Where the Act is Wearing Thin

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As something to read before bedtime, this is very readable. Probably a four out of five stars. I like the way he breaks up and juxtaposes various stories. Effective. He's a good writer.

But this book is more about information, and I find his information increasingly suspect.

When I read The Tipping Point, every element of it was new to me. He was the guru on a topic I had never heard of and it was really cool. Several books in, I'm less impressed and more skeptical.

Some of the topics he writes on in here I know something about, or I've read more sophisticated treatments of, and I realize his framing is a kind of sketchy. (He seems to be unaware of the drop in crime virtually everywhere from the 80s to the present, although he comes close to it at one point.) He arrives at what I consider the right conclusion on three strikes laws, but frames it like a thing that shouldn't be true but is. The violence in Northern Ireland gets the same treatment--naturally, he says, the government must use some violence, but if it exceeds a certain amount it stops working. He keeps arriving at the conclusion that radicalizing people through state action is counterproductive, and keeps being surprised at that result.

He also never attempts to unpack the absurd supposition that this university is "better" than that one, the idea that they can be ranked like sprinters at the line. He takes it for granted without evidence and proceeds. Why does he believe that? Do the professors at Harvard enunciate better? Have access to better textbooks? Terrify their students into greater compliance? Assign better readings? He doesn't bother about that because it's an implicit assumption.

The comparison of top students at state schools versus those at elite schools does yield an interesting result--a good student may have greater career success if they are academically at the top of a state school rather than the bottom of an elite school--and he's impressed with that, attributing it to powerful emotional effects, but he seems to be unaware that he's also proven that the "worse" school still had to teach well for that to be possible. (Is the takeaway that more top students should go to "average" universities or that universities should stop messing up the brains of 18- and 19-year-old kids?)

I guess after reading several of his books he has started to strike me as a conservative who, after reading a great deal of research about how things actually work, is slowly on a path to being a progressive and yet is still shocked every time he finds out another unfounded belief turns out not to be true.

Stop being so surprised. We're not surprised.

Anyway--a four for the charming anecdotes. A three for the condescension. Marginally recommended.

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