These two stories about Gladwell are both true, and yet they are also very different. The first personalizes his success. It is the classically American version of his career, in that it gives individual characteristics — talent, hard work, Horatio Alger-like pluck — the starring role. The second version doesn’t necessarily deny these characteristics, but it does sublimate them. The protagonist is not a singularly talented person who took advantage of opportunities. He is instead a talented person who took advantage of singular opportunities.[...]Many people, I think, have an instinctual understanding of this idea (even if Gladwell, in the interest of setting his thesis against conventional wisdom, doesn’t say so). That’s why parents spend so much time worrying about what school their child attends. They don’t really believe the child is so infused with greatness that he or she can overcome a bad school, or even an average one. And yet when they look back years later on their child’s success — or their own — they tend toward explanations that focus on the individual.
The tricky thing about this argument is that it points in two different directions. It's good for societies to overstate the existence of individual opportunity and life-cycle autonomy. The more that people feel able to achieve, the more that they will attempt. A high perception of mobility is good for personal initiative, and personal initiative is good for both individuals and the economy. It's also good for political systems to build policy atop realistic understandings of economic mobility. If outcomes are only weakly variable because opportunity is not broadly shared, than you probably want to use national policy to redress that fact. But policy is, at least in part, a function of attitudes. A society that's wrongly certain of its natural mobility will create policy that's insufficient in spreading opportunity. Optimally, you'd want individuals to overestimate mobility and policy to realistically estimate it, but it doesn't necessarily work out that way. For instance, the graph below tracks intergenerational income mobility:
If the political system were to more fully face up to the implications of that data -- that economic mobility is an upper-class asset -- it would push towards some pretty serious changes in policy. Similarly, do people realize that America has less economic mobility than virtually any other advanced nation?
Arguably, it's simultaneously one of Americas strengths and its weaknesses that this data would likely surprise most Americans. Indeed, our countrymen are much likelier to believe that people are rewarded for their effort and much less likely to believe that family riches are important for getting ahead than residents of other countries. That's good from an entrepreneurial standpoint, but it creates a society that believes strongly in economic mobility and doesn't have it. A society, in other words, at odds with its own deeply held values.
