I’m a sucker for pop-academic books, but “Blink” was one of the most disappointing books I’ve ever looked at. So… sometimes gut reactions are on target, sometimes they’re not, sometimes years of experience help, sometimes not, and the writer has absolutely no ideas about how to arrive at a general conclusion on this subject… why is this book getting such rave reviews? There are plenty of reasons for a Gladwell backlash that have absolutely nothing to do with politics.

More generally, I think that Gladwell’s vague idea that ‘where you come from matters’ is sufficiently well-accepted by most people right now that it is unlikely to change their political views (this advertising campaign by Orange perhaps shows how innocuous it is.) Anyone who has ever witnessed an Oxford alumni event or public school Old Boys evening knows that acknowledging that upbringing and education ‘made me the man I am today’ is quite compatible a sense of entitlement a mile wide and the most vicious right-wing politics.

I skimmed The Tipping Point, then decided to read it more slowly—because I didn’t think I was going to feel like going back over it after I’d finished, if I just read it straight through once—and didn’t get much past the first chapter.

Jonny; the appeal is a winning writing style with a pugnacious and unfussy way of making the points he is wanting to make. I don’t know anyone who reads him uncritically (but then I wouldn’t, would I?), and if read critically I don’t see the problem pedagogically. I do use Lareau, who is wonderful, obviously, but what his first couple of chapters add are the stories behind real people who are, actually, recognised by the students as successful people and about whom they do have preconceptions that are usefully shaken. Well, I say that, but its only conjecture—I’ll find out by using it.

I wish more academics who really produce and have full command of ideas could and would write a bit more like Gladwell; not in journal articles but in books. Few do (Lareau, for example, doesn’t, even though one of the many virtues of Unequal Childhoods is that she eschews jargon and frequent references to theoretical frameworks while allowing them to shape the whole story in a sophisticated way).

I think the point of the 10000 hour rule is that you have to be trying to improve yourself, not just go along. And 10,000 hours is a lot. I suspect that people who are chair of a meeting for several hours everday for 15 years, and who are actively trying to improve their skill all that time, will in fact be very, very good chairmen at the end.

Bu another problem is of course that you do not have to note good chairmen. You go to meeting, and you come out quick thinking “hey, everything went very smooth this time”

So, I do wonder what his appeal is? Personally, as an academic who works within ‘political philosophy’ I don’t see how Gladwell is useful as a guide to the kind of theoretical, structure / agency questions being asked here. I mean, OK he’s a guide if you don’t get a bit of it at the basic level, but the stuff he writes seems so superficial as to regress any understanding of the subject. Lareau is a much a better example of this kind of argument, so why not stick with that?

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution on Outliers:

The book is best read as a supplement to Ludwig Lachmann’s ‘Capital and its Structure.’ The main enduring insight of both Lachmann and Gladwell is simply how much we live in a world of complementarity rather than substitutability.

Nowhere in the book does the name Dean Keith Simonton appear nor does the phrase ‘multiplicative model of human success.’ A lot of the content here has already been done with more rigor and empirical support and also in readable form I might add. Everyone should read Simonton, noting that his hypotheses fare better in the arts than in politics.

If you ask too much from Outliers it will fall apart. It is too easy to find contingency in the world and Gladwell doesn’t begin to look for a theory of which contingencies are interesting or not. For instance arguably Ludwig van Beethoven would not have been a great composer if:…

It’s still a good book and a fun book. You can order it here.