Book Review: Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

You know Malcolm Gladwell from The Tipping Point and Blink. Last night I had the opportunity to read Outliers: The Story of Success, and thought it might be of interest to some of the readers here.

This is a different kind of book, more in the mode of Freakonomics than anything else. While trying to discuss success, Gladwell outlines a series of interesting data points that suggest that our cultural story of how someone becomes successful is (at best) incomplete.

Some of the data-driven anecdotes are interesting -- why hockey players are more likely to be born in the month of January suggests that the notions of equality of opportunity are mistaken. Some are poignant, as he discusses in the end chapter the influences that led his mother to success. Some are merely intriguing -- why some birth years mattered for successful computer programmers, Jewish lawyers, and wealthy capitalists. (You're left at the end of these chapters with a sense of knowing something you didn't know before, but feeling that this knowledge is essentially trivial -- it has no predictive or replicative power, can't be used to design program or policy, and doesn't do you any individual or collective good in searching for how to be successful.)

The chapters that would seem to hold some promise for discussion about community-level indicators make these points:

1. There's no substitute for hard work. Success takes 10,000 hours of investment before it pays off. Those that succeed have a level of competence, the opportunity for those 10,000 hours, and the drive/diligence to accomplish the hard work. While Gladwell doesn't get prescriptive here, this implies something for those involved in community-building about access to opportunities for practice and investment of time in a given arena.

2. Culture matters. He traces the influence of Scotch-Irish immigration patterns into Appalachia on codes of honor and honor-related violence and murder rates in the American South. (He stops much too soon on this topic: read this with Code of the Street and you may start drawing conclusions that the inexplicable internal urban violence we face may have its roots in culture transfer from Scotch-Irish slaveholders. I'd love to see more work on this topic, and means to move beyond explanatory to actionable policy.) He also takes Asian proficiency in mathematics back to the differences in rice and wheat cultivation, differences in language systems, and differences in length of the school year. I found useful the point at which he began to describe how Korean Airlines crashes were reduced once cultural deference patterns were identified and pilots trained specifically to operate in a different cultural milieu, but this section ended much too soon again to get into how one addresses disadvantages of culture.

3. Summer vacation hurts poor children. This section on public education is worth exploring further, as he suggests that public education systems are working for poor, middle-income, and upper-income children who all make roughly equivalent learning gains during the year, but upper-income children also make learning gains over the summer while poor children slide backward. He traces a large portion of the achievement gap in public education to summer breaks, and touts the KIPP schools as an answer to this problem. I suspect the answer is a little more complicated (see JCCI's Eliminating the Achievement Gap discussion), but if we're serious about improving educational opportunity, using an outdated agricultural model to schedule class hours doesn't seem to make sense.

Overall, an intriguing book -- not likely to have the impact of The Tipping Point, but worthy of reading and prompting more discussion, especially among community indicators practitioners. The book suggests that we need to be doing a better job of mining the data for unexpected patterns -- I'd love your thoughts on that.

Read more ...

Charity Channel Reviews Results That Matter

I'm a big fan of the book Results That Matter - Improving Communities by Engaging Citizens, Measuring Performance, and Getting Things Done, by Paul Epstein, Paul Coates, and Lyle Wray, with David Swain. The website that describes the book and the concepts in it can be found here.

Charity Channel has reviewed the book -- you can find the review here. I'm excited about the concepts in the book going out to a wider audience.

Unfortunately, not being a Charity Channel subscriber, I can't read the review. Can someone tell me what it says? Thanks!

Read more ...

Super Crunchers: Book Review

I picked up the book Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart at an airport bookstore and was entertained for nearly the entire trip to Chicago. I thought community indicators practitioners might be interested in Ian Ayres' book, and so I'll share my thoughts.

Please note that this is coming from the perspective of someone who has been trying for quite some time to increase the use of data-based decision-making, particularly in public policy. The chapters on public policy -- especially "Government by Chance" -- were especially interesting to me, but I was predisposed to accept the author's arguments from the outset.

The book begins with a discussion of the incredibly large quantities of data available now. He points out that "a terabyte is the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes. The prefix tera comes from the Greek word for monster. A terabyte is truly a monstrously large quantity. The entire Library of Congress is about twenty terabytes of text." He tries to get us used to the idea of huge amounts of data and increased cheap data storage and powerful processing capabilities, which allows for "super crunching" of data. (He doesn't mention the rumors of a terabyte ipod, however.)

(For another perspective on the amount of data being generated, see this earlier blog post from last March. It has pictures. And a discussion of exabytes, which are way cooler than terabytes.)

With that amount of data, and that amount of processing speed, amazing things can be done. 100,000 lives saved with simple changes in medical practice. Effective policy demonstration practices replicated quickly. Airlines and booksellers and grocery stores tailoring their pricing structure to extract as much money as possible from you.

Wait, that last part didn't sound as exciting. But that's the downside of this data explosion -- along with the lack of privacy, the notion that business can use data to your personal dollar pain threshhold and come as close to it as possible.

So how do we counteract these trends? Increased public availability of data. Community access to information. Put the data in the hands of the consumer or voter and see what kinds of revolutionary changes are possible.

The author's a friend of the Freakonomics guys, and tries to write a book as engaging and controversial as theirs. It's not quite there. But it should make you think a little bit about how you use data and the importance of open, free access to information to counteract the growing information imbalances in our society.

Read more ...