David Brooks’ column on Gladwell’s “Outliers” critiqued Gladwell for suggesting that individual choice does not matter for success. I commented on the NYT site (pasted below)
Everyone (including David Brooks and Malcolm Gladwell) knows that genes, environment, and individual choice each play a critical role in determining a person’s fate. The purpose of these arguments about the “cause” of success is not to isolate a universally dominant factor but to identify the factor that is most worthy of attention right now.
There are times when environments are stable, culture is stifling, and innovation and success demand individual action at the expense of the dominant, collective view. There are two or three roads and everyone is taking only one of them. These are the times to emphasize individual choice.
But there are also times when the world is chaotic and disjointed and individual actions do not have reliable, predictable consequences. There are a thousand roads and only one person on each, and they keep criss-crossing. These are the times when cooperation and collaboration are required to pool ideas and stabilize the options so that individual choices can be relevant to outcomes.
Reading David Brooks over the last year or so, I am quite certain he knows we are in the latter situation. It is true that individual choice still matters, and always will, but the challenge of our day is to set policy, the rules of cooperation, such that it can matter even more in the future. I haven’t yet read Gladwell’s book, but my guess is it contains many ideas and insights that will help us do so.
