The Uses of Adversity (Can underprivileged outsiders have an advantage?): Malcolm Gladwell

Article in the New Yorker from Malcolm Gladwell of Blink and Tipping Point fame.

Interesting article but Mr Gladwell should not give the underprivileged false hope.   He makes a fatal flow called “survivorship bias”.

Simply put.  Assume:

P(A) = Brooklyn dudes who succeeded / Brooklyn dudes who tried

P(B) = Princeton dudes who succeeded / Princeton dudes who tried

Well should be obvious that P(B) > P(A).  Therefore, no “uses of adversity”

Sidney Weinberg’s story  makes for a great read especially since: 1) he is ex-GS (or rather the very epitome of GS in his heydays) and 2) in such tumultuous time when Investment Banks have broken away from their traditional r/s banking model to become pseudo hedge funds.  But Mr Gladwell’s article seems more sensationalist than anything, having failed to dealt with the other Brooklyn dudes who tried and failed, i.e. 1 – P(A).  What about those fellows?  Where lies the advantage of adversity for them?

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Annals of Business

The Uses of Adversity

Can underprivileged outsiders have an advantage?

by Malcolm Gladwell November 10, 2008

Sidney Weinberg became a powerful banker by accentuating his humble origins.

Keywords

Outsiders;

Weinberg, Sidney;

Goldman Sachs;

“The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs” (Penguin Press; $37.95);

Social Mobility;

Success;

Underprivileged

Sidney Weinberg was born in 1891, one of eleven children of Pincus Weinberg, a struggling Polish-born liquor wholesaler and bootlegger in Brooklyn. Sidney was short, a “Kewpie doll,” as the New Yorker writer E. J. Kahn, Jr., described him, “in constant danger of being swallowed whole by executive-size chairs.” He pronounced his name “Wine-boig.” He left school at fifteen. He had scars on his back from knife fights in his preteen days, when he sold evening newspapers at the Hamilton Avenue terminus of the Manhattan-Brooklyn ferry.

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The Uses of Adversity