Archive for 19 November 2008
Against Gladwellism
| Peter Klein |
The blogosphere is atwitter over Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers (#4 on Amazon this morning). Outliers studies high achievers in art, science, business, and other fields, seeking to refute the myth of the self-made man: high achievers “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.”
Abbeville (via 3quarks) expresses some reservations, not about Gladwell’s conclusion, but about his approach:
[Gladwell] is a skilled and entertaining writer, exemplifying the modern New Yorker “house style” for journalism with its combination of solid research, amused detachment, and quirky anecdotes in the Ken Burns mold. Tragically, Gladwell is also often very wrong. His work, famous for its forays into sociology, social psychology, market research, and other trendy disciplines, is a testament to both the exciting possibilities and the intellectual limitations of those fields. His penchant for what might be called pop statistical analysis sometimes leads to elegant, well-supported, and counterintuitive conclusions, but just as often recalls the man who couldn’t possibly have drowned in that river because its average depth was five feet. (more…)
Sentences to Ponder
| Peter Klein |
Although it does very well on the share of total jobs created by new firms, America scores highest of all in terms of the percentage of its lost jobs that are destroyed by enterprises’ going out of business. Perhaps, in the spirit of Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, it is the ability for firms to fail — and for the entrepreneurs involved to escape without stigma — that provides the overlooked but crucial part of the American entrepreneurial culture.
That’s from an Economist story on Global Entrepreneurship Week (did you know it started Monday?) that focuses on the Kauffman Foundation’s work on collecting and analyzing global data on startups, firm growth, innovation, bankruptcy, and the like. The story opens with one of the all-time great (and probably apocryphal) Bushisms: “the problem with the French is they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” (Thanks to Chris Boessen for the pointer.)
Alfie Kohn on Parenting
| Peter Klein |
A new item for our Alfie Kohn archive, courtesy of Joshua Gans.
One comment on the alleged crowding-out effect of extrinsic motivation. As I explain to my students, even when behavior is intrinsically motivated, extrinsic motivation can have powerful effects on the margin. For example, I didn’t go into academia for the money, but because I love research and teaching, I like keeping my own hours, I enjoy walking through leafy quads, and I look right smart in a tweed jacket with elbow patches. However, on the margin, the choice between teaching one more course or one less, attending this conference or that, working on one paper or another, is most definitely affected by monetary and other professional rewards.
Likewise, I want my children to work hard, be kind to others, eat their vegetables, clean their rooms, and so on, not because of rewards and punishments, but because those are the rights thing to do. But do I use extrinsic motivation to elicit marginal changes in behavior, subject to those general rules? You bet your Christmas Wish List I do.
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