This post is just a footnote to the forthcoming or long lost theory I've been writing. It just so happens that I pulled in two 'plates of shrimp' today. Meme synchronicity. The first comes from Nassim Taleb in this video.
The second comes from Yglesias channelling Gladwell, emphasis mine.
At the end of the day, it’s hard for me not to reach the conclusion that the backlash is, not coincidentally, coming just as Gladwell’s hit upon a politically charged topic and reached conclusions that are discomfiting to the very successful. I’ve seen a few people express the notion that Gladwell’s conclusion — that success is determined largely by luck rather than one’s powers of awesomeness — is somehow too banal to waste one’s time with. I think those people need to open their eyes and pay a bit more attention to the society we’re living in. It’s a society that not only seems to believe that the successful are entitled to unlimited monetary rewards for their trouble, but massive and wide-ranging deference.
Beyond that, it’s a society in which the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige has largely gone out the window. The elite feel not only a sense of entitlement, but also a unique sense of arrogance that only an elite that firmly believes itself to be a meritocracy can muster. Gladwell not only shows that this is wrong, but he does an excellent job of showing why it feels right. He explains that success does, in fact, require hard work — lots of it — and that people who think they got where they are through effort rather than good fortune are at least half right. The issue is that in some ways the best luck of all is the luck to be in a position to do hard work at a time when it pays off. Bill Gates, Gladwell explains, put in vast hours programming computers at a very young age at a time when almost nobody in the United States even had the opportunity to put in that kind of time in front of a computer screen.
I cannot find where I was talking about this before. When I do, the links will go here.
Well. All I can say in retrospect is that these three, especially the first are useful:
Ross Douthat has an interesting take:
Thus the importance of the 10,000 hours aspect of Gladwell's argument - and thus, too, the psychological phenomenon Leonhardt is describing. Before you've put in your ten thousand hours (or before your child has done so), it makes sense to focus intently on the preconditions for success, rather than assuming that with enough hard work and talent you or your offspring can overcome any obstacle thrown in your way. But many of those preconditions are set, by definition, early in the life cycle, and the experience of actually succeeding takes place over the course of years of often-grinding work, in which a given meritocrat's work ethic makes a significant difference in how well you do relative to your peer group. (Not as much of a difference as being born a Kennedy, of course, but then again we only have so many fairy princesses ...)
By the time you reach the end of your career, then, what seems like the defining experience of your life isn't the broad luck of being born in the upper-middle class, or the narrower luck of being in the right place at the right time to join a hedge fund, or start a popular blog, or found a software company. It's the mad, mad treadmill that you've been running on since high school or earlier, the experience of which instills the not-unreasonable sense that despite all your advantages, you really do deserve your success.
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