【非文青N周一文】批判地读Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

 

 

In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell eloquently argues that those successful people “might have looked as if they rose from nothing, but they are the beneficiaries of hidden advantages, extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies”.  He starts with showing the pattern that almost all successful Canadian hockey players were born in the first half of the year. They are top players because the cutoff date for picking young hockey players is January, 1st. Kids born in the first half of the year get the advantage of being more mature and more skilled compared to those born in the second half of the year, when a couple of months difference in age still counts. Therefore, they get more encouragement, more positive feedback and more attention, which contribute to their ultimate success in this sport. He claims this trend applies to academic success as well.  This is very relevant to me because my daughter was born on the cutoff date of school enrollment. I had assumed that she had the advantage of choosing to go with either the younger kids or the older ones. Before reading the book, I had leaned toward putting her in the class of the older kids as that had been my own experience, being the youngest in the class. The conclusion from the book makes me hesitatant. I only wish he had seen and reported a study that checks if this trend is true across genders, or to use some statistical jargon, whether gender is a confounding factor in the relationship between age and academic success.

            A month ago, I was just telling NewVoice that I couldn’t think of one single book that had changed my life.  Here you go, now I am thinking, here is a book that will change at least my daughter’s life if we decide against putting her in with the older crowd.  As a chain reaction, it would change my life too. I was pretty convinced by Gladwell’s other claims in the book, like the one about putting 10,000 hours into a skill in order to master it. That sounds like a lot of Chinese proverbs about diligence.  However, I changed my mind about Gladwell’s writing when I came across his theory about rice farming:

            “The peasants of Europe worked essentially as low-paid slaves of an aristocratic landlord, with little control over their own destinies. But China and Japan never developed that kind of oppressive feudal system, because feudalism simply can’t work in a rice economy.”

            Unless there were two different systems both called “feudalism” (hello?!), Chinese society was a feudalistic one for thousands of years.  Gladwell has romanticized rice farming a bit too much, oblivious of the complicated Chinese social and historical environment several centuries ago. This argument was so oversimplified that it made me less convinced about his claim of the advantage of going to school as the older one in the class. Now, I am back to square one, still not sure whether to send my daughter to school when she is five or six.  

 Gladwell’s books are, as a lot reviewers said, both entertaining and enlightening. Just as in Blink, he is a master at weaving facts, anecdotes and theories together to convince his readers. He is very persuasive in general.  Only in this case, I was trying to decide on something that he didn’t really answer. To be fair, it wasn’t his intention to answer that specific question anyway, since the theme of the book is that， what makes someone succeed lies in where he or she is from, when he or she was born, what kind of family he or she was born into and his or her upbringing.