Elite junior hockey
players in Canada are almost all born in January, February, or March. Twenty
percent of the wealthiest people in history were born in America between 1831
and 1840. If you want to be a New York lawyer, arrange to be the son of a
Jewish garment worker born in the 1930s. It's harder to avoid crashing your
plane if you're a pilot from Brazil than if you're from the United States. In
his new book, Outliers: The Story Of Success, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell
explores the reason behind these strange clumps in data. His
conclusion—that potential genius abounds, but little of it lands on the
fertile soil of opportunity—provides a poignant theme for perhaps his
most impassioned book to date.
What haunts Gladwell is
the nature of the opportunity needed to make the most out of innate talent.
Being born at just the right time, to just the right parents, and in just the
right culture has a much more profound effect than even ardent cultural
determinists might imagine. Gladwell centers the book on the story of
Christopher Langan, IQ 195, a familiar brand of child prodigy (reading Principia
Mathematica at 16, achieving a perfect
SAT score even though he fell asleep during the test). Why is he a Missouri
horse farmer, not a Nobel Prize winner? Contrast Langan's rural environment of
abuse and poverty with the privilege of another precocious youngster, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, who reached the pinnacle of his profession even after trying to
poison one of his teachers. Early training in assertiveness, negotiation, and
social know-how made the difference, and according to sociologist Annette Lareau
of Maryland, middle-class children are far more likely to absorb those lessons
than the poor.
Gladwell concludes his
book by describing the way his Jamaican grandmother Daisy raised his mother.
Like Bill Gates and Asian math students, Joyce Gladwell worked hard and had
plenty of talent. But also like them, she couldn't have achieved a successful
life without a thousand and one instances of help—which in some cases was
just coincidentally available at that time and place. It takes a village to
raise a genius, Gladwell concludes, and if we want those geniuses to help solve
our problems, we need to study the blueprints of those villages.