Malcolm Gladwell always makes for entertaining reading. He takes an idea – or two – and proceeds to demolish conventional wisdom built around it with a barrage of carefully selected statistics and persuasive anecdotal narrative. And there is a tantalizing element of self-help woven into the theory; remember the prescription of devoting 10000 hours to one’s chosen pursuit to reach the end of the rainbow, in Outliers? It is sociology’s pop version at its appealing best.
But does all he has to say stand rigorous scrutiny? The best that can be said is that the jury will always be out on some of his hypotheses. In the meanwhile, the believers and laymen like me will eagerly lap up his offerings. That is how his previous works ‘The Tipping Point’, ‘Blink’, Outliers’ and ‘What the Dog Saw’ were received and the book under review ‘David and Goliath’ has similarly found enough readers to scale every prominent Bestseller List.
The central theme of the book is that the ‘weak’ need not lose – indeed their disadvantages are not what they appear to be. It is entirely a question of understanding what an advantage or disadvantage really is, the limits that power of the strong has and following asymmetric tactics to grapple with such an adversary.
The book is built around these ideas and to me, at times it appeared that the stories are being forced to fit the theme; indeed some of the tales did not appear to have much to do with the core hypotheses. A case in point is the narrative of the insurgency in Northern Ireland and law and order in some of the badlands of urban America.
The books tilts at conventional logic and comes up with a few interesting and credible arguments. One is the proposition that contrary to common understanding of parents and educationists, small classrooms are necessarily not beneficial for its students. Indeed, Gladwell argues that lack of competition and peer support to weaker children militate against the desirability of small classes. There is a great deal to be said for the desirability of interaction among children and its value to education. Also, teachers of small classes do not automatically pay more attention to each student; human nature is to adapt and work less in such circumstances. Gladwell also points out that very large classroom are not beneficial either; they are chaotic and render children nameless and anonymous. He quotes figures from the performance of either variety to underscore his conclusions. A median strength is preferable, he says. Could it be about 25 children per class in the Indian conditions?
Similarly, the book argues that joining the more ‘prestigious’ schools and colleges is not always an advantage. There is a great deal to commend the theory that to be a large fish in a small pond does much more for the growth of an individual than to be reduced to being a small fish in the large pond of an elite college. A student who joins an Ivy League college on merit might soon find that in the new environment of heightened meritocracy, he or she is just an average player. Not only can self-esteem be a casualty, many students actually drop out of their preferred courses and take up other streams of education. The elite schools do more to ‘ássure’ wealthy parents that they are providing the ‘best’ possible education to their children that they do for the children themselves. Indeed, the end result could well be quite the opposite of the intended objective.
Gladwell also professes the applicability of the inverted U-curve in many situations where something that appears to be an advantage hits the law of diminishing returns and even becomes counter-productive over time or when pressed beyond a point. He gives examples of law-enforcement vis a vis application of stringent laws (as in the ‘Three Strikes’ law first introduced by the State of California to stem the tide of crime) as one of the examples.
Finally, if you need an occasional fix of pop-sociology and want to quell that desire to understand the way slices of our world function, I would recommend David and Goliath – Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants.
Incidentally, this was the first book I ever ‘heard’ through the earphones as I walked every morning. The experience was enjoyable and made the walks easier. But I did find that once in a while my mind tended to wander and had to be nudged back. Initially that bothered me till I reminded myself that even when I ‘read’ a book, my concentration is rarely a hundred percent!
But does all he has to say stand rigorous scrutiny? The best that can be said is that the jury will always be out on some of his hypotheses. In the meanwhile, the believers and laymen like me will eagerly lap up his offerings. That is how his previous works ‘The Tipping Point’, ‘Blink’, Outliers’ and ‘What the Dog Saw’ were received and the book under review ‘David and Goliath’ has similarly found enough readers to scale every prominent Bestseller List.
The central theme of the book is that the ‘weak’ need not lose – indeed their disadvantages are not what they appear to be. It is entirely a question of understanding what an advantage or disadvantage really is, the limits that power of the strong has and following asymmetric tactics to grapple with such an adversary.
The book is built around these ideas and to me, at times it appeared that the stories are being forced to fit the theme; indeed some of the tales did not appear to have much to do with the core hypotheses. A case in point is the narrative of the insurgency in Northern Ireland and law and order in some of the badlands of urban America.
The books tilts at conventional logic and comes up with a few interesting and credible arguments. One is the proposition that contrary to common understanding of parents and educationists, small classrooms are necessarily not beneficial for its students. Indeed, Gladwell argues that lack of competition and peer support to weaker children militate against the desirability of small classes. There is a great deal to be said for the desirability of interaction among children and its value to education. Also, teachers of small classes do not automatically pay more attention to each student; human nature is to adapt and work less in such circumstances. Gladwell also points out that very large classroom are not beneficial either; they are chaotic and render children nameless and anonymous. He quotes figures from the performance of either variety to underscore his conclusions. A median strength is preferable, he says. Could it be about 25 children per class in the Indian conditions?
Similarly, the book argues that joining the more ‘prestigious’ schools and colleges is not always an advantage. There is a great deal to commend the theory that to be a large fish in a small pond does much more for the growth of an individual than to be reduced to being a small fish in the large pond of an elite college. A student who joins an Ivy League college on merit might soon find that in the new environment of heightened meritocracy, he or she is just an average player. Not only can self-esteem be a casualty, many students actually drop out of their preferred courses and take up other streams of education. The elite schools do more to ‘ássure’ wealthy parents that they are providing the ‘best’ possible education to their children that they do for the children themselves. Indeed, the end result could well be quite the opposite of the intended objective.
Gladwell also professes the applicability of the inverted U-curve in many situations where something that appears to be an advantage hits the law of diminishing returns and even becomes counter-productive over time or when pressed beyond a point. He gives examples of law-enforcement vis a vis application of stringent laws (as in the ‘Three Strikes’ law first introduced by the State of California to stem the tide of crime) as one of the examples.
Finally, if you need an occasional fix of pop-sociology and want to quell that desire to understand the way slices of our world function, I would recommend David and Goliath – Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants.
Incidentally, this was the first book I ever ‘heard’ through the earphones as I walked every morning. The experience was enjoyable and made the walks easier. But I did find that once in a while my mind tended to wander and had to be nudged back. Initially that bothered me till I reminded myself that even when I ‘read’ a book, my concentration is rarely a hundred percent!
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