Monday

Precocious Kids and Successful Adults

Another offering from Malcolm Gladwell, this time his talk at the 2006 New Yorker Festival. Gladwell works from the assumption that parents and citizens are interested in kids who display early aptitude for a given skill -- who are, in short, precocious. We are not only interested in identifying and nurturing and praising such talents, but we expend resources on them on the assumption that they are more likely to innovate and excel in these fields later in life than their non-precocious peers. Examples of this include child prodigy musicians, young track stars, or early readers.

But does early excellence really predict future success? Not according to Gladwell, who summons a diverse host of studies suggesting that precocious kids tend to fall off the proverbial map later in life, and similarly, highly successful adults (not just physicists but Nobel Prize-winning physicists) did not tend to be precocious kids. There are always exceptions to this, but the complexity of real life and growing up remove any real correlation between precociousness as a kid and pathbreaking as an adult. (He suggests, at one point, that young kids who excel are gifted learners or gifted consumers of knowledge; stellar adults are gifted doers or gifted producers of knowledge.)

Gladwell suggests two factors that, in combination, are much better predictors of excellence than precociousness per se:

1) Your attitude about your own intelligence (known, apparently, as your "explanatory style"). People who are optimistic about thenselves AND who see their intelligence as malleable are likely to actively pursue knowledge and address challenges constructively, as opposed to those who are always told they are brilliant and thus crumble under the first challenge.

2) Your capacity for hard, focused work at something. Though not all diligent workers are tomorrow's Nobel prize winners, Mozart's capacity on the violin likely had a lot to do with the unprecedented practice regimine he is thought to have undertaken from such a young age, whether or not native ability is still a prerequisite of excellence.

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posted by Burke Scarbrough at 09:06 1 comments

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Blogger Brandy said...

I believe that behind every sucessful and precocious kid is some sort of adult. The adult may not always be successful though. It is my understanding that it is the power of the adult to provide the necissary skills to encourage the child to become successful. Not all adults know how to use the "powers" that they know about. It takes someone who understands these ideas and can put them into play in order to become successful.

September 30, 2007  

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"Million-Dollar Murray"

Malcolm Gladwell's 2/06 New Yorker article opens with the story of Murray, a homeless man in Reno who rotates fairly regularly among the street, the hospital, and shelters. His medical bills may be the highest for any individual in Nevada. He costs the state an enormous sum of money.

Policies toward the homeless tend to be constructed as though all homeless required the same available services; there need to be shelters, emergency care, and food for all of them. Such blanket policies necessarily imply that how much each homeless person "costs" is distributed normally, that is, on a bell curve, with a large majority accounting for most of the costs and a few that are very or very-not costly.

Recent research on homelessness, though, says different. The costs of aiding homeless men and women shows a "power-law" relationship: a graph that looks like a hockey stick, with a few people accounting for the majority of the costs, and most people costing very little. Most homeless individuals, it turns out, are homeless for a very short time, and only once. Only a very few are "chronically" homeless and riddled with costly addictions, etc. From the standpoint of efficiency, it would be most cost-effective to house, feed, employ, and treat those few chronically homeless "for free" rather than pump money into less-comprehensive services for everyone. This may not be politically popular, of course.

A similar situation inheres in car emissions. Emissions checkpoints and stickers assume that all cars need inspection, and administering such tests is extremely costly. In reality, car pollution falls in a power-law relationship; most cars emit very little. The better solution, then, would be for police to use an infra-red detector (which exists) to check the emissions of cars exiting highways, say. Drivers of cars above approved levels could be pulled over and ticketed (or whatever). The point is, addressing the few rather than regulating the many. That's the way to handle power-law relationships. We don't yet think of homelessness as one of those.

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"Getting In"

Malcolm Gladwell's 10/05 New Yorker article discusses the advent of non-quantitative measures of merit in college admissions, specifically Harvard's groundbreaking use of interviews, letters of reference, and personal essays in the 1930s. According to Karabel's The Chosen, this practice was instituted to stem the influx of Jews onto campus. The measure was successful; with Harvard able to analyze the personal qualities and background of its candidates, it wasn't long before the number of Jews on campus dropped.

Despite its sordid purpose, these aspects of an applicant's file have obviously been institutionalized widely since then. And as it turns out, such a multifaceted application has been found to correlate with a much higher incidence of success later in life. (however that's measured!)

But speaking of success, Gladwell takes up the question of what exactly Harvard does to a person. Does the school make mere mortals great, or does it merely attract already-great people? The former is known as a "treatment effect", the effect that the marine corps has on its students, say. The latter is a "selection effect", as seen in modeling agencies (the agencies don't make you look 'good'; they select people who already do).

Until recently, Harvard was found to have a treatment effect on its students because, after college, those who were accepted outperformed those who were accepted to other top schools.The recent correction that Gladwell discusses is interesting: what those studies should have been comparing is the students accepted to Harvard who went to Harvard and those who were accepted but did not go. Controlling for the talent to be accepted, those students fare about the same in the real world. Harvard, then, is a school with a selection effect. Those who get in know how to succeed wherever they choose to end up.

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"The Moral Hazard Myth"

Malcolm Gladwell's 8/05 New Yorker article tees off on America's privatized health care system, asserting that:
  • The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in America is unpaid medical bills.
  • Americans spend 2.5 times the industrialized world's median on per capita health care, $5267/person.
  • All the while, infant mortality is in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized countries, and the US wildly outspends Canada in expenses for medical paperwork (we're neither more effective nor more efficient).
  • The death rate for someone without health insurance is 25% higher than for someone who has it.

Gladwell describes the political mess that has stymied the six historical attempts to universalize health coverage in the US (who exactly should be added to the roster of the insured that includes the wealthy and those in powerful unions? And who should pay for those who are added?) But beyond the political mess, the major impediment to expanded health insurance in America is the "moral-hazard" idea: that those with insurance will engage in more risky behavior because they know they're insured. Data supports this effect for car insurance, but Gladwell argues that health insurance is a different beast entirely. Economists underestimate how big a hassle it is to deal with waiting rooms, rounds of testing, dental procedures, etc. People have serious incentive to take care of their own health, and will not act more dangerously just because they have expanded affordable medical coverage.

It is true, Gladwell says, that putting the cost on the consumer cuts down on how much health care he consumes. The problem is that studies show he will cut down on basic, essential health services along with those that might be called "frivolous" by some standard.

And as people continue to propose treating health care like car insurance (in that you pay more or less given your medical history and risks of illness, like paying more insurance for having a sports car or being a young driver), do we want to support the idea that those in poor health or with tragic predispositions should shoulder more of the financial burden than those of us who are lucky (and isn't much of it luck?) enough to be healthy? Don't we as a society benefit from our individuals being healthy?

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