Outliers - part 1

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is a book illustrating "The Story of Success," as well as the story of success can truly be illustrated. He uses several case studies of the wealthy and successful - Bill Gates, for example, and an almost equally successful and important (but less well-known, I think, by the general public... well, I'd never heard of him anyway) Bill Joy, wealthy Jewish lawyers, doctors, and psychologists, entrepreneurs from the late 1800s.

OK, I'm going to admit something here: I have NO idea how to punctuate lists within lists. "Bill Gates, Bill Joy, wealthy Jewish lawyers, doctors, and psychologists, entrepreneurs from the late 1800s..." is incorrect, unless I'm saying 'wealthy Jewish lawyers' 'doctors' and 'psychologists' when what I'm really trying to say is 'wealthy Jewish lawyers' 'wealthy Jewish doctors' and 'wealthy Jewish psychologists.' I think this would include a semi-colon somehow. Perhaps "Bill Games, Bill Joy, wealthy Jewish lawyers, doctors, and psychologists; entrepreneurs from the 1800s..." But I honestly have no idea. And instead of researching it or looking through E.B. White's Elements of Style like a good English major, I'm just going to leave this note here for myself and look it up later.

The first part of his book, called "Opportunity" outlines some pretty basic sociological concepts: how successful a person is depends just as much (if not more so) on what is presented to them as it is on their individual intelligence, work ethic, and personal strength. We as Americans like to believe in this pretty little ideology of individualistic meritocracy that says it doesn't matter where you're born, how wealthy your parents are, what school you attend as a little kid, what color your skin is or what genitalia you're born with (actually those last two are iffy even by standard ideology; racism and sexism are much more 'acceptable' to us than classism, which isn't to say that classism doesn't exist - it does, and prominently - nor is it to say that consciously the average American thinks it's OK to be racist or sexist - typically it's unconscious or not recognized with words as blatant as 'racist' and 'sexist'). The truth is, however, that the vast majority of the time people, even Americans, die within the same socioeconomic class they were born into. If a person is born lower class, to parents who have little or no wealth, their odds of becoming wealthy and fitting into the 'higher class' or even 'upper middle class' or 'middle class' bracket at any point within their lives is fairly unlikely, and typically the ONLY way to break through those barriers is through higher education. People who are born to college-educated parents are much more likely to become college-educated than people who are born to high school drop outs, even if the child of the high school drop out possesses more intelligence or raw skill than the child of the college graduates. It sounds harsh. It is harsh. It's also truth.

The case studies presented by Malcolm Gladwell in the first part of Outliers were incredibly interesting examples of, as the name of the book would imply, the outliers in society. The rags-to-riches story that's embedded into the American dream conveniently forgets how extremely privileged Bill Gates and Bill Joy were to be just the right age when computers were rising into the public sphere of knowledge, and not only that, but to have the opportunity to practice coding and programming for over ten thousand hours as children in order to jump onto the technology boom when it came. Success is a slave to the ebb and flow of time and open doors (or cracks in the wall). The ideological argument that even I have is this: everyone is presented with opportunities. But this is often false, and even if it's not entirely false, the situations surrounding those opportunities often present unfortunates with Catch-22 style ultimatums: go to law school, but since you come from an economically underprivileged background, the "fortune" you accumulate must be used to turn back around and help your family, instead of being used to accumulate wealth and pass down to children. And, man, how lucky do you have to be to get into law school? OK, you have to be WAY more than lucky. You have to be privileged and intelligent, you have to have opportunities AND a work ethic. I'm not denying the hard work that goes into success. What I'm denying is the idea that anyone who doesn't succeed must fail because of a LACK of intelligence or work ethic. It's much larger and more complex than that.

What I don't like, occasionally, is the tone that Malcolm Gladwell uses to convey this. While he uses facts to back his arguments, Americans raised to believe that all it takes is a dream and some hard work (I honestly don't see that in my generation, but that's a different blog post) to succeed do not need to be told that they're dumb for believing that a dream and hard work will get them somewhere. When I read Blink there was no tone of condescension accompany Gladwell's explanation of why gut instinct is often correct, but then, in Blink Gladwell wasn't contesting one of the fundamental American ideologies that make make Americans distinctly American. As an American, even as a somewhat liberal activist college student with a less-than-friendly attitude towards capitalism and mega-corporations, I want to believe that individual meritocracy is the way to go. I want to disregard the fact that I'm white, middle-class, and come from well-educated, intelligent parents. I can't, of course, but Malcolm Gladwell is mean about it. He's right. I agree with him. I even acknowledge that sugarcoating the truth only makes it easier to deny, and that if he did so I would not consider this book very highly at all. Still, it's a blow to have it told to me so bluntly: You are privileged. I am. I have not 'made' myself into what I am, not entirely. Largely, I have been made. This is less a critique than an emotional, gut response.

As a fiction writer, one of the paragraphs I am MOST jealous of is a description of a Jewish lawyer in New York City that Gladwell describes in one of his case studies:

"Joe Flom is the last living 'named' partner of the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom. He has a corner office high atop the Conde Nast tower in Manhattan. He is short and slightly hunched. His head is large, framed by prominent ears, and his narrow blue eyes are hidden by oversize aviator-style glasses. He is slender now, but during his heyday, Flom was extremely overweight. He waddles when he walks. He doodles when he thinks. He mumbles when he talks, and when he makes his way down the halls of Skadden, Arps, conversations drop to a hush."

That's just fun writing. And a lot of Gladwell's descriptions are - the people he studies take on the life of characters (I know that's a bit backwards, usually I'm admiring characters for taking on the life of people), and yet Gladwell does not pretend that these men and women are anything less than brilliant, hard-working, and resourceful. What Gladwell is saying is that there are TONS of brilliant, hard-working, and resourceful human beings on the planet. Very few of them succeed. There are also tons of dumb, lazy, and cruel human beings on the planet. I would say that very few of them succeed, but some do. This attitude that someone of a lower class is somehow dumb, lazy, or cruel is a dumb, lazy, and cruel attitude in and of itself. This is my thesis and not quite the conclusion that Gladwell is presenting - Outliers is not that book. It is, however, the book that makes my own thesis that much easier to understand and realize, personally.

I am currently reading the second part of Outliers, called "Legacies." So far my favorite quote is:

"Why are we so squeamish? Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from - and when we ignore that fact, planes crash."

I would have reviewed the book as a cohesive unit, however, I wanted to get my thoughts on the first half of the book written down before I moved too far into my thoughts on the second part. After a whole chapter on airplane crashes, my brain is whirring loudly. (I simultaneously love and hate reading about actual plane crashes/plane crash statistics. I have no been able to ride on a plane for almost two years without having a panic attack.) I'll be back later with more, for sure. Because I think too much. :)