Q: Your main argument in your new book, Outliers, is that there’s no such thing as a self-made man; super-achievers are successful because of their circumstances, their families and their appetite for hard work. Isn’t that what most people believe anyway, that success is learned and earned?
A: We pay lip service to ecological factors, but don’t appreciate just how enormously significant outside forces—the generation we’re born into, or the particular cultural legacies we inherit—are in determining success. If we’re so convinced of the importance of these kinds of variables, then why do people jump up and down every time there’s an attempt to even the playing field? Why does affirmative action remain incredibly controversial?
Q: You say that class confers a long-lasting advantage and gives privileged kids a leg up, but not just because their families have money.
A: There’s much more to it. A wonderful sociologist named Annette Lareau identifies profound differences in parenting styles. She calls the upper-class parenting style “concerted cultivation”: parents take control of their children’s psychological and intellectual development and encourage them to be activists in the way they interrelate with adults and institutions. The other style is called “natural growth.” She notes that parents in poorer families have a very passive attitude toward their kids’ development, they really sit back and allow them to find their own way. It can produce wonderful, warm, sweet, creative people, but does not prepare them for a world in which they’re competing against kids who have been schooled since the earliest days in how to get their way. Being successful is all about whether you have the skills necessary to impose your will on the world. That’s really what class advantage is: being taught the skills necessary to make sense of institutions.
Q: You also cite a study showing there’s a significant learning gap over the summer. Poor kids have fun but don’t learn anything, while the better-off ones keep learning and moving ahead. Is your point that if you don’t come from money, you’re cooked?
A: We tell this comforting story that says anyone can make it all by themselves, and the effect is to relieve us of responsibility for taking steps to help people on the bottom rung. I’m trying to call attention to the fact that that story is a lie. It’s exceedingly difficult to make it up from the bottom, and it’s getting harder.
Q: Have you been radicalized? This book seems far more political than anything you’ve written before.
A: It is more political. Part of it is an awareness that I have a pulpit, which I never realized I had, and if you have an opportunity to engage the attention of lots and lots of people, it would be a shame not to use it. I don’t want to write another book about sneakers when I have an opportunity to say something a lot more meaningful.
Q: What does that feel like, being a guru?
A: Oh, I wouldn’t call myself a guru.
Q: Come on! You sell millions of books, captains of industry pay a lot of money to hear you speak, and as you said, you have a pulpit.
A: I will only say that it is a very nice feeling to know that things you write will be taken seriously. But do I find it all a little absurd? Yeah, I think anyone would. You go into writing expecting to be anonymous.
Q: Why do you keep coming back to IQ as a topic?
A: Because everyone always says, and this drives me crazy, “Yes, we know that IQ is not the be-all and end-all,” and yet we continue to act as if [it is].
Q: You mean by restricting access to top universities to those with high scores on standardized tests like the SATs?
A: Yes. They’re saying, “You must be above a certain IQ even to be considered for admission.” That is an intellectually and morally bankrupt notion.
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