Excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell, speaking at Microsoft on the subject of his latest book at the time, "Outliers: Why Some People Succeed And Some People Don't":
We know that poverty makes it very, very difficult for those who have an ability to do something to actually end up doing that very thing. And that's sort of an obvious constraint on human capitalization.
But one of the things I think is true of poverty is that we tend, even as we acknowledge its importance in constraining capitalization, we underestimate just what a powerful constraint it is.
Let me give you an example. In the book "Outliers" I talk about the famous Terman study. This is a study that began in the 1920's in California. And Terman, who was a Psychologist at Stanford University... he does this thing where he gives an IQ test to 250,000 California school children. And he basically identifies the top .1 percent. So kids with IQ's of 140 plus, genius level essentially.
And he tracks those kids for the rest of their lives, for fifty years. And he's trying to figure out what happens to them. And it's his notion starting out, because he's so invested in the idea that IQ is the single most determinate of life success, he thinks that what he's done is identified the cohorts who will turn out to be the leaders in acedemia, in industry, and the people who will end up running the organizations and being the top politicians and the top intellectuals.
So he follows them over the course of 20 and 30 years, and 20 and 30 years in he realizes it's not true at all. And that these kids turn out to be adults, they have a variety of strikingly different fates. There is a small group that does very well. The top 15 percent actually occupy positions of real prominence in society. Then there's a big group in the middle who have pretty average lives. Remember, these are kids with, adults with genius level IQ's. And the majority of them do have moderately succ essful professional lives.
And then there is a chunk at the bottom who are, by any measure, failures, whose lives turn out, by any kind of occupational yardstick, to be massively disappointing, who do not seem to make use of their extraordinary human potential at all.
And the question Terman had to wrestle with is, why did that group fail? What's the difference between this group that did beautifully well and this group that did so poorly at the bottom?
And he runs through, and this question obviously obsesses him, and he runs through every conceivable explanation for that difference. And he says, "Is it their personality?" It's not. He says, "Is it their habits, is it their...?" And he goes on and on down the list.
And he realizes in the end that the answer is really, really simple. And that is that the kids who did best, these genius kids who ended up succeeding in the world were the ones who came from wealthy households. And that the genius level kids who ended up utter failures in life were the ones who were born into poor families. Born into families where parents hadn't gone to college, where there weren't books in the home, where there wasn't the kind of cultural and institutional support for a habit of learning and a habit of intellectual activity.
What he was saying, in other words, was that even if you endow a child with a brain that is a one in a billion brain, that is not sufficient to ensure the success of that child. That poverty is such a powerful constraint on capitalization that it can reduce that genius child to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity, or a lifetime of really profound disappointment.
