Jay Walljasper, Senior Fellow at On the Commons and editor of OnTheCommons.org, created OTC’s book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. A speaker, communications strategist and writer and editor, he chronicles stories from around the world that point us toward a more equitable, sustainable and enjoyable future. He is author of The Great Neighborhood Book and a senior associate at the urban affairs consortium Citiscope. Walljasper also writes a column about city life for Shareable.net and is a Senior Fellow at Project for Public Spaces and Augsburg College’s Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning. For more of his work, see JayWalljasper....
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Malcolm Gladwell deconstructs the self-made man
From Bill Gates to Wall Street, personal success depends heavily on public help
By Jay Walljasper
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Savvy social observer Malcolm Gladwell deconstructs America’s myth of the self-made man in his latest bestseller, The Outliers.
This is a very timely book, coming at the crashing close of an era defined by full-scale worship of self-made men. The conventional economic wisdom for several decades has been that successful people deserve every reward possible—because they alone are the creators of prosperity and progress.
But Gladwell’s meticulous research rips the last vestiges of Horatio Algernomics to pieces. Studying enormously successful and productive figures like Bill Gates, the Beatles, nuclear physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer, NHL ice hockey stars, and New York City’s top lawyers, he identifies wider social patterns that explain a large share of their accomplishments.
Bill Gates, for instance, was more than a bright young man with an aptitude for computers. He and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen were lucky enough in the early 1970s to go to a high school that was one of few in the country to have a computer club. Without that experience—made possible not by Gates and Allen themselves but by their math teachers and the Lakeside School Mothers’ Association—Microsoft would never have seen the light of day.
We are now being smacked in the face by the problems of building our economy on the quicksand of individualized greed. Gladwell’s new book offers more evidence that a prosperous society needs to constructed upon the firm foundation of a commons-based society—which means that decisions must be made for the public good, not the privileged few.
For an interview with Gladwell in U.S. News and World
Report
Posted December 22, 2008
Gladwell’s books and articles
Gladwell’s books and articles often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences and make frequent and extended use of academic work, particularly in the areas of sociology, psychology, and social psychology. –