Hippopottoman
Waterloo
A review of this — 1 year ago
Probably a better work than either The Tipping Point or Blink. Well-written, and entertaining, but not without its flaws. One of the big problems is that Gladwell seems to fall into the classic blunder of thinking that the plural of “anecdote” is “data”.
In a few places his assertions about factors that influence people’s success are backed up by science, but in many cases it’s not clear that they are. One will often find instances of “hey, look at these 3 Jewish families – there are lots of siblings who are doctors and lawyers, so being Jewish during a certain period in New York increases the likelihood that your kids will be professionals”. Now, maybe that’s the case. Unfortunately, it’s not the sort of thing that can be determined by looking at a handful of examples, and Gladwell never makes it clear to the reader that any more rigorous analysis was performed.
That being said, the book was fun to read in spite of these little niggles – I enjoy Gladwell’s conversational writing style, and the subject matter was very interesting, even if I wouldn’t necessarily take the book as an authoritative reference.
Comments
sipes23
Crystal Lake
What would have been really interesting would be so see some sort of statistical analysis of, say, lawyers who became partners in NYC from 1950 and 1980 and correlating that to birth year and (likely) ethnicity. If tax records are public, you might even be able to correlate earnings directly—or indirectly from the law firms’ filings (again, assuming that information is public).
But yes, the plural of anecdote is not data. I once read a bit from a science writer who claimed that you could cut the audience by some proportion—I forget how much—for each formula in the book. So a serious analysis for a popular audience doesn’t seem likely.