Work & Luck: Thoughts on <i>Outliers</i>

There has been a great deal of talk lately among the radio and TV punditry about "socialism" in America. In religious circles this conversation tends to take on moral overtones. It is claimed that capitalism rewards work and punishes laziness. By contrast, socialism, it is believed, enables laziness and vice.

Take the issue of taxes. A "capitalist" claims that taxes are unfair. Why tax people who work hard and make money? Why "redistribute wealth" by giving money to the idle and lazy? According to the "capitalist", taxes are unfair and immoral. By contrast, the "socialist" claims that success in life isn't solely the product of hard work. Lots of luck is involved. Not everyone gets into law school or medical school. Not everyone is born with good looks, talent or a high IQ. Not everyone gets born into good families and school districts. And not everyone can be at the top. There is only one Google or Microsoft. Hard working competitors are just out of luck if they come in second place. To succeed you must, by definition, succeed at someone else's expense. Thus, it is only fair and moral that you share the fruits of your success with the people you climbed over.

Work versus Luck. This is issue is often at the root of the debate over taxation or government interventions to level the playing field. Both ideologies make good points. No doubt hard work is implicated in success. But so is luck. Consequently, how one views the taxation debate is largely the product of how one views the causal forces behind success.

Into this debate steps the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. I love Gladwell's work and would recommend his two others books--The Tipping Point and Blink--along with Outliers.

Outliers is a book about success. And what impresses me about the book is that, chapter by chapter, it portrays the interplay between work and luck in the creation of success.

Let me give some examples. First, let's look at work. Chapters 2, 8, and 9 of Outliers are odes to work. For example, Chapter 2 is about the 10,000 Hour Rule, the notion that true expertise in a given area can only be attained after one has put in 10,000 hours of practice. Take Tiger Woods as an example. Clearly he's talented. But the story of Tiger Woods is largely about his childhood. You can't explain Tiger Woods without talking about his father and Tiger's commitment to practice as a child and adolescent. Point to any other "genius" (e.g., Mozart, Bobby Fisher, The Beatles) and you'll find, behind the talent, 10,000 hours of practice. In short, success involves hard work. Drudgery. Commitment. Sweat.

Chapter 8 picks up on that same theme. In Chapter 8 Gladwell tackles the puzzle of Asian excellence in math. Are Asians genetically superior to Americans and Europeans in the area of mathematics? Rather than pointing to genetics to explain the standardized test score gap between Asians and Whites Gladwell tells a story of work. It is largely a cultural story, a tale of the work ethic of the rice patties. To understand this story one needs to understand the agriculture of rice patties. Basically, rice is very difficult to grow, requiring hour-by-hour year round vigilance and sweat. Which is very different from Western agriculture (plant the corn, pray for rain, and take the winters off). The cultural rice-farming legacy is captured by an Asian proverb, "No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich." Rice farming is about year round, hour-by-hour work.

Gladwell's argument is that success at math is largely a matter of work. Math is hard. And it takes persistence and sweat. Asians, shaped by the cultural ethic of the rice patty, simply work harder than American school kids on mathematical subjects. When American school children encounter difficult math problems they quickly give up. Asian children tend to work the problem and work the problem. Just like you work a rice patty. In short, Asians are "better" at math than American school children because Asians work harder. It's not genetic. It's work.

This lesson finds an American application in Chapter 9 when Gladwell takes up the successes of the KIPP Academy in New York City. KIPP is a middle school that produces outstanding students from inner city populations. The key to KIPP's success is simple: Work harder. The KIPP kids start school earlier, end later, and have shorter summer vacations. KIPP kids are swamped with homework. They work late into the night and get up early for the earlier start time to the school day. And the outcome? Success. The lesson for American education couldn't be clearer. Want better standardized test scores? Want to compete educationally with other nations? Work harder. Longer school days. More homework. No summer vacations. It's simple. Work harder.

In short, Outliers preaches the value of work. And this seems to support the no tax ideology. Success goes to those who work.

But Outliers is not so simple. Outliers pushes against the myth of hard work by devoting chapters to the role of luck in success. Take, for example, Chapter 1. The story of Chapter 1 centers on the ages of professional hockey players. In the 1980s Canadian psychologist Roger Barnsley noted a curious phenomenon while looking through the program at a professional hockey game. Specifically, Barnsley observed that most of the hockey players on both teams were born in the months of January, February, or March. Now why would hockey player birthdays cluster in these three months? Well, the answer has to do with the cutoff dates in the Canadian youth hockey system (an American example would be Little League baseball). The age cutoff in Canadian youth hockey is January 1. So imagine two kids born two days apart. One is born on January 2, just missing promotion, and is, thus, the oldest and likely biggest kid in his league. The other is born on December 31. This kid is promoted up to the higher league as the youngest, and likely smallest, kid in the advanced league. A two day difference in birthday makes you the smallest or the biggest kid in your league.

Now talent isn't correlated with age. You can be the youngest and the best or the oldest and the worst. But being older is an advantage in pre-adolescent sports. Being older means that, on average, you are bigger, stronger and faster. This translates into more ice time (or more innings). And, remembering the 10,000 Hour Rule, the clock starts ticking. That small advantage begins to grow over the years as the slightly older kids get more game time and opportunities for All Star or touring seasons (highly competitive off-season practice and games). A small, initial lucky advantage rapidly inflates to create a real disparity of skill on the ice. Work is involved, but it's also a matter of luck. Just look at the birthdays of professional hockey players.

In short, work and luck are intimately intertwined. Those professional hockey players are talented. Genetics is a part of it. And they also have practiced and worked really hard. Work is also a part of it. But they also had the perfect birthday to give them a slight edge over their peers. Luck was a part of it.

Given that talent is also a matter of luck (think of that sibling who is better looking, more athletic or smarter than you) we simply cannot discount the role of luck in success. This is not to discount the role of work. Far from it. Success does involve work. But small turns of fate, like a birthday, can have huge implications. The successful should be praised and emulated. They have worked hard. But they did not earn their genes. And they have also been lucky. The successful cannot claim all the credit.

The reason I'm interested in the role of luck is that I hear a lot of religious people railing against the rise of "socialism" in America. But I think it is very clear, the case in Outliers as one example, that personality, work ethic, religious affiliation and income are impacted by luck. Consequently, all I am and all I own isn't solely due to my virtue or work ethic. I'm not good, I'm fortunate. Importantly, luck implies success at someone else's expense. I got the break and you didn't. You're a janitor and I'm a millionaire professional athlete (or CEO, Dr., or whatever). Consequently, it seems right and just that I share.

How much should I share? I don't know. Where is the balance here? How much luck is involved? How much work? When are the taxes too low or too high? Again, I don't know. All I'm arguing is that the socialistic move isn't, on the face of it, immoral or unfair. It's realistic as far as I can tell. I don't mind debates about taxes or entitlements. But I do mind an ideological stance that automatically and unthinkingly equates taxation or "socialism" as evil. Why? Because it assumes life is all merit, work and virtue with no luck involved.