This was a common practice in ancient times. Two sides in a conflict would try to avoid the heavy bloodshed of open combat by choosing a warrior to represent them in a duel. For example, Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius, a Roman historian from the 1st century BC. BC, of an epic battle in which a Gallic warrior began taunting his Roman opponents. "This immediately aroused the great indignation of one Titus Manlius, a youth of the highest birth," writes Quadrigarius. Tito challenged the Gaul to a duel:
He stepped forward and would not allow a Gaul to embarrass Roman bravery. Armed with a legionnaire's shield and a Spanish sword, he faced the Gauls. His battle took place on the same bridge [over the Anio River] in the presence of both armies, with great apprehension. This is how they faced each other: the Gaul, according to his fighting method, with an advanced shield and waiting for an attack; Manlius, trusting more in his courage than skill, struck shield against shield, throwing the Gauls off balance. As the Gaul tried to regain the same position, Manlius again pushed shield against shield, forcing the man to change ground. In this way he slipped under the Gaul's sword and stabbed him in the chest with his Spanish sword. Neck.
This is what Goliath has been waiting for: a warrior like him would step up to close combat. It never occurred to him that the battle would be fought under conditions other than these, and he prepared accordingly. To protect himself from blows to the body, he wore an elaborate tunic made of hundreds of overlapping bronze fish scales. He covered her arms and came down to her knees and probably weighed over 100 pounds. He had bronze shin guards protecting his
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Legs, with attached bronze plates covering their feet. She was wearing a heavy metal helmet. She had three separate weapons, all optimized for close combat. He wielded an all-bronze javelin capable of penetrating a shield or even armor. He had a sword on his hip. And as a primary option, he carried a special short-range spear with a metal shaft "thick as a weaver's beam." It was attached to a rope and an elaborate set of weights that allowed it to be released with extraordinary power and precision. As historian Moshe Garsiel writes: "To the Israelites, this extraordinary spear, with its heavy shaft and long heavy iron blade, seemed capable, when thrown from Goliath's strong arm, of piercing any bronze shield and armor." "Israel rises up to fight. Goliath?
Then David shows up. Saul tries to give him his own sword and armor so he would at least have a fighting chance. David refuses. "I can't drive in it," he says, "because I'm not used to it." Instead, he bends down, picks up five smooth stones and puts them in his pocket. He then descends into the valley with his shepherd's staff. Goliath looks at the boy who approaches him and is offended. He expected to fight an experienced warrior. Instead, he sees a shepherd, a boy of one of the lower professions, who apparently wants to use his shepherd's staff as a club against Goliath's sword. "I'm a dog," says Goliath, pointing to the stick, "so you come at me with sticks?"
What happens next is a matter of legend. David places one of his stones in a leather sling case and fires it into Goliath's exposed forehead. Goliath falls, stunned. David runs towards him, grabs the giant's sword and cuts off his head. “The Philistines saw their warrior dead,” says the Bible, “and they fled.”
The fight is miraculously won by an underdog who by all accounts should not have won. This is how we have told each other the story for many centuries since. This is how the expression "David and Goliath" came to our language, as a metaphor for an unlikely victory. And the problem with this version of events is that almost everything is wrong.
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3.
Ancient armies had three types of warriors. The first was cavalry: armed men on horseback or in chariots. The second was the infantry: foot soldiers in armor and wielding swords and shields. The third were missile warriors, or what we would now call artillery: archers and especially slingers. The slingers had a leather bag fastened on two sides with a long rope. They placed a stone or lead ball in the bag, spun it in ever larger and faster circles, then released one end of the string, causing the stone to shoot forward.
The sling required an extraordinary amount of skill and practice. But in expert hands, the sling was a devastating weapon. Medieval paintings depict slingers striking birds in mid-flight. Irish slingers are said to be able to hit a coin as far as the eye can see, and slingers are described in the Old Testament Book of Judges as being accurate to within a hair. Wide.” A skilled shooter could kill or seriously injure a target two hundred yards away. Imagine he is standing in front of a Major League Baseball pitcher who is aiming a baseball at his head.
Historian Baruch Halpern argues that the sling was of such importance in ancient warfare that the three types of warriors balanced each other, like each rock-paper-scissors gesture. With their long spears and armor, the infantry could hold their own against the cavalry. The cavalry, in turn, was able to defeat the missile warriors because the horses were moving too fast for the artillery to aim correctly. And Missile Warriors were deadly against infantry, for a large, heavy, heavily armored soldier was an easy target for a slinger, hurling missiles a hundred yards away. "Therefore, the Athenian expedition to Sicily failed in the Peloponnesian War," Halpern writes. "Thucydides describes in detail how the Athenian heavy infantry in the mountains was decimated by the local light infantry, mainly with the sling."
Goliath is heavy infantry. He believes that he will duel another heavy footman, much like Titus Manlius's battle with Gaul. When he says: "Come to me, that I may give your meat to the birds of the air and to the beasts of the field", the key phrase is "come to me". He wants to come to me so we can have a close fight. When Saul tries to put David in armor and give him a sword, he acts on the same assumption. He assumes that David will go hand in hand with Goliath.
However, David has no intention of honoring the rituals of single combat. When he tells Saul that he killed bears and lions as a shepherd, he does so not only as a test of his bravery, but also to emphasize another point: that he intends to fight Goliath the same way he did. he did it. He has learned to fight. wild animals - like a projectile. Warrior.
Run towards Goliath as he is fast and agile without armor. He puts a stone in his sling and spins it over and over again, faster each time at six or seven revolutions per second, aiming his projectile at Goliath's forehead, the giant's only vulnerable spot. Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israel Defense Forces, recently performed a series of calculations showing that a typical stone thrown by an expert marksman from 30 feet would hit Goliath's head at a velocity of 100 feet. four meters per second. - more than enough
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penetrate his skull and render him unconscious or dead. In terms of stopping power, this is equivalent to a reasonably sized modern pistol. "We found," Hirsch writes, "that David could have thrown and struck Goliath in just over a second, a time so short that Goliath could not have protected himself and during which he would have been virtually immobile."
What could Goliath do? He was wearing over a hundred pounds of armor. He was prepared for hand-to-hand combat, where he could stand still, parry blows with his armor, and deliver a powerful strike with his spear. He watched David approach, first with scorn, then with surprise, then with what can only be horror, realizing that the fight he had been waiting for had suddenly changed shape.
“You come against me with sword and javelin and javelin,” David said to Goliath, “but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. in my hands, and I will strike you and I will cut off your head... All who are here will know that the Lord does not save with sword or spear; for the battle is the Lord's, and he will deliver you all into our hands.
David mentions Goliath's sword and spear twice, as if to emphasize how fundamentally different their intentions are. He then reaches into his shepherd's coat for a stone, and at that moment no one watching from the ridges on either side of the valley would have thought that David's victory was unlikely.
"Goliath had as many chances against David," writes historian Robert Dohrenwend, "as any Bronze Age warrior with a sword had against an [opponent] armed with a .45 automatic pistol."
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4.
Why was there so much misunderstanding that day in the Valley of Elah? On one level, dueling reveals the folly of our assumptions about power. The reason King Saul is skeptical of David's chances is that David is small and Goliath is big. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical power. Little does he know that power can come in other forms: breaking the rules, substituting force for speed and surprise. Saúl is not alone in this error. In the pages that follow, I will argue that we continue to make that mistake today, in a way that has consequences for everything from the way we raise our children to the way we do. Fight crime and disorder.
But here is a second, deeper problem. Saul and the Israelites think they know who Goliath is. They size him up and jump to conclusions about what he thinks he's capable of. But they don't really see it. The truth is that Goliath's behavior is fascinating. He must be a mighty warrior. But he doesn't act like it. He descends to the bottom of the valley, accompanied by a companion, a servant who walks in front of him, carrying a shield. Shield bearers used to accompany archers into battle in ancient times, because a soldier using a bow and arrow did not have his hands free to carry a shield. But why would Goliath, a man summoning sword to sword in single combat, need to be assisted by a third party carrying an archer's shield?
Also, why does he say to David, "Come to me"? Why can't Goliath go to David? The biblical account emphasizes how slowly Goliath moves, which is a strange statement about someone who is supposed to be a battle hero of infinite strength. Why didn't Goliath react much sooner when he saw David come down the hill without a sword, shield or armor? When he first sees David, his immediate reaction is to insult when he should be scared. He doesn't seem to notice what's going on around him. There's even this weird comment after finally seeing David with his shepherd's crook: "Am I a dog coming at me with sticks?" Multiple Clubs David only holds one club.
What many medical experts today believe is that Goliath had a serious illness. He looks and sounds like someone who suffers from acromegaly, a condition caused by a benign tumor on the pituitary gland. The tumor causes an overproduction of human growth hormone, which would explain Goliath's extraordinary size. (The tallest person in history, Robert Wadlow, suffered from acromegaly. He was eight feet tall when he died and appears to be still growing.)
Also, one of the most common side effects of acromegaly is visual disturbances. Pituitary tumors can grow to the point where they compress the nerves to the eyes, causing people with acromegaly to often experience severe visual impairment and diplopia, or double vision. Why did a servant take Goliath to the bottom of the valley? Because the partner was your visual guide. Why is he moving so slowly? Because the world around you is blurry. Why does it take you so long to understand that David changed the rules? Because he doesn't see David until David is very close. "Come to me, that he may give your flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field," he cries, and in this request is an indication of his vulnerability. You have to come to me, otherwise I cannot reach you. And then comes the inexplicable "I'm a dog, are you coming to me with sticks?" David only had one stick. Goliath saw two.
What the Israelites saw from the top of the peak was an intimidating giant. Actually, the thing itself
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What gave the giant its size was also the source of its greatest weakness. Therein lies a powerful lesson for battles with all manner of giants. The powerful and strong are not always what they seem.
Moved by courage and faith, David ran towards Goliath. Goliath was blinded by his approach, and then he fell, too big and slow and his eyes too blurry to understand how the tables had been turned. We've been telling these kinds of stories wrong for years. David and Goliath try to get it right.
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Walnuts
INITIATION
John G. Bruhn and Stewart Wolf have published two books about their work at Roseto: The Roseto Story (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979) and The Power of Clan: The Influence of Human Relations on Heart Disease (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1993). For a comparison between Roseto Valfortore, Italy, and Roseto, Pennsylvania, USA, see Carla Bianco, The Two Rosetos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974). Roseto is perhaps unique among small Pennsylvania towns in terms of the academic interest it has attracted.
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A: THE MATTHEW EFFECT
Jeb Bush's fantasies about being a self-made man are explored in S.V. Dates Jeb: America's NextBush (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007), especially pp. 80-81. Dáte writes: “At both the 1994 and 1998 races, Jeb made it clear that not only did he not apologize for his past, but he was proud of his financial position and trusted that it was the result of his own courage and work ethic from him. he works. ' I have worked very hard for what I have achieved and I am very proud of it," he told the St. Petersburg Times in 1993. "I have no guilt, I have no guilt feelings."
"The attitude was the same as he had expressed on CNN's Larry King Live in 1992: 'I think, overall, it's a disadvantage,' he said of being the president's son when it came to his business opportunities. 'Because you are limited in what you can do.'
"That thought can only be described as delusional." The Lethbridge Broncos, who were playing on the day Paula and Roger Barnsley first noted the relative effect of age, formed a junior hockey team in the Western Hockey League from 1974 to 1986. They won the WHL championship in 1982-83 and three years later they returned to Saskatchewan's Swift Current. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethbridge_Broncos. ' published in Developmental Review 21, No. 2 (2001): 147 – 167. Roger Barnsley and AH Thompson published their study on a website, http://www.socialproblemindex.ualberta.ca/relage.htm Self-fulfilling prophecies are go back to ancient Greek and Indian literature. , but the term itself was coined by Robert K. Merton in Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968). Barnsley and his team turned to other sports. See R. Barnsley, AH, Thompson and Philipe Legault, "Family Planning: Football Style. The Relative Age Effect in Football", published in International Review for the Sociology of Sport 27, No. 1 (1992): 77-88. statistics on the relative effect of age on baseball are from Greg Spira, in Slate Magazine, http://www.slate.com/id/2188866/.A. Dudink of the University of Amsterdam showed how the deadline for football of the English Premier League creates the same age hierarchy as in Canadian ice hockey, see 'Date of birth and sporting success', Nature 368 (1994): 592. Interestingly, in Belgium the deadline for soccer used to be August 1 and back then almost a quarter of the best players were born in August and September, but that changed the Belgian Football Association on January 1 and in fact within a few years there were almost no outstanding footballers born in December and an overwhelming number born in January.For more information, see e Werner F. Helsen, Janet L. Starkes, and Jan van Winckel, "Effects of a Change in Selection Year on Success in Male Soccer Players," American Journal of Human Biology 12, no. 6 (2000): 729-735. Data by Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey are from The Persistence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics121, No. 4 (2006): 1437-1472.
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TWO: THE 10,000 HOUR RULE
Much of the discussion of the Bill Joy story comes from Andrew Leonard Salon's article "BSDUnix: Power to the People, from the Code", May 16, 2000, http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp /2000/ 05 /16/chapter_2_part_one/index.html. For the history of the University of Michigan Computing Center, see "A Career Interview with Bernie Galler, Professor Emeritus in the school's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 23, No. 4 (2001): 107-112 One of the (many) wonderful articles by Ericsson and his colleagues on the 10,000 hour rule is that of K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer, " The Role of Deliberate Practice in Acquiring Expert Performance", Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363-406. Daniel J. Levitin speaks in This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton , 2006), p 197. Mozart's development as a child prodigy is explained in Michael J.A. Howe's Genius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p 3. Harold Schonberg is quoted in John R. Hayes, Thinking and Learning Skills Volume 2: Research and Open Questions, ed Susan F. Chipman , Judith W. Segal and Robert Glaser (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1985). Krampe and Ulrich Mayr in their essay "The Role of Practice and Coaching in Entrepreneurial Skill Domains: An International Comparison of Life-Span Chess Skill Acquisition", in The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games, edit. K. Anders Ericsson (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996) pages 51-126, especially page 73. To read more about the timeshare revolution, see Gates: HowMicrosoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry—And Made Him the Richest Man in America, by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews (New York: Touchstone, 1994), page 26. Philip Norman wrote the Beatles biography Shout! (New York: Fireside, 2003). John Lennon and George Harrison's recollections of the band's beginnings in Hamburg come from Hamburg Days by George Harrison, Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voorman (Surrey: Genesis Publications, 1999). The quote is from page 122. Robert W. Weisberg discusses the Beatles, and calculates the hours they spent practicing, in "Creativity and Knowledge: A Challenge to Theories," in Handbook of Creativity, ed. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 226-250. For the full list of the richest people in history, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealthy_historical_figures_2008. The reference to C. Wright Mills in the footnote is from The American Business Elite: A Collective Portrait, published in Journal of Economic History 5 (December 1945): 20-44. Bill Hewlett's search for Steve Jobs is described in Lee Butcher Jobs's Accidental Millionaire: The Rise and Fall of Steve at Apple Computer (New York: Paragon House, 1987).
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THREE: THE GENIUS PROBLEM, PART 1
Episode 1 in 100 starring Chris Langan aired on January 25, 2008. Leta Hollingworth, mentioned in the footnote, published her version of "L" in Children Above180 IQ (New York: World Books, 1942). Sources for the life and times of Lewis Terman are Henry L. Minton, "Charting Life History: Lewis M. Terman's Study of the Gifted," in The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology, ed. Jill G. Morawski (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Joel N. Shurkin, Terman's Children (New York: Little, Brown, 1992); and May Seagoe, Terman and the Gifted (Los Altos: Kauffman, 1975). The Henry Cowell discussion is from Seagoe. Liam Hudson's discussion of the limitations of IQ tests is found in Contrary Imaginations: A Psychological Study of the English Schoolboy (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967). Hudson is an absolute joy to read. The Michigan Law School study, Michigan's Minority Graduates in Practice: The River Runs Through Law School, written by Richard O. Lempert, David L. Chambers, and Terry K. Adams, appears in Law and Social Inquiry 25, no. 2 (2000). Pitirim Sorokin's rebuttal of Terman was published in Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956).
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FOUR: THE GENIUS PROBLEM, PART 2
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005). Robert J. Sternberg has written extensively on practical intelligence and related topics. For a good non-academic overview, see Success Intelligence: How Practical and Creative Intelligence Certain Success in Life (New York: Plume, 1997). It should be obvious that I loved Annette Lareau's book. It's worth reading, as I've just begun outlining her argument in Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Cecis OnIntelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). It was published in History of Education Quarterly 2, no. 1 (March 1962): 6-18.
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FIVE: THE THREE LESSONS OF JOE FLOM
The definitive history of Skadden, Arps, and takeover culture was written by Lincoln Caplan, Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993). Alexander Bickel's obituary was published in the New York Times on November 8, 1974. The transcript of his interview is from the American Jewish Committee Oral History Project on file at the New York Public Library. Erwin O. Smigel writes about New York's former white shoe law firms in The Wall Street Lawyer: Professional Organization Man? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). His particular employee preferences are listed on page 37. Louis Auchincloss has written more than anyone about the changes that took place in the old Manhattan law firms in the postwar years. The quote is from his book The Scarlet Letters (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), page 153. The economic devastation faced by lawyers at the low end of the social spectrum during the Depression is illustrated in Jerold S. Auerbach's Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 159. For statistics on the fluctuating birth rate in the United States during the 20th century, see http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005067.html. The effects of the "demographic valley" are explored in "Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare" by Richard A. Easterlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). H. ScottGordon's hymn to the circumstances of children born during the depression is from p. 4 His presidential address to the Western Economic Association at its annual meeting in Anaheim, California, June 1977, "On Being Demographically Lucky: The Optimal 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 Borrower's Story was adapted by Louis Harold H. Friedman and published as The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis Borgenicht (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1942). For 19th- and 20th-century immigrants in the United States, see The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City 1880–1915, by Thomas Kessner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (Boston: BeaconPress, 1982) contains a brilliant chapter on Jewish immigrants in New York, for which I am very grateful. Europe and America, 1880–1924 (New York: QueensCollege Spring Thesis, 1982).
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SEIS: 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 effects of coal mining in Harlan County are 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 feud between Turner and Howard is described, along with other disputes in Kentucky, in John Ed Pearce's wonderfully funny Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), page 11. Keith F. Otterbein makes the same confrontation from an anthropological perspective in "FiveFeuds: An Analysis of Homicides in Eastern Kentucky in the Late Nineteenth Century," AmericanAnthropologist 102, no. 2 (June 2000): 231-243.J. K. Campbell's essay "Honor and the Devil" appeared in J. G. Peristiany (ed.), Honor and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). for a phonetic guide to the Scotch-Irish language, see David Hackett Fischer's monumental study of early American history, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), page 652. South and the specific nature of these murders are discussed by John Shelton Reed in One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). See especially Chapter 11, "Below the Smith and Wesson Line." . Nisbett and Dov Cohen (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, Inc., 1996). Raymond D. Gastil's study of the relationship between "surenismo" and homicide rates in the United States, "Homicide and a Regional Culture of Violence," was published in the American Sociological Review36 (1971): 412-427. Cohen collaborated with Joseph Vandello, Sylvia Puente, and Adrian Rantilla on another study of the cultural divide between North and South America: "'If you call me that, smile!' for politeness, interaction styles, and aggression work together in southern culture," SocialPsychology Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1999): 257-275.
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SEVEN: THE ETHNIC THEORY OF THE PLANES
The National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that investigates civil aviation accidents, has released a plane crash report on the downing of Korean Air 801: NTSB/AAR-00/01. : Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984). , 1978 Through 1990” (NTSB/SS-94/01 Security Study, 1994). The heartbreaking dialogue and analysis of the Avianca 052 accident can be found in the Accident Report AAR-91/04 of the National Transportation Safety Council. Ute Fischer and Judith Orasanu's study on cockpit mitigation "Cultural Diversity and CrewCommunication" was presented at the 50th Astronautical Congress in Amsterdam in October 1999. It was published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The dialogue between Air Florida's fated captain and first officer is cited in a second study by Fischer and Orasanu, "Error-Challenging Strategies: Their Role in Error Prevention and Correction," presented as part of the 14th Annual Meeting of the International Ergonomics Association of The Factors and Ergonomics Society in San Diego, California, August 2000. Geert Hofstede formally calculated the unconscious influence of nationality on behavior and described it in Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2001). The study of French and German factories that he quotes on page 102 was published in M. Brossard and M. Maurice, "Existe-t-il un modèle universel desstructures d'organisation?", Sociologie du Travail 16, no. 4 (1974): 482-495. The application of Hofstede's dimensions to airline pilots was reviewed 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 titled "Anatomy of a SystemAccident: The Crash of Avianca Flight 052", International Journal of Aviation Psychology 4, no. 3 (1994): 265-284. The linguistic indirectness of the Korean language compared to the American language was discussed by Ho-minSohn of the University of Hawaii in his article "Cultural Communication in Cognitive Values: American and Korean", published in Language and Linguistics 9 (1993): 93 - 136, established.
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EIGHTH: RICE FIELDS AND MATHEMATICS TESTS
To read more about the history and complexity of rice cultivation, see Francesca Bray, The RiceEconomies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Graham Robb, The Discovery of France (New York: WW Norton, 2007). !Kung's surprisingly secure and calm life is detailed in Chapter 4 of Man the Hunter, ed. Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, assisted by Jill Nash-Mitchell (New York: Aldine, 1968). The working year of the European peasantry was calculated by Antoine Lavoisier and published by B. H. Slicher van Bath in The Agrarian History of Western Europe, AD 500-1850, trans. Olive Ordish (New York: St. Martin's, 1963).
Activities Days Percentage Plowing and sowing 12 5.8 Cereal harvest 28 13.6 Mowing and hauling 24 11.7 Threshing 130 63.1 Other work 12 5.8 Total 206 100.0
The fatalism of Russian peasant proverbs is counterbalanced by the originality of Chinese proverbs by R.David Arkush in "If Man Works Hard, Country Will Not Be Lazy: Entrepreneurial Values in North China Peasant Proverbs", Modern China 10 , No. 4 (Oct. 1984): 461–479 The correlation between students' national mean TIMSS scores and their persistence in completing the student survey that accompanies the test was evaluated in "Predictors of National Differences in the Math and Science Performance of Eighth Grade Students: TIMSS Data for Students' Six Nations Educational Research" by Erling E Boe, Henry May, Gema Barkanic, and Robert F. Boruch of the Center for Policy Research and Evaluation Social Sciences, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania. Revised February 28, 2002. See chart showing results on page 9. TIMSS test results over the years can be found on the National Center for Education Statistics website, 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).
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NINE: MARITA'S BUSINESS
A New York Times Magazine article by Paul Tough, "What It Takes to Become 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 like KIPP. Kenneth M. Gold, School's In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools (New York: Peter Lang, 2002) is an unexpectedly fascinating account of the roots of the American school year. Karl L. Alexander, Doris R. Entwisle, and Linda S. Olson's study on the effects of summer vacation is titled "Schools, Achievements, and Inequality: A Seasonal Perspective," published in EducationE 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 Atlantic Monthly, November 1990, page 78.
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EPILOGUE: A JAMAICAN STORY
William M. MacMillan, in the foreword to the second edition of Warning from the West Indies: A Tract for Africa and the Empire (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1938), describes how his fears materialized. Trevor Burnard details the sexual exploits and terrible punishments of Jamaica's white government in Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). South, is discussed by Donald L. Horowitz in "Color Differentiation in American Systems of Slavery," Interdisciplinary History Journal 3, no. are taken from the essay "The Social Differentiation of Jamaica" by Leonard Broom, American Sociological Review 19, no. 2 (April 1954): 115-125. Color differences within families are discussed by Fernando Henriques in Color Values in Jamaican Society, British Journal of Sociology 2, No. 2 (June 1951): 115-121. Joyce Gladwell's experiences as a black woman in Britain are from Brown Face, Big Master (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1969). It is a wonderful book. I highly recommend it, although as you can imagine I can be a bit biased.
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* The way Canadians select ice hockey players is a prime example of what sociologist Robert Merton has called a "self-fulfilling prophecy," a situation in which "an incorrect definition at the outset...results in to a new behavior that the mistaken idea becomes reality". . “Canadians start with the wrong definition of who the best nine- and ten-year-old hockey players are. They only choose the oldest each year. But the way they treat these "stars" makes their original misjudgment seem right. As Merton says: “This apparent validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. Because the Prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right all along.
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* A physically immature basketball player in an American city is likely to be able to play as many hours of basketball as a relatively older child in a given year because there are so many basketball courts and so many people willing to play. It's not like ice hockey where you need an ice rink. Basketball is saved by its accessibility and ubiquity.
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* Even more social phenomena can be related to relative age. For example, Barnsley and two colleagues found that students who attempt suicide were also more likely to be born in the second half of the school year. His explanation is that poor school performance can lead to depression. However, the relationship between relative age and suicide is not as strong as the relationship between date of birth and sporting success.
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* Sociologist C. Wright Mills made another point about this particular cohort of the 1830s: he examined the background of the American business elite from colonial times to the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, he found that corporate leaders, in most cases, came from privileged backgrounds. The only exception? The group around 1830. This demonstrates the magnitude of the advantage of being born in that decade. It was the only time in American history that people born into poverty had a realistic chance of becoming truly wealthy. He writes: "The prime time in American history for the birth of the highly commercially successful ambitious poor boy was about 1835."
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* The Super IQ test was developed by Ronald K. Hoeflin, who is someone with an exceptionally high IQ. Here is a sample question from the Verbal Analogies section. "Are the teeth of a hen what a nest is?" If you want to know the answer, I'm afraid I have no idea.
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*To get an idea of what Chris Langan must have been like as a child, consider the following description of a boy named "L" who had an IQ in the same 200 range as Langan. It comes from a study by Leta Stetter Hollingworth, one of the first psychologists to study gifted children. As the description makes clear, an IQ of 200 is very, very high: “Young L's erudition was astounding. His passion for academic precision and meticulousness has set a high standard of performance. Relatively large, stocky, and imposing, he was affectionately known as "Professor." His attitude and skills were appreciated by students and teachers alike. He was allowed to lecture often (up to an hour) on a specific subject, such as the history of clocks, ancient theories of engine construction, mathematics, and history. He built a homemade pendulum clock out of trinkets (eg, spools of typewriter tape) to illustrate some of the principles of timekeeping, and this clock was assembled before class during the Advanced Time Unit and timing to demonstrate some of the principles of timing. His notebooks were marvels of scientific presentation.
"Dissatisfied with what he saw as inadequate treatment of ground travel in a 'Transportation' class, he agreed that time was too limited to do justice to all. But he insisted that they "should have at least covered the old theory."
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* The answer is that a round manhole cover cannot fall down the manhole no matter how much you turn it. A rectangular can: just tilt it to one side. That's it: now you can get a job at Microsoft.
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* As “IQ fundamentalist” Arthur Jensen put it in his 1980 book “Bias in Mental Tests” (p. 113): “The four most socially and personally important threshold regions on the IQ scale are the who are more likely to discriminate between individuals who, depending on general intellectual ability, may or may not attend mainstream school (approximately IQ 50), be proficient in traditional elementary school or not (approximately IQ 75), be successful or not in the academic curriculum, or be college ready through high school. (approximately IQ 105), you may graduate from an accredited four-year university with qualifications that qualify for admission to graduate or vocational school (approximately IQ 115). Also, IQ level becomes relatively unimportant in terms of common career aspirations and success criteria. That's not to say there aren't real differences between intellectual abilities represented by IQs of 115 and 150, or even between IQs of 150 and 180. But IQ differences at this higher end of the scale have an impact. personnel much lower than the thresholds. we have just established that they are generally of less importance to success in the popular sense than certain personality and character traits.
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*Just to clarify, it remains true that Harvard produces more Nobel Prize winners than any other school. Just look at these lists. Harvard appears three times in both. A school like Holy Cross appears only once. But wouldn't you expect schools like Harvard to win more Nobel Prizes than they did? Harvard is, after all, the richest and most respected school in history and has some of the brightest students in the world.
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* To get an idea of just how absurd the selection process has become at elite Ivy League schools, consider the following statistics. In 2008, 27,462 of the world's highest-qualified high school students enrolled at Harvard University. Of these students, 2,500 scored a perfect 800 on the SAT Critical Reading Test and 3,300 scored perfect on the SAT Mathematics Test. More than 3,300 have earned first place in their high school classes. How many did Harvard accept? About 1,600, which means they turned down 93 out of 100 applicants. Can you really say that one student is a Harvard student and another is not when they both have identical and perfect academic records? Of course, no. Harvard is dishonest. Schwartz is right. They should just have a lottery.
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* Here are answers from another student. These might even be better than Poole's: "(Brick). Used to break windows, determine the depth of wells, as ammunition, as a pendulum, to practice sculpture, to build walls, to demonstrate Archimedes' principle, as part of abstract sculpture, for cosh, for ballast, for throwing objects into the river, etc., such as a hammer, an open door, a foot-cleaner, a cobblestone, a wedge, a scale, a support for a rickety table, a paperweight, a chimney to plug the rabbit hole.
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* Most estimates place the heritability of IQ at around 50%.
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* Lawyer and novelist Louis Auchincloss, affiliated with the former New York law firm WASP, has a scene in his book The Scarlet Letters that perfectly captures downtown firms' aversion to takeover law. "Be honest, my dear, your husband and I run a criminal enterprise," an acquisition lawyer told his partner's wife.
He continues: “Today, if someone wants to acquire a business that they don't want to be acquired, someone's lawyer will file all kinds of annoying lawsuits to change their minds. We are suing for director mismanagement, unpaid dividends, violation of the Articles of Incorporation, improper issuance of stock. We accuse criminal conduct; we yell about antitrust law; we demand old and dubious liabilities. And our adversary's lawyer will respond with unreasonable demands from all our files, seeking endless interrogations to entangle our client in a desperate tangle of red tape... It's just war, and you know the quality of that and of love.
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* The best analysis of how adversity became opportunity for Jewish lawyers comes from legal scholar Eli Wald. However, Wald makes it clear that Flom and the gang were out of luck. Lucky wins the lottery. They had an opportunity and they took it. As Wald says, “The Jewish lawyers got lucky and helped each other. That's the best way to say it. They took advantage of the circumstances that presented themselves. Fortunately, WASP firms were reluctant to get involved in takeover law. But that word happiness does not capture the work, effort, imagination and action for opportunities that would otherwise be hidden and not so obvious.
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* Janklow and Nesbit, the agency he founded, is actually my literary agency. That's how I learned about Janklow's family history.
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* I realize it seems strange to call American Jewish immigrants the lucky ones when the families and relatives they left behind in Europe were on the brink of annihilation at the hands of the Nazis. In fact, Borgenicht inadvertently captures this poignancy in his memoirs, published in 1942. He called him "The luckiest man." After several chapters full of optimism and joy, the book ends with the sad reality of Nazi-dominated Europe. If The Happiest Man had been published in 1945, when the full story of the Holocaust was known, one would think it would have had a very different title.
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*To be clear: to say that the garment work was significant is not to romanticize it. It was incredibly difficult and often miserable work. The conditions were inhumane. A survey from the 1890s estimated that the average work week was 84 hours, equivalent to 12 hours per day. Sometimes it was stronger. “During peak season,” David von Drehle writes in Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, “it was not uncommon to find workers on benches or broken chairs hunched over their sewing machines or irons from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. m. to 9 p.m. m. One hundred or more hours a week. In fact, it has been said that the hum of sewing machines never quite ceased during the day and night peak season on the Lower East Side.
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* The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from an educated and intellectual culture. They are notoriously "the people of the book." There is definitely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who attended law school. They were children of textile workers. And his critical advantage in career advancement was not the intellectual rigor that comes from studying the Talmud. It was the practical wit and insight you get from watching your father selling aprons in Hester Street.
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* David Hackett Fischer's book Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America is the most definitive and compelling 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 is from Fischer's Paul Revere's Ride.) In Albion's Seed, Fischer argues that there were four separate British migrations to the United States in its first 150 years: Puritans who came to Massachusetts from East Anglia in the 1630s; then the knights and serfs who came to Virginia from southern England in the mid-17th century; then Quakers, from the North Midlands to the Delaware Valley in the late 17th and early 18th centuries; and finally the people of the frontiers inland from the Appalachians in the 18th century. Fischer brilliantly argues that these four cultures, each profoundly different, continue to characterize these four regions of the United States today.
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* Cohen ran other experiments to again look for evidence of "surenness", and each time found the same thing. "In the past, students have been plagued with ongoing harassment," he said. “They arrive at the laboratory and have to draw pictures from an early age. You do this to your accomplice, and he's an idiot. He does all these things to irritate the subject in a lasting way. He'll crumple up your drawing and throw it away and put the matter right. He will steal the subject's crayons and not return them. He keeps calling the boy "Slick" and says "I'll put your name on your drawing" and writes "Slick". point where they level off. Southerners are much less likely to get angry at first. But eventually they catch up with the northerners and pass them. They are more likely to explode, much more volatile, much more explosive.
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* How is this attitude transmitted from generation to generation? Through social heritage. Think about how accents persist over time. David Hackett Fischer notes that the original settlers of Appalachia said: "what to where, what to there, hired hard, critter for creature, sartin sure, go to go, hit for it, he-it to hit, away for." fire, deef for deaf, pizen for poison, nekkid fornaked, eetch for itch, boosh for bush, wrassle for fight, chew for chew, poosh for push, shet for close, ba-it for bat, be-it for be, tell for narrow, winds for window, wider for widow and young for young. Do you recognize that? That's how many farm workers in Appalachia talk today. Whatever mechanism conveys language patterns, it is also likely to convey behavioral and emotional patterns.
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* Korean Air was called Korean Airlines before changing its name after the accident in Guam. And the Barents Sea incident was preceded by two more accidents in 1971 and 1976.
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* This does not only apply to plane crashes. This applies to virtually all workplace accidents. For example, one of the most famous accidents in history was the near-collapse of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979. Three Mile Island so traumatized the American public that it plunged the American nuclear industry into a crisis of which never fully recovered. . But what really happened in that nuclear reactor started out as nothing dramatic. As sociologist Charles Perrow shows in his classic "Normal Accidents," blockages in the plant's so-called "polisher"—a kind of giant water filter—occurred relatively frequently. The clog caused moisture to enter the facility's air system, accidentally tripping two valves and shutting off the flow of cold water to the facility's steam generator. Like all nuclear reactors, Three Mile Island had an emergency cooling system for this situation. But on this particular day, for reasons no one really understands, the safety valves were not open. Someone had shut them down, and a screen in the control room showing they were shut down was blocked by a repair sign hanging from a switch above. This made the reactor dependent on another backup system, a special type of relief valve. But luckily the relief valve wasn't working properly that day either. It stayed open when it was supposed to close and to top it off an indicator in the control room that should have informed the operators that the relief valve was not working. By the time the Three Mile Island engineers realized what was happening, the reactor was perilously close to collapsing.
Nothing major went wrong on Three Mile Island. Instead, five unrelated events occurred in a row, each of which, if it occurred in isolation, would have caused only one setback to the normal operation of the plant.
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* We know this because the flight attendant survived the crash and testified at the inquest.
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*Hofstede is similarly referring to a study conducted a few years ago that compared German and French factories that operated in the same industry and were roughly the same size. French factories had an average of 26% of their employees in managerial and specialized positions; the Germans 16 percent. In addition, the French paid much more to the management than the Germans. What we see in this comparison, Hofstede argued, is a difference in cultural attitudes toward hierarchy. The French have twice the distance to power rating of the Germans. They demand and support hierarchies in a way that Germans simply don't.
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* These are the top five IDP pilots by country. If you compare this list to the air accident rankings by country, they are very similar.
1. Brazil
2. South Korea
3. Morocco
4. Mexico
5. Filipinas
The five lowest pilot IDPs by country are:
15. United States
16. Ireland
17. South Africa
18. Australia
19. New Zealand
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* On international benchmark tests, students from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan perform about equally well in mathematics, around the 98th percentile, as do the United States, France, England, Germany, and the rest of the industrialized nations. Westerners are grouped between the twenty-sixth and thirty-sixth percentile. That is a big difference.
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† Lynn's claim that Asians have higher IQs has been convincingly refuted by several other experts, who have shown that he based his argument on IQ samples drawn disproportionately from high-income urban households. James Flynn, perhaps the world's leading expert on IQ, then made an intriguing counterclaim. Asians' IQs, he says, have historically been slightly lower than whites' IQs, which means his math proficiency occurred despite his IQ, not because of it. Flynn's argument is detailed in his book AsianAmericans: Achievement Beyond IQ (1991).
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* Two small points. Mainland China is not on this list because China is not yet participating in the TIMSS study. But the fact that Taiwan and Hong Kong rank so highly suggests that mainland China would probably do pretty well too.
Second, and perhaps more important, what about northern China, which is not a rice-producing society but historically a wheat-producing culture, much like Western Europe? Are you good at math too? The short answer is that we don't know. However, psychologist James Flynn points out that the overwhelming majority of Chinese immigrants to the West, the people who were so good at math here, come from southern China. The Chinese students who graduated at the top of their class at MIT are largely descendants of people from the Pearl River Delta. He also points out that the underperforming Chinese Americans are the so-called Sze Yap, who hail from the edges of the delta "where the soil was less fertile and agriculture less intensive."
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† In fact, there is a significant academic literature measuring Asian "perseverance". In a typical study, Priscilla Blinco gave large groups of Japanese and American first graders a very difficult puzzle and measured how long they worked before giving up. American children lasted an average of 9.47 minutes. The Japanese children lasted 13.93 minutes, 40% longer.
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* KIPP stands for "Knowledge is Power Program."
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* The modern world record for throwing a stone was set by Larry Bray in 1981: 437 meters. Accuracy obviously suffers at this distance.
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* Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, the architect of Israel's overwhelming victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, also wrote an essay on the story of David and Goliath. According to Dayan, “David did not fight Goliath with inferior weapons, but (on the contrary) with superior weapons; and his greatness did not lie in being willing to fight someone much stronger than himself. But knowing how to blow up a weapon that a weak person could blow up and become stronger."
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contents
HomeWelcome
INTRODUCTION Devotion
The mystery of Roseto “These people died of old age. That is."
PART ONE: OPPORTUNITY
a matthew effect
“For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance. but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away." -Matthew 25:29
TWO 10,000 Hour Rule
"In Hamburg we had to play eight hours."
THREE The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1
"Knowing a child's IQ isn't very helpful when dealing with a class full of smart kids."
FOUR The problem with geniuses, Part 2
"After lengthy negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be released on probation."
FIVE The three lessons of Joe Flom
"Maria has a room."
PART TWO: LEGACY
SEIS Harlan, Kentucky
"Die like a man, as your brother died!"
SEVEN The ethnic theory of plane crashes
"Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot."
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EIGHT rice field tests and mathematics
"No one who gets up before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year fails to enrich his family."
NINE Marita's bargains
"All my friends are KIPP now."
EPILOGUE History of Jamaica
"When an offspring of colored children is conceived, they are emancipated."
GRACIAS
About the Author
Livros de Malcolm GladwellAcclaim for the escape of Malcolm Gladwell
READING GROUP GUIDE
A conversation with Malcolm Gladwell
questions and discussion topics
A preview of David and Goliath
STAGES
Copyright ©
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Copyright ©
Copyright © 2008 by Malcolm Gladwell Reading Group Guide Copyright © 2010 by Malcolm Gladwell and Little, Brown and Company Excerpt from David and Goliath copyright © 2013 by Malcolm Gladwell Author Photographer by Bill Wadman Design by Layer by Allison J. Warner Photography by Layer © Andy Crawford/ Dorling Kindersley /Getty ImagesCoverage Copyright © 2011 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. Under the US Copyright Act of 1976, scanning, uploading, and electronically sharing this book without the publisher's permission constitutes illegal piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. If you wish to use any material from the book (other than for review purposes), you must first obtain written permission by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your copyright support.
Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group 237 Park Avenue, Nova York, NY 10017littlebrown.comtwitter.com/littlebrownfacebook.com/littlebrownandcompany
First edition of the e-book: November 2008
The Hachette Speakers Bureau offers a wide range of speech event writers. For more information, visit hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.
The author appreciates permission to use the following copyrighted material: AmericanPrometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, 2005 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by Annette Lareau, Copyright 2003 Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press; "Cross-Cultural Communication in Cognitive Values: Americans and Koreans, by Ho-min Sohn, University of Hawaii Press, 1983; The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis Borgenicht (New York: GP Putnam's Sons, 1942). Courtesy of Lindy Friedman Sobel and Alice Friedman Holzman.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
ISBN 978-0-316-04034-1
E3
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- title page
- Warm welcome
- mission
- INTRODUCTIONThe mystery of Roseto “These people died of old age. That is."
- PART ONE: OPPORTUNITY
- ONE The Matthew Effect “To everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance. but from the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.” -Matthew 25:29
- ZWEI The 10,000 hour rule "In Hamburg we had to play eight hours."
- THREE The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1 "Knowing a child's IQ is of little use when you're dealing with a class full of smart kids."
- FOUR The problem with geniuses, part 2 "After lengthy negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be released on parole."
- FIVE Joe Flom's Three Lessons "Mary Got a Fourth."
- PART TWO: LEGACY
- SIX Harlan, Kentucky "Die like a man, as your brother died!"
- SIETE La teoría étnica de los accidentes aéreos "Capitán, el radar meteorológico nos ha ayudado mucho".
- EIGHT Rice Fields and Mathematics Tests "No one who gets up before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year does not enrich his family."
- NINE Marita's Bargains "All my friends are KIPP now."
- EPILOGUE A story from Jamaica "When children of color are begotten offspring, they are emancipated."
- GRACIAS
- About the Author
- Malcolm Gladwell's books
- Praise for Malcolm Gladwell Outliers
- READING GROUP GUIDE
- A conversation with Malcolm Gladwell
- questions and discussion topics
- A preview of David and Goliath
- STAGES
- Copyright ©