The Gospel of Gladwell and Flaws of Freakonomics
The promise and perils of our cultural obsession with intellectual tourism (Part 1), brought to you by Athletic Greens
“Gladwell’s many critics often accuse him of oversimplification. Just as often, though, he acts as a great mystifier, imposing complexity on the everyday stuff of life, elevating minor wrinkles into profound conundrums. This, not coincidentally, is the method of pop social science, on whose rickety findings Gladwell has built his reputation as a public intellectual.”
-Andrew Ferguson, on Malcolm Gladwell
“Throughout the book, they're setting up this binary between acting on intuition and acting on data. But what we see throughout this book is that all of their "data-driven presentation" is riddled with ideology. They're leaving out important information, they're using data that doesn't indicate what they say it indicates, they're mis-citing existing research. I just want to stress that this is a false binary. There is no such thing as using data to remove all human judgment, values, and ideology from the way that we make decisions. We should make decisions based on values.”
-Michael Hobbes, on Freakonomics
“What you expect from these little pop science books is oversimplification. And what you so often get is just incorrect information.”
-Peter Shamshiri, on pop science
1. Finding Gladwell, searching for sociology
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Malcolm Gladwell changed the course of my life in a major (or minor) way by motivating me to become a sociology major. Sure, I’ve never met the man, so he didn’t do this motivation in person. As a bright eyed 18 year old, I told myself and my academic advisor that I was enrolling in an intro to sociology course at my rural liberal arts college because I’d recently read and enjoyed The Tipping Point while on vacation in Sag Harbor with my dad. Wow, that may just be the whitest sentence I’ve ever written. Pardon me while I go wash my mouth out with mayonnaise.
The fact that Gladwell was a journalist, not a sociologist, didn’t register with me at the time. Nor did that fact that, had I looked for it, I could have found ample criticism of Gladwell’s writing as overly simplistic, focused on building intellectual sandcastles out of counterintuitive generalizations at the expense of the messy, nuanced truth. In hindsight, I honestly knew little of what sociology was or what studying it would entail. I just wanted to one day have the insights of Gladwell and share them with a fascinated audience. Reading his books felt like an intellectual safari to me. From the first page I got the cushy thrill of hopping in an air-conditioned vehicle as the author took me on a meandering tour of human history, helpfully pointed out the counterintuitive cheetah, hidden hyena, and greatly important giraffe.
By enrolling in that intro to sociology class, I was hoping that by studying this mysterious social science I would one day have Gladwell’s mastery of engrossing storytelling. I admired how he wove together different disciplines and examples like a loving grandmother making you a brainy quilt. As a young man, eager to prove my own intelligence, his penchant for focusing on the overlooked and counterintuitive was particularly appealing. I wanted nothing more than to one amass beautiful bouquets of counter-examples like he did, and then toss them confidently over my shoulder to eagerly grasping hands like I was the bride at a nerdy wedding. As a long-winded aspiring writer, I adored how he used meandering, seemingly unrelated tangents to hammer home his point with the assertiveness of a Mortal Kombat finishing move. Despite being MacGyver’d together from an eclectic pile of cherry-picked studies, random anecdotes, and clever analogies, Gladwell’s theories always felt ironclad to me. How could writing this immersive, well-researched, and entertainingly put together not be correct?
2. If books could kill
Once I was in college, I started to see Gladwell’s flavor of content everywhere. So I developed a blanket term for it, dubbing it “intellectual tourism,” a journey that asks little of you but still makes you feel like you’re smart, involved, and powerful. Consuming it does little to nothing to change your day-to-day life just as visiting Mexico, Thailand, or Tanzania on vacation does little to change individual behavior much less international relations. It felt like these books only lasting contribution to the world were the fun facts I could trot out to impress my peers in the same way that study abroad would only reliably change my friends’ Facebook profile pictures.
A decade out of college and blessed with the benefit of hindsight I now see the bigger truth that books like these are so popular simply because they’re entertaining to read, not because they’re at all correct or explain the world we live in. Today, many of Gladwell’s biggest theories have been either accepted as clever narrative repackaging of other peoples work or largely rejected, as has been the case with the infamous 10,000 hour rule presented in Outliers. Troublingly, often all it takes is a cursory review of many of their arguments for them to fall apart. The odd endgame of books like Outliers and The Tipping Point is that after the appeal of their counterintuitive narratives and the novelty of their contrarian explanations fade away, there often isn’t much else there. While I venerated their brainy assertiveness as a young man, today many of Gladwell’s books and their imitators are now dismissed as little more than indulgent time-filler for dads who need some reading material for their flight back to Boston.
I didn’t arrive at this conclusion alone. I had some help from the podcast-verse. Contrarianism is, after all, the engine that powers huge swaths of the internet, so it was only a matter of time until I discovered a thoughtful and hilarious podcast devoted entirely to feasting on the worst offenders of pop psychology, history, and economics.
If Books Could Kill (IBCK) comes from one half of the team behind my other favorite podcast for empathetic contrarians like me: You’re Wrong About. IBCK is all about, in the words of the hosts: “the airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds.” In some hilarious and insightful episodes, the hosts joyfully dismember the intellectually bankrupt arguments of books like Freakonomics, Outliers, Bobos in Paradise, Hillbilly Elegy, Rich Dad Poor Dad & many more. In following along while folding your laundry or driving to see your parents, you have a laugh and learn a lot.
One of my favorite episodes was their dissection of Gladwell’s third book Outliers because it epitomizes much of what’s fascinating and problematic about Gladwell and his contemporaries. One chapter in particular, called “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes” has aged like milk in the hot sun. Let’s set the stage. Deep into this runaway NYT bestseller Gladwell revs up his narrative engine and confidently embarks on one of his trademark brainy anecdotes. In it, he asserts two things:
Korean airlines crash more than non-Korean ones.
Cultural differences, specifically what he calls a “uniquely Korean” tendency to not speak directly out of deference to the social status of the captain are the main cause of these crashes.
It’s a classical Gladwellian chapter: an immersive story leads us to a non-obvious answer to a big question with fascinating implications. There’s just one issue. Neither of these assertions are true and they absolutely don’t mesh together with the tidiness that Gladwell implies. The IBCK crew decisively debunks both of these in short order. Firstly, the assertion that Korean planes crash more than non-Korean ones is a stretch at best:
“All in all, Gladwell identifies seven significant Korean air crashes between 1978 and 1997 and that is the basis of his thesis here. But three of them were the results of terrorists or military attacks.” (bolding my own)
So 3 out of 7, or 40% of the plane crashes cited were shot down or bombed, meaning pilot error had nothing to do with them. Strong start. It gets worse. The “cultural differences” he keeps gesturing at don’t hold up to a basic reading of the transcript of the one flight log that he uses to base his entire theory on. As co-host Peter Shamshiri puts it:
“Gladwell wants you to believe that the first officer sensed some danger due to the weather, but was so deferential to the captain that he didn't properly communicate it. In reality, Korean speakers who analyzed it said he very plainly told the captain that the weather was bad.”
One Korean American blogger put it a bit less circumspectly:
"This so-called interpretation of the pilots' true intentions is pure garbage. It is so ludicrously wrong that I cannot think of enough superlatives to describe how wrong this is. Gladwell's exposition on Korean language is completely, definitely, utterly entirely 120% laughable to anyone who has spoken Korean in a professional setting."
Calling Gladwell’s argument a house of cards may actually be offensive to cards, given they have more structural integrity than this chapter. It’s based on a woefully tiny sample, includes multiple data points that contradict his core argument, and its conclusion ends up in a pseudo-intellectual uncanny valley that is ignorant at best and racist at worst. In conclusion, Peter leaves us with this mic drop.
“He uses Korean culture as his case study. But all he has as evidence is a single flight transcript and a handful of plane crashes, again, half of which were either shot down or blown up. There's no analysis of data from other Korean airlines, no data about other airlines with higher crash rates than average, nor from what I can tell that he consult with a single Korean person.”
I wish I could say this was the only flimsy argument in Gladwell’s history, but sadly it’s not even the only one in this book. You’ll have to read about the problems with his theory of why Asians are so good at math, a chapter with the cringe-worthy name “Rice Paddies and Math Tests” on your own time. In his scathing NYT review of Outliers, author and Harvard professor Steven Pinker wrote: “The reasoning in ‘Outliers,’ which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle.” Yet re-litigating the merits of all of his claims here is not a great use of anyone’s time, so listen to the podcast, read Pinker’s review if you’re interested, and let’s zoom out. The logical fallacies and rhetorical errors found in Outliers are glaring, but they are by no means limited to Gladwell’s work alone. Popular explanatory nonfiction books do this all the time to the point of self parody.
So why can’t anyone seem to discuss economics or psychology in a way that’s both fun to read and accurate? Why are so many of these books’ arguments tissue paper thin? Why does it take only the slightest breeze of critical scrutiny to tear them apart?
3. The entertainingly bumbling style of intellectual tourism
We should start by acknowledging that the goal of these books is first and foremost to sell lots of copies. Being factually accurate is perhaps a secondary or even tertiary benefit of them being easy to market and entertainingly written. Therefore it’s understandable that they prioritize eye-grabbing claims and theories over intellectual rigor. It’s particularly revealing that many airport book authors got their start through magazine articles given magazine fact checking is famously much more rigorous than what goes into nonfiction books. Many major magazines make a point of fact checking every word they publish while book publishers make fact-checking the writers responsibility, not the publishers. Most nonfiction books are not fact-checked beyond a basic legal review due to cost and time constraints. As a result, getting a book deal based off of your viral article in The New Yorker or New York Times Magazine (as happened with Gladwell and Steven Dubner of Freakonomics) results in more eyeballs on what you write, but ironically less scrutiny or accountability for what you’re actually saying.
There is their trademark structure to consider, too. Since intellectual tourism books like Gladwell’s must be entertaining first, so they tend to operate deductively. They start with a catchy, entertaining conclusion that the author would like to arrive at and then cherry pick examples as necessary to support it, conveniently trimming out anything that doesn’t serve the shocking thesis. There’s even a great shorthand for this, what author Tom Rivers dubbed “Gladwells Law”:
“If you ignore almost everything, you can explain almost anything (with stories)”
Chef’s kiss.
To be clear, this “thesis-down” deductive style isn’t a unique or even inherently problematic approach to writing. In fact, it is the structure of most persuasive non-fiction writing, including your favorite Substack blog. The difference is, unlike Gladwell, I’m not trying to persuade dads in airports that I understand the economics of sneakers or the cultural causes of plane crashes in a way that no one else has thought of. In fact, the only unimpeachable thesis I have presented is why Jaws is the best shark movie. If you want to argue with me about that one you're gonna need a bigger boat.
Joking aside, the real problem here is not with deductive reasoning, but how it’s used. Time and time again the examples provided in Gladwellian airport books fail to support the bold conclusions being presented in anything resembling a sound way. In addition to prioritizing interesting stories over sound evidence, the argumentative skeleton of popular nonfiction writing tends to play very fast and loose with what even gets to count as evidence. Small studies have their findings wildly overgeneralized in a way that would likely make the academics responsible for them nauseous. The argument often hops back and forth between individual or anecdotal explanations of a behavior and systemic or institutional ones all in the same book or even chapter. When it’s convenient, they acknowledge the role of ideology or history, and when it doesn’t serve their conclusion, they ignore it entirely. Sometimes they act like only data counts as a valid explanation, while other times one random anecdote, observation, or offbeat shower thought gets to be load-bearing proof of a point.
4. Freakonomics’s stat problem
Even when books like these use data and studies instead of quirky stories, they often end up using them in remarkably lazy and misleading ways. Most often this takes the form of deliberately ignoring the larger context. All stats are after all contextual. A crime stat, for example, is just one small piece in the vexing jigsaw puzzle that is criminal behavior. Many crime stats are underreported, either because police departments are incentivized not to report them due to optics, because individuals are reluctant to come forward, or a messy mix of both. So we should always be a bit skeptical of stats used as a shorthand for truth. We just don’t know what the stats are omitting or even deliberately distracting from. The upstream causes of a statistic are often ten times as interesting and useful as the stat in isolation. So whenever a book like Freakonomics trots out one stat as evidence of a mind-blowing mansplanation of something, we all ought to pause before accepting it at face value. IBCK co-host Michael Hobbes goes on to articulate how Freakonomics is particularly guilty of committing egregious errors when it comes to using statistics. He elaborates that this book misuses data by “leaping to conclusions on some things while refusing to reach conclusions on others.”
The epitome of this type of unforgivably sloppy statistical argumentation in Freakonomics is when Levitt and Dubner unload one of their trademark “well actually” drive-by-arguments about the dangers of swimming pools compared to guns. They claim that, based purely on data, pools are actually more dangerous than guns because there are more drownings of kids under the age of 10 per pool than there are gun fatalities of the same population per gun. Therefore, based on their slick data, parents might want to be more cautious around pools and worry less about guns. While on a raw data level this conclusion is technically accurate it leaves out a comically long and distressing list of critical context, such as:
The fact that framing the statistic around the ratio of pools to drowning deaths is horrendously misleading because the majority of the drownings of children under the age of 10 included in the data set did not occur in the pools counted, but tragically in bathtubs, lakes, and rivers.
The fact that presenting the data as deaths per gun vs deaths per swimming pool is not very useful in assessing the actual threat posed by guns vs pools in real life since many households have more than one gun while few non-Kardashian households have more than one pool.
The fact that, in the eyes of a real human parent assessing risk, their kid playing in a pool under adult supervision can have positive social, health, and developmental benefits, while their kid playing with a gun conveys none of these. It pains me that Freakonomics makes me need to state the obvious to refute their conclusion, but: guns are literally designed to kill people while pools are not.
The fact that mansplaining child rearing via counterintuitive statistics is perhaps the least helpful type of parenting advice short of firing parenting books via catapult at a sleep deprived mother while her son has a tantrum in a Walmart parking lot.
My larger point here is isn’t just that these books’ arguments are rickety at best, nor that it’s quite fun to dunk on them; it’s that that the type of knowledge you get from reading them is shockingly un-applicable to the lives we all lead. They’re undeniably entertaining to read but often just as undeniably useless to apply to anything outside of their gripping pages.
For pop science and psychology books like Gladwell’s, this comes down to the tenuous nature of the claims, exacerbated by a tendency to position the eye-opening theses against a strawman of common misconceptions that are either greatly exaggerated or don’t really exist. As the Guardian puts it, in Outliers “Gladwell is ultimately engaged in a long argument with nobody but himself. Throughout, he defines his position against a floating, ubiquitous, omnipotent 'we'; a Greek chorus of predictable opposition and received opinion.” While in reality, most people are of course aware of the importance of context, practice, or culture in understanding what makes certain individuals successful, to read a Gladwell book you’d think no one but him has thought about this stuff.
Pop economics books like Freakonomics have a different straw man problem. Instead of assuming a straw man public that has never thought to connect a few dots before, Freakonomics assumes a strawman reader that not only believes living their lives according only to data is possible, but that it is actually what they desire most. Yet while Steve Levitt might consult data and statistics before making every day decisions like sending his kid to a pool party, the rest of us don’t. Even if we did, the notion that if we just knew about the quirky study that Levitt conducted we’d act differently is itself suspect. Even when people do know the risks of a behavior, we’re all famously irrational about acting accordingly. Dan Ariely has built his entire intellectual career on spelling out how predictably irrational we are.
Plenty of people drink alcohol and drive cars (and tragically mix both) despite an overwhelming bevy of data about the dangers of driving and the negative health impacts of alcohol. Meanwhile, some people are deathly afraid of flying and sharks despite the fact that the data irrefutably proves that flying is much safer than driving and sharks kill far fewer people per year than mosquitos, dogs, snails, and ladders. As Ariely has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, we never act purely based on on data even when we clearly know about it; we act on a messy cocktail of intuition, bias, impulse, habits, and emotions. Pointing out that people don’t rationally assess risks based on data and expecting people to be impressed, as Freakonomics does multiple times per chapter, is a rhetorical nothing-burger since this is so well documented. It’s also baked in to how economists and non-economists alike are already accustomed to living their lives. The implicit premise of Freakonomics’s worldview: that we ought to remove human bias from our behavior so we can focus purely on slick data sets ends up being a fools errand that provides readers with nothing more than a shiny stick for libertarians and contrarians to take turns jousting with.
5. What optical illusions, outliers, and obnoxious barbecue dads have in common
In assessing the legacy of the best-selling book Nudge, Peter from IBCK summed up the core flaw of pop science books nicely by framing it this way:
“There’s a problem with these concepts where if you zoom out enough they’re correct but not very useful. If you zoom in, you start seeing that they’re not really correct in the micro and they’re not explaining a lot.”
Books like Outliers and Freakonomics have baked into them this kind of logical optical illusion. Their core claims must be viewed from a certain distance and angle for them to make any sense at all. For example, the most incontrovertible argument of Outliers, that success is the result of a combination of hard work, luck, and circumstance is obvious enough that any of us could have written it. However, if you seriously engage with the examples Gladwell weaves in to add needed texture to this theory, it ends up falling apart. So he is either stating the obvious for 300 gripping pages or misleading you most of the time. Yet he wants to have it both ways and neither all at once. For an author like him to be both accurate and entertaining requires you to hover in this cognitive in-between space, accepting the complexity and confidence of the argument without exploring its nuance or the interplay of the evidence presented with the real world outside of its pages. So books like Freaknomics or Outliers end up being more like theme park rides than a books; you’re not supposed to get out of your seat, wander around, and touch the animatronic dinosaurs or the illusion will be ruined for everyone.
Outliers’s very title ends up being awkwardly literal in a way I suspect Gladwell didn’t intend. By focusing throughout the book on the most interesting examples of the phenomena he attempts to explain, the literal outliers, at every turn he sacrifices the validity of his theories in the name of a more engrossing story. The subtitle of the book, “the story of success,” would be more accurately stated as “some stories about successful people,” but I suspect this would have hurt sales. While there are plenty of bands that practiced for 10,000 hours and never become famous, Gladwell focuses on the colorful story of Beatles jamming in Hamburg strip clubs and reverse engineers their fame from this 10,000 hours of practice. It’s appealing and convincing while you’re reading it but vaporizes under a light breeze of scrutiny. Outliers epitomizes the flaws of both Gladwell’s other books and the genre he popularized: a penchant for selecting edge cases that are fascinating to learn about but have little to no real explanatory power.
A truly staggering amount of these best-selling books hold less water than a colander. I believe this boils down to the fact that what makes us human, interesting, and fills most of our lives is precisely all of the stuff that these airport books either assume we’ve never thought about before or refuse to engage with if it doesn’t support their theses. What you’re left with beneath all the engaging storytelling is a bunch of moderately interesting studies, strung together by a few half-baked theories that in no way help you live your life besides killing a few hours after your connection was delayed at O’Hare. It’s entertaining, but the intellectual half life is remarkably short. After polishing off the last chapter, you have some counterintuitive tidbits that are fun in the moment but quickly irrelevant. Or as Michael Hobbes puts it, after finishing a book like Freakonomics, “All you have is a little factoid that you can drop at a barbecue with the other dads and be obnoxious.”
Okay, I’ll own up to two things. The first is that I’m destined to become an obnoxious barbecue dad. From my insistence on grilling obscure alliums to my contrarian stance on beloved sports movies, it’s inevitable that I’ll one day make little Timmy cry and cause his dad to indignantly rescue his un-drunk six pack of Lagunitas from my cooler and storm out of my party in a huff. The second is that Gladwell and the Freakonomics nerds never explicitly set out on an agenda to write a 100% factually accurate textbook or an explicitly useful guide to anything. While I stand by all of my critiques of their work and the troublingly wobbly genre it represents, as “creative nonfiction” authors, they can and do hide behind the vagueness and loose rules of this genre when criticized. Or you can claim that people just misunderstood or oversimplified your argument, as Gladwell often does, explaining that “I’m always struck by [how] the task of responding to critics is more often than not, not refuting the critic, but correcting the critic.” Moreover, neither Outliers or Freakonomics has an explicit agenda to improve anyone’s lives much less society. Like the brainy dad at the barbecue, they’re just there to soak up the attention by sharing some clever explanations and witty analogies about the frustrating world the rest of us are living in.
To his credit, Gladwell is also the first to admit that his writing prioritizes entertainment over persuasive power or accuracy. Just look at how he concludes the preface to his greatest hits essay collection, What the Dog Saw:
“Nothing frustrates me more than when someone who reads something of mine or anyone else’s and says, angrily, “I don’t buy it.” Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head— even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’d really like to be. I’ve called these pieces adventures, because that’s what they’re intended to be.”
Point taken. He’s right of course that popular writing lives or dies by engagement, not facts, never more so than now in the age of shortened attention spans, fake news, and social media. However, what happens when the approach of intellectual tourism is applied to content with an explicit agenda to improve the health of an individual or the health of our society? These are neither rhetorical questions nor things you likely have remaining time or patience to read any more about. I’ll be diving into a joyful dismembering of Andrew Huberman’s podcast in next week’s installment before sharing my honest disillusionment with TED Talks in the third and final part!