David and Goliath: The Triumph of the Underdog

by Malcolm Gladwell

  So what should we be doing? We should be firing bad teachers. Or coaching them in order to improve their performance. Or paying the best teachers more in exchange for taking more students. Or raising the profile of the teaching profession to try to attract more of the special kind of person who can excel in the classroom. The last thing we should do in response to the problem of there being too many poor teachers and not enough good teachers, though, is go out and hire more teachers. Yet that is precisely what many industrialized countries have done in recent years, as they have become obsessed with lowering class size. It is also worth pointing out that nothing costs more than reducing class size. It costs so much to hire extra teachers and build them classrooms in which to teach that there is precious little money left over to pay teachers. As a result, the salaries of teachers, relative to other professions, have steadily fallen over the past fifty years.

  In the past generation, the American educational system has decided not to seek the very best teachers, give them lots of kids to teach, and pay them more—which would help children the most. It has decided to hire every teacher it can get its hands on and pay them less. (The growth in spending on public education over the course of the twentieth century in the United States was staggering: between 1890 and 1990, in constant dollars, the bill went from $2 billion to $187 billion, with that spending accelerating toward the end of the century. That money went, overwhelmingly, toward hiring more teachers in order to make classes smaller. Between 1970 and 1990, the pupil-staff ratio in American public schools fell from 20.5 to 15.4, and paying for all those extra teachers accounted for the lion’s share of the tens of billions of dollars in extra educational spending in those years.

  Why did this happen? One answer lies in the politics of the educational world—in the power of teachers and their unions, and in the peculiarities of the way schools are funded. But that is not an entirely satisfactory explanation. The American public—and the Canadian public and the British public and the French public and on and on—wasn’t forced to spend all that money on lowering class size. They wanted smaller classes. Why? Because the people and countries who are wealthy enough to pay for things like really small classes have a hard time understanding that the things their wealth can buy might not always make them better off.

  Chapter Three: Caroline Sacks

  The discussion of the Impressionists is based on several books, principally: John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (MOMA, 1973); Ross King, The Judgment of Paris (Walker Publishing, 2006), which has a marvelous description of the world of the Salon; Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists (Harper Collins, 2006); and Harrison White and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Wiley & Sons, 1965), 150.

  The first academic paper to raise the issue of relative deprivation with respect to school choice was James Davis’s “The Campus as Frog Pond: An Application of the Theory of Relative Deprivation to Career Decisions of College Men,” The American Journal of Sociology 72, no. 1 (July 1966). Davis concludes:

  At the level of the individual, [my findings] challenge the notion that getting into the “best possible” school is the most efficient route to occupational mobility. Counselors and parents might well consider the drawbacks as well as the advantages of sending a boy to a “fine” college, if, when doing so, it is fairly certain he will end up in the bottom ranks of his graduating class. The aphorism “It is better to be a big frog in a small pond than a small frog in a big pond” is not perfect advice, but it is not trivial.

  Stouffer’s study (coauthored with Edward A. Suchman, Leland C. DeVinney, Shirley A. Star, and Robin M. Williams Jr.) appears in The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life, vol. 1 of Studies in Social Psychology in World War II (Princeton University Press, 1949), 251.

  For studies of so-called happy countries, see Mary Daly, Andrew Oswald, Daniel Wilson, and Stephen Wu, “Dark Contrasts: The Paradox of High Rates of Suicide in Happy Places,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 80 (December 2011), and Carol Graham, Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford University Press, 2009).

  Herbert Marsh teaches in the Department of Education at Oxford University. His academic output over the course of his career has been extraordinary. On the subject of “Big Fish/Little Pond” alone, he has written countless papers. A good place to start is H. Marsh, M. Seaton, et al., “The Big-Fish-Little-Pond-Effect Stands Up to Critical Scrutiny: Implications for Theory, Methodology, and Future Research,” Educational Psychology Review 20 (2008): 319–50.

  For statistics on STEM programs, see Rogers Elliott, A. Christopher Strenta, et al., “The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions,” Research in Higher Education 37, no. 6 (December 1996), and Mitchell Chang, Oscar Cerna, et al., “The Contradictory Roles of Institutional Status in Retaining Underrepresented Minorities in Biomedical and Behavioral Science Majors,” The Review of Higher Education 31, no. 4 (summer 2008).

  John P. Conley and Ali Sina Önder’s breakdown of research papers appears in “An Empirical Guide to Hiring Assistant Professors in Economics,” Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers Series, May 28, 2013.

  The reference to Fred Glimp’s “happy-bottom-quarter” policy comes from Jerome Karabel’s fascinating book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Mariner Books, 2006), 291. Karabel comments:

  Would it be better, [Glimp] implied, if the students at the bottom were content to be there? Thus the renowned (some would say notorious) Harvard admission practice known as the “happy-bottom-quarter policy” was born.…Glimp’s goal was to identify “the right bottom-quarter students—men who have the perspective, ego strength, or extracurricular outlets for maintaining their self-respect (or whatever) while making the most of their opportunities at a C-level.”

  The question of affirmative action is worth discussing in some detail. Take a look at the following table from the work of Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It (Basic Books, 2012). It shows where African-Americans rank in their law school classes compared with white students. The class ranks run from 1 to 10, with 1 being the bottom tenth of the class and 10 being the top.

  Rank Black White Other

  1. 51.6 5.6 14.8

  2. 19.8 7.2 20.0

  3. 11.1 9.2 13.4

  4. 4.0 10.2 11.5

  5. 5.6 10.6 8.9

  6. 1.6 11.0 8.2

  7. 1.6 11.5 6.2

  8. 2.4 11.2 6.9

  9. 0.8 11.8 4.9

  10. 1.6 11.7 5.2

  There are a lot of numbers in this table, but only two rows really matter—the first and second rows, showing the racial breakdown of the bottom of the average American law school class.

  Rank Black White Other

  1. 51.6 5.6 14.8

  2. 19.8 7.2 20.0

  Here is the way that Sander and Taylor analyze the costs of this strategy. Imagine two black law school students with identical grades and identical test scores. Both are admitted to an elite law school under an affirmative-action program. One accepts and one declines. The one who declines chooses instead—for logistical or financial or family reasons—to attend his or her second choice, a less prestigious and less selective law school. Sander and Taylor looked at a large sample of these kinds of “matched pairs” and compared how well they did on four measures: law school graduation rate, passing the bar on their first attempt, ever passing the bar, and actually practicing law. The comparison is not even close. By every measure, black students who don’t go to the “best” school they get into outperform those who do.

  Career Success White Black Black

  (Affirmative

  Action)

  Percentage who graduate from law school 91.8 93.2 86.2

  Percentage who pass bar first attempt 91
.3 88.5 70.5

  Percentage who ever pass bar 96.4 90.4 82.8

  Percentage who practice law 82.5 75.9 66.5

  Sander and Taylor argue very convincingly that if you are black and you really want to be a lawyer, you should do what the Impressionists did and steer clear of the Big Pond. Don’t accept any offer from a school that wants to bump you up a notch. Go to the school you would have otherwise gone to. Sander and Taylor put it bluntly: “At any law school the bottom of the class is a lousy place to be.”

  By the way, those of you who read my book Outliers, where I also discussed affirmative action and law school, know that in the book I was interested in making a very different point—that the usefulness of IQ and intelligence starts to level off at a certain point, meaning that the kinds of distinctions among students made by elite institutions are not necessarily useful. In other words, it is wrong to assume that a lawyer admitted to a very good law school with lesser credentials will be a less able lawyer than those admitted with sterling credentials. To back this up, I used data from the University of Michigan Law School, which shows that their black law school affirmative-action graduates had careers every bit as distinguished as their white graduates.

  Do I still believe this? Yes and no. I think the general point about the benefits of intelligence leveling off at the high end remains. But I now think the specific point made about law schools in Outliers was, in retrospect, naive. I was not familiar with relative deprivation theory at the time. I am now a good deal more skeptical of affirmative-action programs.

  Chapter Four: David Boies

  A good general introduction to the problem of dyslexia is Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Harper, 2007).

  The Bjorks have written widely and brilliantly on the subject of desirable difficulty. Here’s a good summary of their work: Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork, “Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning,” Psychology and the Real World, M. A. Gernsbacher et al., eds. (Worth Publishers, 2011), ch. 5.

  The puzzles about the bat and ball and the widgets come from Shane Frederick, “Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (fall 2005). The results of Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer’s experiment with the CRT at Princeton are described in Adam Alter et al., “Overcoming Intuition: Metacognitive Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136 (2007). Alter has a wonderful new book about this line of research called Drunk Tank Pink (Penguin, 2013).

  Julie Logan’s study of dyslexia among entrepreneurs is “Dyslexic Entrepreneurs: The Incidence; Their Coping Strategies and Their Business Skills,” Dyslexia 15, no. 4 (2009): 328–46.

  The best history of IKEA is Ingvar Kamprad and Bertil Torekull’s Leading by Design: The IKEA Story (Collins, 1999). Incredibly, there is nothing in Torekull’s interviews with Kamprad to suggest that Kamprad had even a moment’s hesitation about doing business with a Communist country at the height of the Cold War. On the contrary, Kamprad seems almost blasé about it: “At first we did a bit of advance smuggling. Illegally, we took tools such as files, spare parts for machines, and even carbon paper for ancient typewriters.”

  Chapter Five: Emil “Jay” Freireich

  Sources for the London Blitz include Tom Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz (Collins, 1976). “Winston Churchill described London as ‘the greatest target in the world,’” appears on page 22; “I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant,” page 81; and “What, and miss all this?” page 128. Other sources include Edgar Jones, Robin Woolven, et al., “Civilian Morale During the Second World War: Responses to Air-Raids Re-examined,” Social History of Medicine 17, no. 3 (2004); and J. T. MacCurdy, The Structure of Morale (Cambridge University Press, 1943). “In October 1940 I had occasion to drive through South-East London” appears on page 16; “the morale of the community depends on the reaction of the survivors,” pages 13–16; and “When the first siren sounded,” page 10.

  The informal survey of famous poets and writers is from Felix Brown, “Bereavement and Lack of a Parent in Childhood,” in Foundations of Child Psychiatry, Emanuel Miller, ed. (Pergamon Press, 1968). “This is not an argument in favour of orphanhood” appears on page 444. J. Marvin Eisenstadt’s study is detailed in “Parental Loss and Genius,” American Psychologist (March 1978): 211. Lucille Iremonger’s findings about the backgrounds of England’s prime ministers can be found in The Fiery Chariot: A Study of British Prime Ministers and the Search for Love (Secker and Warburg, 1970), 4. Iremonger actually made an error in her calculations, which was corrected by the historian Hugh Berrington in the British Journal of Political Science 4 (July 1974): 345. The scientific literature on the association between parental loss and eminence is considerable. Among other studies are S. M. Silverman, “Parental Loss and Scientists,” Science Studies 4 (1974); Robert S. Albert, Genius and Eminence (Pergamon Press, 1992); Colin Martindale, “Father’s Absence, Psychopathology, and Poetic Eminence,” Psychological Reports 31 (1972): 843; Dean Keith Simonton, “Genius and Giftedness: Parallels and Discrepancies,” in Talent Development: Proceedings from the 1993 Henry B. and Jocelyn Wallace National Research Symposium on Talent Development, vol. 2, N. Colangelo, S. G. Assouline, and D. L. Ambroson, eds., 39–82 (Ohio Psychology Publishing).

  Two excellent sources on the history of the fight against childhood leukemia are John Laszlo, The Cure of Childhood Leukemia: Into the Age of Miracles (Rutgers University Press, 1996), and Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (Scribner, 2011). “There was a senior hematologist” is quoted in Laszlo’s book on page 183. Laszlo conducted a series of interviews with every key figure from that period—and each chapter of the book is a separate oral history.

  Stanley Rachman’s experiments with people with phobias are described in “The Overprediction and Underprediction of Pain,” Clinical Psychology Review 11 (1991).

  “A voice rose from the wreckage,” appears on page 97 of Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama; The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (Touchstone, 2002); “Hell, yeah, we’re going to ride,” page 98; “To the child’s disbelief,” page 109; “Today is the second time within a year,” page 110; and “Coke bottles shattered,” page 215.

  Eugen Kogon’s memoir is The Theory and Practice of Hell (Berkley Windhover, 1975). “The more tender one’s conscience, the more difficult it was to make such decisions” appears on page 278.

  Chapter Six: Wyatt Walker

  The story of the photograph—and of all the iconic civil rights photographs—is brilliantly told by Martin Berger in Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (University of California Press, 2011). Berger’s book is the source for all the discussion of the photograph and the impact it caused. Berger’s larger point—which is deeply thought-provoking—is that mainstream white Americans in the 1960s needed black activists to seem passive and “saintly.” Their cause seemed more acceptable that way. The denunciation of King and Walker for the use of children in the protests is on pages 82–86. Gadsden’s explanation of his actions (“I automatically threw my knee”) is on page 37.

  The single best account of King’s Birmingham campaign—and the book to which this chapter is greatly indebted—is Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama; The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (Touchstone, 2002). If you think Walker’s story is extraordinary, then you should read McWhorter’s book. It is as good a work of history as I have ever read. “In Birmingham, it was held a fact of criminal science” appears in a footnote on page 340; “One of the attendees at the meeting was the president’s wife,” page 292; “A Jew is just a ‘nigger turned inside out,’” page 292; “A black man in Chicago wakes up one morning,” page 30; “They were astounded to watch King,” page 277; “militant out of Dr. Seuss,” page 359; “We got to use what we got,” page 363; “The K-9 Corps,”
page 372; and “Sure, people got bit by the dogs,” page 375. McWhorter’s account of the showdown in Kelly Ingram Park is extraordinary. I have greatly condensed it.

  King’s mock eulogy appears in Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63 (Simon and Schuster, 1988), 692. For Branch’s description of Wyatt Walker (“he acquired dark-rimmed glasses”), see page 285. “As a general principle, Walker asserted that everything must build” is on page 689. King’s words to the parents whose children had been arrested appear on pages 762–64.

  “When I kissed my wife and children good-bye” is from an interview of Wyatt Walker by Andrew Manis at Canaan Baptist Church of Christ, New York City, April 20, 1989, page 6. A transcription of the interview is held at Birmingham Public Library, Birmingham, Alabama. From the same interview are: “This man must be out of his goddam mind,” 14; and “They can only see…through white eyes,” page 22.

  “De rabbit is de slickest o’ all de animals de Lawd” is cited in Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2007), 107. Also from Levine are: “The rabbit, like the slaves who wove tales about him,” page 112; “painfully realistic stories,” page 115; and “The records left by nineteenth-century observers of slavery,” page 122. The story of the Terrapin is on page 115.

  “I’m not hard to get along with, dahlin’s” is from a Wyatt Walker interview with John Britton that is part of the Civil Rights Documentation Project, housed in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. See page 35 of the transcript. Also from the interview are: “If you get in my way, I’ll run smack dab over you,” page 66; “If I’d had my razor,” page 15; “At times I would accommodate or alter my morality,” page 31; “Oh, man, it was a great time to be alive,” page 63; “Tip his hand,” page 59; “I called Dr. King,” page 61; and “It was hot in Birmingham,” page 62.