Meritocracy

What Makes People “Exceptional”?

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

I had heard about Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers long before I actually decided to read it.  My reluctance was due to the emphasis of reviewers—who tended to focus solely on the so-called 10,000 hour rule.  That is, one does not have to be a born genius to master a particular activity (the example in the book was a concert violinist), but merely dedicate a total of 10,000 hours to concentrated practice.  Because my impression was that Outliers was yet another exhortation from the establishment urging all of us to work harder and keep our noses to the grindstone in order to get anywhere in life, I avoided reading it until recently.  However, the book is much more nuanced and complex than most reviewers give it credit for.  Indeed, some of them seem to have missed the primary message entirely.

human-potential

Gladwell’s premise actually debunks the notion of the self-made genius who through talent, grit and determination accomplishes great things and enjoys worldly success. Although successful people can usually make rightful claim to a certain amount of smarts and hard work, what is often left out of these stories is what Gladwell describes as non-obvious advantages and opportunities.  In other words, the difference between a smart person who works hard and enjoys worldly success and a smart person who works hard and struggles is a matter of being at the right place at the right time.

Gladwell describes a number of scenarios in which a few individuals rise to the top, ranging from Canadian hockey stars to high tech entrepreneurs. He calls this process the “Matthew Effect.”  The Matthew Effect is based on the Book of Matthew in the Bible, in which those who are successful are given more and “from those who hath not…all that they hath will be taken away.”  For now, I will not delve into the theological implications of this verse, but it describes a phenomenon that sociologists term “cumulative advantage.”  Cumulative advantage occurs in a manner similar to that which economists describe as winner-take-all markets, in which a small, early advantage is compounded by further advantages.  In the case of an individual, when parents, teachers and schools identify early talent in a particular student, attention and resources are marshalled to further develop and enhance this talent.  In the economic context, an early advantage allows a business to capture markets, supply chains, and even public consciousness.

While there is nothing harmful in cumulative advantage in and of itself, it can become a problem in the individual context when it draws attention and resources away from the development of other individuals and/or different talents. Similarly, in the business world the winner-take-all phenomenon often leads to monopoly markets, operating to crowd out innovation and diversity. Individuals may make poor career choices because a potential (if statistically improbable) payoff may be huge compared to other options.  Yet, the individual may end up losing sight of his or her own talents and unique path in the world.

In one chapter, Gladwell tells the story of a man who was known to have a high IQ and much intellectual potential, but because he grew up in a dysfunctional home and lived in a remote rural area, he spent his youth bored with school and learned mainly to distrust authority. As an adult, this fellow is working on what Gladwell describes as “a project of enormous sophistication” while eking out a living on a remote farm.  The tragedy is that it is unlikely this man’s work will ever see the light of peer review or even a curious news story because he has no institutional support and no skill for making his voice heard in the world.  Although Gladwell’s main point in this story is that there is a lot of wasted talent out there because it has not been recognized and nurtured, he also suggests that alienation of unrecognized genius will further reduce the talent and knowledge that could be put to beneficial use.

Gladwell’s ultimate message is that the self-made genius or billionaire is a myth because no one “makes it” alone.  He concludes with the observation:

          “[Geniuses] are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy.  Their success is not exceptional or mysterious.  It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain luck—but all critical to making them who they are.  The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.”

Outliers is a first step in disabusing ourselves of the exceptionality of individuals and completely “deserved” worldly success. We need not begrudge such individuals the legitimate fruits of their efforts, but we can also rightfully ask for a little less hubris and a little more humility.  However, popular myths surrounding success do more than simply bolster the egos of the successful—they serve to legitimize a system in which a few are over-rewarded while others who are equally talented and hard-working are under-rewarded.  Perhaps Gladwell’s message is that we either need to broaden our idea of what constitutes talent or genius or even dispense with the notion of genius altogether.  Gladwell speaks of a “culture of possibility,” describing how his great-great-great-grandmother was sold into slavery yet managed to found a family legacy based on education and self-betterment.  We can only imagine what the world would be like if every human being was able to reach her or his full potential—and no one had to go it alone.

Who Should Pay? Egalitarianism, Luck, and Redistributive Policies

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Recent studies of egalitarian ethics have attempted to resolve the conflict between redistributive egalitarianism and personal responsibility.  That is, how much of where one ends up in life depends on individual effort or merit as opposed to random luck should make a difference in how much of the surplus should be returned to help support the collective welfare.  In essence, this theory makes a distinction between rewards or losses that are “deserved” and those that are not.

Even the most egalitarian among us can probably agree that someone who works 60 hours a week should earn more than someone who only works 30 hours.  Most everyone can also likely agree that someone with a higher level of skills and training should earn more than someone without this for the same time increment of work.  Many agree that equality of opportunity (which the law should require) does not mean the same as equality of outcome.  Indeed, even if everyone in a society had the same income they would not be the same in how they spent or invested it, or even how satisfied they might be with it.  Others make the argument that so long as the lowest members of society are afforded a basic level of subsistence, any levels of inequality above this is acceptable.  However, the question is often one of how much more is too much, or can any person’s work be “worth” hundreds of times more than another’s, given a finite range of human abilities and only 24 hours in the day.

Egalitarian theory has attempted to address the issue of luck and risk, and proposes that there is an ethical distinction between risk that is rationally chosen and voluntarily assumed as opposed to risk that is more random.  This dichotomy was first proposed by Ronald Dworkin and is represented by the concept of brute luck and option luck.  Brute luck is the unchosen, random variety.  Option luck, on the other hand, is the outcome of a risk that is chosen, presumably on the basis of some probabilistic determination, and the person who chooses the risk can either accept or decline it.

On some level, this argument seems to make sense:  people should “pay” for losses incurred by voluntary risks, but society should cover those that are the result of unpredictable misfortune. Conversely, those who benefit from a calculated risk should be able to keep the fruits of their good fortune, but not so for those who benefit from a windfall. The problem with the choice-of-risk analysis assumes that the choice itself is voluntary.  For example, under this analysis, the “choice” to forego health or property insurance means that the individual should fully bear the risks of loss from unexpected illness or property damage.  However, especially for lower income individuals, the “choice” of purchasing insurance may involve trade-offs with basic subsistence such as food, medicine, or housing.  In such cases, what appears to be a “choice” may really be no choice at all.

Denise Huggins and Catherine Coghlan devised a study in which students of criminal justice studies played a game of monopoly, where they had occasion to select either an illegal or a legal “opportunity card”.  At the beginning of the game, unlike regular monopoly, where everyone starts with an equal number of assets, the students were allocated assets in accordance with the five income quintiles as determined by the latest census data.  Not surprisingly, students from the lowest quintiles were more likely to select illegal opportunity cards, which tended to have the greatest payoffs but also carried the greatest risk.  The purpose of the study was to encourage the (mostly) middle and upper class students to better understand how social structures impact decisions to engage in criminal behavior.  From the standpoint of luck egalitarianism, even the element of choice in risk-taking (what choices are realistically available and the degree of financial desperation) can be affected by one’s position in the social hierarchy.

As with most questions of distributional policy, there are positions that represent polar opposites.  On one extreme are the “you create your own reality/make your own luck” advocates who believe almost every outcome is self-generated on some level. In his book, The Luck Factor, Professor Richard Wiseman has analyzed factors that differentiate “lucky” and “unlucky” people and concludes that one can maximize their chances of “luckiness” by being open to new experience, listening to one’s intuition, persevering in hard times, and having optimistic expectations.  On the other extreme is Nicholas Barry, a luck egalitarian and political lecturer at La Trobe University in Western Australia.  Professor Barry suggests  that it would be logistically impossible to collect sufficient detail about the basis of personal decision, the degree of “choice,” and the impact on outcomes, as well as potential violations of individual privacy, and so the better practice is to “adopt a presumption in favor of equality of outcome.”

I do not claim to have the answer to any of this.  However, I do believe the luck egalitarians have a point in that some of what happens to people is as much a result of where they started out in life and the impact of social structures on their choices as it is their individual behavior.  I also agree that parsing out which is the cause and which is the effect is highly complex even in the case of a single individual, let alone to determine this on an aggregate level.  From a policy perspective, we should probably focus attention on the extremes of the income distribution and leave inequalities in the middle well enough alone.  As a developed society, our compassion should not allow people to perish, especially if they are unable to work because of illness or disability (regardless of whether it is their own fault or not), or are working at below-subsistence wages (even though other work is theoretically available). On the other end, people should reap the rewards of their own effort, but at some point those rewards are compounded by social structures where they reach levels that are way outside the bounds of any individual’s marginal productivity. Indeed, the luck egalitarians have done us a favor in that policy should perhaps concern itself with how political, economic, and social structures (as opposed to individual behaviors) create unnatural inequalities rather than arguing about after-the-fact redistribution.