It is not easy to be so honest about where we’re from. It would be simpler for my mother to portray her success as a straightforward triumph over victimhood, just as it would be simpler to look at Joe Flom and call him the greatest lawyer ever—even though his individual achievements are so impossibly intertwined with his ethnicity, his generation, the particulars of the garment industry, and the peculiar biases of the downtown law firms. Bill Gates could accept the title of genius, and leave it at that. It takes no small degree of humility for him to look back on his life and say, “I was very lucky.” And he was. The Mothers’ Club of Lakeside Academy bought him a computer in 1968. It is impossible for a hockey player, or Bill Joy, or Robert Oppenheimer, or any other outlier for that matter, to look down from their lofty perch and say with truthfulness, “I did this, all by myself.” Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They 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 lucky—but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.
My great-great-great-grandmother was bought at Alligator Pond. That act, in turn, gave her son, John Ford, the privilege of a skin color that spared him a life of slavery. The culture of possibility that Daisy Ford embraced and put to use so brilliantly on behalf of her daughters was passed on to her by the peculiarities of the West Indian social structure. And my mother’s education was the product of the riots of 1937 and the industriousness of Mr. Chance. These were history’s gifts to my family—and if the resources of that grocer, the fruits of those riots, the possibilities of that culture, and the privileges of that skin tone had been extended to others, how many more would now live a life of fulfillment, in a beautiful house high on a hill?
Notes
INTRODUCTION
John G. Bruhn and Stewart Wolf have published two books on their work in Roseto: The Roseto Story (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979) and The Power of Clan: The Influence of Human Relationships on Heart Disease (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1993). For a comparison of Roseto Valfortore, Italy, and Roseto, Pennsylvania, USA, see Carla Bianco, The Two Rosetos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974). Roseto might be unique among small Pennsylvania towns in the degree of academic interest it has attracted.
ONE: THE MATTHEW EFFECT
Jeb Bush’s fantasies about being a self-made man are detailed in S. V. Dáte’s Jeb: America’s Next Bush (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007), esp. pages 80–81. Dáte writes: “In both his 1994 and 1998 runs, Jeb made it clear: not only was he not apologizing for his background, he was proud of where he was financially, and certain that it was the result of his own pluck and work ethic. ‘I’ve worked real hard for what I’ve achieved and I’m quite proud of it,’ he told the St. Petersburg Times in 1993. ‘I have no sense of guilt, no sense of wrongdoing.’
“The attitude was much the same as he had expressed on CNN’s Larry King Live in 1992: ‘I think, overall, it’s a disadvantage,’ he said of being the president’s son when it came to his business opportunities. ‘Because you’re restricted in what you can do.’
“This thinking cannot be described as anything other than delusional.”
The Lethbridge Broncos, who were playing the day that Paula and Roger Barnsley first noticed the relative-age effect, were a junior ice hockey team in the Western Hockey League from 1974 until 1986. They won the WHL Championship in 1982–83, and three years later were brought back to Swift Current in Saskatchewan. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethbridge_Broncos.
For an overview of the relative-age effect, see Jochen Musch and Simon Grondin, “Unequal Competition as an Impediment to Personal Development: A Review of the Relative Age Effect in Sport,” published in Developmental Review 21, no. 2 (2001): 147–167.
Roger Barnsley and A. H. Thompson have put their study on a Web site, http://www.socialproblemindex.ualberta.ca/relage.htm.
-Self-fulfilling prophecies can be traced back to ancient Greek and Indian literature, but the term itself was coined by Robert K. Merton in Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968).
Barnsley and his team branched out into other sports. See R. Barnsley, A. H. Thompson, and Philipe Legault, “Family Planning: Football Style. The Relative Age Effect in Football,” published in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport 27, no. 1 (1992): 77–88.
The statistics for the relative-age effect in baseball come from Greg Spira, in Slate magazine, http://www.slate.com/id/2188866/.
A. Dudink, at the University of Amsterdam, showed how the cutoff date for English Premier League soccer creates the same age hierarchy as is seen in Canadian hockey. See “Birth Date and Sporting Success,” Nature 368 (1994): 592.
Interestingly, in Belgium, the cutoff date for soccer used to be August 1, and back then, almost a quarter of their top players were born in August and September. But then the Belgian soccer federation switched to January 1, and sure enough, within a few years, there were almost no elite soccer players born in December, and an overwhelming number born in January. For more, see Werner F. Helsen, Janet L. Starkes, and Jan van Winckel, “Effects of a Change in Selection Year on Success in Male Soccer Players,” American Journal of Human Biology 12, no. 6 (2000): 729–735.
Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey’s data comes from “The Persistence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics 121, no. 4 (2006): 1437–1472.
TWO: THE 10,000-HOUR RULE
Much of the discussion of Bill Joy’s history comes from Andrew Leonard’s Salon article, “BSD Unix: Power to the People, from the Code,” May 16, 2000, http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/index.html.
For a history of the University of Michigan Computer Center, see “A Career Interview with Bernie Galler,” professor emeritus in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the school, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 23, no. 4 (2001): 107–112.
One of (many) wonderful articles by Ericsson and his colleagues about the ten-thousand-hour rule is K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406.
Daniel J. Levitin talks about the ten thousand hours it takes to get mastery in This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006), p. 197.
Mozart’s development as a prodigy is discussed in Michael J. A. Howe’s Genius Explained (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 3.
Harold Schonberg is quoted in John R. Hayes, Thinking and Learning Skills. Vol. 2: Research and Open Questions, ed. Susan F. Chipman, Judith W. Segal, and Robert Glaser (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1985).
For chess’s exception to the rule, grandmaster Bobby Fischer, see Neil Charness, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Ulrich Mayr in their essay “The Role of Practice and Coaching in Entrepreneurial Skill Domains: An International Comparison of Life-Span Chess Skill Acquisition,” in The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games, ed. K. Anders Ericsson (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), pp. 51–126, esp. p. 73.
To read more about the time-sharing revolution, see Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews’s Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry—And Made Himself the Richest Man in America (New York: Touchstone, 1994), p. 26.
Philip Norman wrote the Beatles’ biography Shout! (New York: Fireside, 2003).
John Lennon and George Harrison’s reminiscences about the band’s beginning in Hamburg come from Hamburg Days by George Harrison, Astrid Kirchherr, and Klaus Voorman (Surrey: Genesis Publications, 1999). The quotation is
from page 122.
Robert W. Weisberg discusses the Beatles—and computes the hours they spent practicing—in “Creativity and Knowledge: A Challenge to Theories” in Handbook of Creativity, ed. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 226–250.
The complete list of the richest people in history can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealthy_historical_figures_2008.
The reference to C. Wright Mills in the footnote comes from The American Business Elite: A Collective Portrait, published in the Journal of Economic History 5 (December 1945): 20–44.
Steve Jobs’s pursuit of Bill Hewlett is described in Lee Butcher’s Accidental Millionaire: The Rise and Fall of Steve Jobs at Apple Computer (New York: Paragon House, 1987).
THREE: THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART 1
The episode of 1 vs. 100 featuring Chris Langan aired January 25, 2008.
Leta Hollingworth, who is mentioned in the footnote, published her account of “L” in Children Above 180 IQ (New York: World Books, 1942).
Among other excellent sources on the life and times of Lewis Terman are Henry L. Minton, “Charting Life History: Lewis M. Terman’s Study of the Gifted” in The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology, ed. Jill G. Morawski (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Joel N. Shurkin, Terman’s Kids (New York: Little, Brown, 1992); and May Seagoe, Terman and the Gifted (Los Altos: Kauffman, 1975). The discussion of Henry Cowell comes from Seagoe.
Liam Hudson’s discussion of the limitations of IQ tests can be found in Contrary Imaginations: A Psychological Study of the English Schoolboy (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967). Hudson is an absolute delight to read.
The Michigan Law School study “Michigan’s Minority Graduates in Practice: The River Runs Through Law School,” written by Richard O. Lempert, David L. Chambers, and Terry K. Adams, appears in Law and Social Inquiry 25, no. 2 (2000).
Pitirim Sorokin’s rebuttal to Terman was published in Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956).
FOUR: THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART 2
Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005).
Robert J. Sternberg has written widely on practical intelligence and similar subjects. For a good, nonacademic account, see Successful Intelligence: How Practical and Creative Intelligence Determine Success in Life (New York: Plume, 1997).
As should be obvious, I loved Annette Lareau’s book. It is well worth reading, as I have only begun to outline her argument from Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
Another excellent discussion of the difficulties in focusing solely on IQ is Stephen J. Ceci’s On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
For a gentle but critical assessment of Terman’s study, see “The Vanishing Genius: Lewis Terman and the Stanford Study” by Gretchen Kreuter. It was published in the History of Education Quarterly 2, no. 1 (March 1962): 6–18.
FIVE: THE THREE LESSONS OF JOE FLOM
The definitive history of Skadden, Arps and the takeover culture was written by Lincoln Caplan, Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993).
Alexander Bickel’s obituary ran in the New York Times on November 8, 1974. The transcript of his interview is from the American Jewish Committee’s oral history project, which is archived at the New York Public Library.
Erwin O. Smigel writes about New York’s old white-shoe law firms in The Wall Street Lawyer: Professional Organization Man? (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969). Their particular employee preferences are listed on page 37.
Louis Auchincloss has written more about the changes that took place in the old-line law firms of Manhattan in the postwar years than anyone. The quotation is from his book The Scarlet Letters (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), p. 153.
The economic annihilation faced by lawyers at the lower end of the social spectrum during the Depression is explored in Jerold S. Auerbach’s Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 159.
Statistics on the fluctuating birth rate in America during the twentieth century can be found at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005067.html.
The impact of the “demographic trough” is explored in Richard A. Easterlin’s Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). H. Scott Gordon’s paean to the circumstances of children born during a trough is from p. 4 of his presidential address to the Western Economic Association at the annual meeting in Anaheim, California, in June of 1977, “On Being Demographically Lucky: The Optimum Time to Be Born.” It is quoted on page 31.
For a definitive account of the rise of Jewish lawyers, see Eli Wald, “The Rise and Fall of the WASP and Jewish Law Firms,” Stanford Law Review 60, no. 6 (2008): 1803.
The story of the Borgenichts was told by Louis to Harold H. Friedman and published as The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis Borgenicht (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942).
For more on the various occupations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrants to America, read Thomas Kessner’s The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City 1880–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Stephen Steinberg’s The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982) includes a brilliant chapter on Jewish immigrants to New York, to which I am heavily indebted.
Louise Farkas’s research was part of her master’s thesis at Queen’s college: Louise Farkas, “Occupational Genealogies of Jews in Eastern Europe and America, 1880–1924 (New York: Queens College Spring Thesis, 1982).
SIX: HARLAN, KENTUCKY
Harry M. Caudill wrote about Kentucky, its beauty and its troubles, in Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962).
The impact of coal mining on Harlan County is examined in “Social Disorganization and Reorganization in Harlan County, Kentucky,” by Paul Frederick Cressey in American Sociological Review 14, no. 3 (June 1949): 389–394.
The bloody and complicated Turner-Howard feud is described, along with other Kentucky feuds, in John Ed Pearce’s marvelously entertaining Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), p. 11.
The same clashes are assessed from an anthropological perspective by Keith F. Otterbein in “Five Feuds: An Analysis of Homicides in Eastern Kentucky in the Late Nineteenth Century,” American Anthropologist 102, no. 2 (June 2000): 231–243.
J. K. Campbell’s essay “Honour and the Devil” appeared in J. G. Peristiany (ed.), Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
The Scotch-Irish ancestry of the southern backcountry, as well as a phonetic guide to Scotch-Irish speech, can be found in David Hackett Fischer’s monumental study of early American history, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 652.
The high murder rate in the South, and the specific nature of these murders, is discussed by John Shelton Reed in One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). See, particularly, chapter 11, “Below the Smith and Wesson Line.”
For more on the historical causes of the southern temperament and the insult experiment at the University of Michigan, see Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, by Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, Inc., 1996).
Raymond D. Gastil’s study on the correlation between “southernness” and the US murder rate, “Homicide and a Regional Culture of Violence,” was published in the American Sociological Review 36 (1971): 412–427.
Cohen, with Joseph Vandello, Sylvia Puente, and Adria
n Rantilla, worked on another study about the American North-South cultural divide: “‘When You Call Me That, Smile!’ How Norms for Politeness, Interaction Styles, and Aggression Work Together in Southern Culture,” Social Psychology Quarterly 62, no. 3 (1999): 257–275.
SEVEN: THE ETHNIC THEORY OF PLANE CRASHES
The National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that investigates civil aviation accidents, published an Aircraft Accident Report on the Korean Air 801 crash: NTSB/-AAR-00/01.
The footnote about Three Mile Island draws heavily on the analysis of Charles Perrow’s classic Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
The seven-errors-per-accident statistic was calculated by the National Transportation Safety Board in a safety study titled “A Review of Flightcrew-Involved Major Accidents of U.S. Air Carriers, 1978 Through 1990” (Safety Study NTSB/-SS-94/01, 1994).
The agonizing dialogue and analysis of the Avianca 052 crash can be found in the National Transportation Safety Board Accident Report AAR-91/04.
Ute Fischer and Judith Orasanu’s study of mitigation in the cockpit, “Cultural Diversity and Crew Communication,” was presented at the fiftieth Astronautical Congress in Amsterdam, October 1999. It was published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Dialogue between the fated Air Florida captain and first officer is quoted in a second study by Fischer and Orasanu, “-Error-Challenging Strategies: Their Role in Preventing and Correcting Errors,” produced as part of the International Ergonomics Association fourteenth Triennial Congress and Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Forty-second Annual Meeting in San Diego, California, August 2000.
The unconscious impact of nationality on behavior was formally calculated by Geert Hofstede and outlined in Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2001). The study of French and German manufacturing plants that he quotes on page 102 was done by M. Brossard and M. Maurice, “-Existe-t-il un modèle universel des structures d’organisation?,” Sociologie du Travail 16, no. 4 (1974): 482–495.
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