Organizations and Markets

Against Gladwellism

19 November 2008 at 10:38 am Peter G. Klein 4 comments

| 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.

Specifically, says Abbeville, there are substantial literatures on creativity and achievement in art history, literary criticism, the history of science, and related disciplines that deal specifically with the influence of the environment on artistic, scientific, and commercial achievement, literatures Gladwell doesn’t consider.

As Gladwell may or may not realize, the “nature vs. nurture” argument as relates to high achievers is an old one. At one extreme you have the Romantic notion of genius or greatness as an innate, invincible force that breaks through any constraints placed upon it. This, as the author of the New York article points out, is a widely discredited notion—in fact, another straw man. Certainly even extraordinary talent needs nurturing and opportunity in order to become extraordinary achievement. But is extraordinary achievement simply the sum of the nurturing and opportunity it has encountered? This view lies at the opposite extreme, and it, too, is easily discredited by real-world examples. Yet Gladwell embraces it as a revolutionary insight.

I find this interesting because because economics, according to some critics, has become infected with what might be called creeping Gladwellism, a dilettantish fascination with clever puzzles, idiosyncratic insights, and statistical anomalies that while flashy and clever, are ultimately ephemeral and are typically based on a superficial understanding of the phenomenon in question. I’ve previously called this the Freakonomics approach. Economists, with their broad and general analytical framework, are particularly susceptible to the disease. Blogging is of course a natural outlet for Gladwellism — a blog entry, after all, is the perfect place for quick-and-dirty, broad but not deep, cutesy and provocative commentary. (I should know.)

The complaint here is not with true polymaths like John von Neumann, Herbert Simon, or Murray Rothbard, geniuses who made substantial contributions in a number of fields. Rather, it’s aimed at contemporary social scientists and essayists, credentialed or not, who feel free to discourse hither and yon without having done serious research on the theory, issue, or controversy at hand. Do you think this criticism is fair?

Entry filed under: - Klein -, Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science.