I'm listening to Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. Its thesis is essentially that success is not something that springs from one person's drive, grit, determination and intelligence (and certainly not from her genius). All those things are important, and play a role, but there are arbitrary circumstances and a colossal amount of luck involved in the most famous "success" stories of our era, and even the past eras.
Gladwell is taking a whack at the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, anyone can make it" myth upon which the American Dream relies. Even though I agree with everything he's saying, and have had an understanding for a long time of the incomplete recipe for success we like to hold up as an example (mostly because of my program of study for economics at Utah) it still makes me vaguely uncomfortable to listen to his book, because it is so destabilizing to think about America without this idea that we can all make it through hard work.
This weekend I read an article in the New Yorker about how the super rich are preparing for some kind of DoomsDay. One of the wealthy Silicon Valley titans who has a basement full of food and shotguns is quoted as saying “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos.”
Our healthy founding myth seems to be fraying. Gladwell uses the example of a Jewish law student who, after attending a good high school in New York, could have gone to City University for free, but chose to spend $450 to go to Michigan State, and took the money he'd earned over the summer and hitch hiked to ANn Arbor to start school. He got a job at a factory on the side to pay for expenses.
It was possible, heck, even easy, to be in control of your own path in the 70's for this man, socially marginalized as he was. That is so different from what my students face today in terms of the availability of free higher education and the promise of jobs to help them through school, and then to pay them after school.
Gladwell is taking a whack at the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, anyone can make it" myth upon which the American Dream relies. Even though I agree with everything he's saying, and have had an understanding for a long time of the incomplete recipe for success we like to hold up as an example (mostly because of my program of study for economics at Utah) it still makes me vaguely uncomfortable to listen to his book, because it is so destabilizing to think about America without this idea that we can all make it through hard work.
This weekend I read an article in the New Yorker about how the super rich are preparing for some kind of DoomsDay. One of the wealthy Silicon Valley titans who has a basement full of food and shotguns is quoted as saying “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos.”
Our healthy founding myth seems to be fraying. Gladwell uses the example of a Jewish law student who, after attending a good high school in New York, could have gone to City University for free, but chose to spend $450 to go to Michigan State, and took the money he'd earned over the summer and hitch hiked to ANn Arbor to start school. He got a job at a factory on the side to pay for expenses.
It was possible, heck, even easy, to be in control of your own path in the 70's for this man, socially marginalized as he was. That is so different from what my students face today in terms of the availability of free higher education and the promise of jobs to help them through school, and then to pay them after school.
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