Malcolm Gladwell's secrets of success

But it's precisely by using our minds and imaginations that we begin to see the holes in Gladwell's conclusions. Did Jewish immigrants take up the garment trade because it was meaningful? Or because it was the only trade open to them? Did they really believe, over the course of their hundred-hour workweeks, that they were shaping the world to their desires? And if their work was so meaningful, why did they urge their children to escape into white-collar professions at the first opportunity? And what about the so-called non-meaningful workers (e.g., day laborers, domestics, construction workers)? Did any of their children become lawyers?

Similar questions pop up in Gladwell's discussion of Asia's math superiority. He makes useful points about the simplicity and transparency of Asian numbering systems, but then he heads straight back to the rice paddies, where extreme but, yes, meaningful labor shapes the dogged work ethic that would later forge math champions. But if that's the case, why don't we see a comparable level of math prowess in West Africa, where rice has been cultivated for centuries? Or, for that matter, the Carolinas?

The problem with having your theory in hand from the beginning is that you have to slough off whatever data don't fit. There is, in fact, a small-print proviso attached to each of Gladwell's theoretical constructs: "Except when it doesn't." "The Tipping Point": A small-scale social shift can generate sweeping societal change ... except when it doesn't. "Blink": Great decision making happens on impulse ... except when it doesn't. (Or, in the case of racial profiling, shouldn't.)

Gladwell's "Outliers" model -- the idea that success is shaped by environment, not genetics -- has two additional problems. First, it is insufficiently predictive. We can easily see that favoring people with January birthdays over people with September birthdays, as Canadian hockey leagues do, can have consequences. But how could anyone have predicted that postwar Jewish lawyers would be rewarded for their expertise 20 years down the road? Or that, 20 years after Bill Gates was born, the advent of the personal computer would turn programming geeks into masters of the universe? These are historical accidents, for which it is impossible to prepare. Success, in these instances, is simply a byproduct of luck.

This leads us to the second problem with Gladwell's model: It is every bit as deterministic as the "genius" model. "The successful are those who have been given opportunities," he writes, "and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them." But opportunity is as much out of our control as genetics. What if the opportunity doesn't come? If, as Gladwell suggests, we are prisoners of our ethnic or cultural legacies, what if we are of the wrong ethnicity or the wrong culture? How can we ever hope to succeed? If, on the other hand, we can overcome these environmental barriers through relatively quick fixes, as Gladwell suggests elsewhere, then how significant are those barriers?

Gladwell's books would be more intellectually honest if he simply dispensed with his frameworks altogether, but then, of course, he wouldn't be the cultural figure he is now. Like "Freakanomics" guru Steven Levitt, Gladwell promises to unravel our knottiest problems with the simplest of paradigms. By turning the macro into micro, he frees life of its chaos.

Gladwell, in short, is in the hope business. "People are experience rich and theory poor," he told the New York Times. "People who are busy doing things -- as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops --don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them." He has been so devoted to helping them with this meaningful work that he has perhaps missed one of the signal ironies of our recent financial meltdown, which is how little it was predicted by theory. Indeed, some of our greatest theoreticians were caught dozing in their endowed chairs. (Even Alan Greenspan was forced to recant his lifelong devotion to Ayn Rand.) Economics has never been theory poor, and theory has never been a substitute for thought. Theory's failure, however, has placed a much higher premium on humility.