| | Malcom Gladwell has a new book: "Outliers: The Secret of Success"
I checked out an excerpt (the Brits call it: an "extract") of his book here, and this is what I (disturbingly) found:
Recently Forbes Magazine compiled a list of the 75 richest people in history. It includes queens and kings and pharaohs from centuries past, as well as contemporary billionaires such as Warren Buffet and Carlos Slim. However, an astonishing 14 on the list are Americans born within nine years of each other in the mid-19th century. In other words, almost 20% of the names come from a single generation - born between 1831 and 1840 in a single country. The list includes industrialists and financiers who are still household names today: John Rockefeller, born in 1839 (the richest of the lot); Andrew Carnegie, 1835; Jay Gould, 1836; and JP Morgan, 1837.
What's going on here is obvious, if you think about it. In the 1860s and 1870s, the American economy went through perhaps the greatest transformation in its history. This was when the railways were built, and when Wall Street emerged. It was when industrial manufacturing started in earnest. It was when all the rules by which the traditional economy functioned were broken and remade. What that list says is that it was absolutely critical, if you were going to take advantage of those opportunities, to be in your 20s when that transformation was happening.
If you were born in the late 1840s, you missed it - you were too young to take advantage of that moment. If you were born in the 1820s, you were too old - your mindset was shaped by the old, pre-civil war ways. ...
Interpretation:
The political philosophy of Capitalism isn't what helped (read: allowed) these tycoons to make riches from producing wealth -- instead, it's accidental circumstances that are the explanation. The eventual, over-reaching bureaucracy characteristic of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 isn't what disallowed everyone else to do the same or similar -- simply being born too late did.
Gladwell says his interpretation is the obvious one. I have just one question for him: What's the British word for "Bullshit!"?
:-)
Ed
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 11/17, 9:47pm)
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