Making it Big

The NY Review of Books has an article by Sue M. Halpern that reviews three books on what it takes to be a success:

• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
  by Alice Schroeder


• Outliers: The Story of Success
  by Malcolm Gladwell


• Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
  by Geoff Colvin

These three books have very little in common. The Buffett book is a standard biography. The Gladwell book is a brilliant thought piece in the tradition of his other books. I haven't read the Colvin book but I suspect it is a fairly pedantic book that looks at factors that contribute to success. The first two books are a lot of fun to read. Here's a bit that Halperns includes from the Gladwell book:

Consider, as well, Chris Langan, whose astronomically high IQ—around 195, 45 points higher than Einstein's—does actually make him a statistical anomaly. In Gladwell's estimation, though, the poor fellow—who lives in relative obscurity on a midwestern horse farm—is a great failure:

He'd been working for decades now on a project of enormous sophistication—but almost none of what he had done had ever been published much less read by the physicists and philosophers and mathematicians who might be able to judge its value.

Gladwell writes:

Here he was, a man with a one-in-a-million mind, and he had yet to have any impact on the world. He wasn't holding forth at academic conferences. He wasn't leading a graduate seminar at some prestigious university. He was living on a slightly tumbledown horse farm in northern Missouri, sitting on the back porch in jeans and a cut-off T-shirt. He knew how it looked: it was the great paradox of Chris Langan's genius.

"I have not pursued mainstream publishers as hard as I should have," he conceded. "Going around, querying publishers, trying to find an agent. I haven't done it and I am not interested in doing it."

It was an admission of defeat.

Really—says who?

Gladwell's explanation for what he believes is Langan's epic failure goes to the heart of his main thesis about success—that it cannot be explained by understanding what a person is like but only by where he or she is from. It's not clear, precisely, why Gladwell considers this is a revelation, not a tautology, but he does. The social science bookshelf is filled with studies linking achievement to background. Most recently, the economic mobility project of the Pew Charitable Trusts found, for instance, that nearly half "of those born to parents in the top quintile [income] who have a college degree remain at the top, [which is] nearly triple the percentage of college graduates born to parents at the bottom that make it to the top of the income distribution." In any case, all stories of success or failure are construed after the fact and the same set of circumstances often leads to fundamentally different outcomes, the explanation for which typically invokes those circumstances. (For example, one man's inherited wealth leads to the revolving door of the Betty Ford Clinic, while another's leads to the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.) To claim, as Gladwell does, that "extraordinary achievement is less about talent than opportunity" overstates the obvious while letting the rest of us, who are not overachievers, off the hook. "People don't rise from nothing," he writes.

We owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.

Chris Langan, the oldest son of a woman who had four boys, each with a different father, the last of whom was an abusive alcoholic, was raised with none of the advantages that might have allowed him to prosper. Though he won full scholarships to the University of Chicago and to Reed College, and enrolled at Reed, he left before the end of freshman year, a crew-cut kid among long-hairs whose mother forgot to fill out the financial aid forms. Then he went to Montana State, and his car broke down and a professor wouldn't let him change a morning class for an afternoon class, and Langan left there, too.

If Langan had had what Gladwell, citing the psychologist Robert Sternberg, calls "practical intelligence"—knowing what to say and who to say it to—he might have graduated from college, gone to graduate school, become an academic, written peer-reviewed articles, sat on innumerable committees, and made something recognizable out of his life. But lacking the kind of family background from which, Gladwell says, such knowledge comes, he was doomed to failure.

For some reason, the Langan story makes Gladwell think of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer, another young prodigy ("Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek,") who was also a depressive and a miscreant: at Cambridge he tried to poison his tutor. Rather than being sent home or to jail, Oppenheimer was set up with a psychiatrist and allowed to continue his studies, a turn of events that Gladwell attributes to his practical intelligence:
Would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed? Would he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoon? Of course not. And that's not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. It's because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.

The sad tale of Chris Langan resonates with me. It is very hard to rise above what you know no matter how "bright" you are. The story of Oppenheimer is the opposite. It is hard to fall from grace when your parents are affluent and well-connected. That's the friction that means that the "meritocracy" claimed by our society will never really honestly work.