Mr. Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and other books about the nature of human nature, has sharply different views about the nature of success. For instance, Mr. Gladwell claims that cognitive skills don't predict success, that intelligence scores do not relate closely to job performance and that above a minimum IQ of 120, higher intelligence doesn't bring greater intellectual achievements. Mr. Pinker claims they do.
Both are right, in a way. It's obvious that genius doesn't guarantee success. We all know brilliant losers, and we even know some dimwitted winners. But Mr. Pinker is more right, and he has mountains of data to prove it. Giftedness counts. A basketball player who's 7 ft. 1 will almost always beat a player who's 5 ft. 10. A swimmer with a long trunk and flipper feet will win a lot more medals than swimmers with ordinary feet (even if he smokes dope). Most Nobel Prize winners have IQs way above 120, and so does Bill Gates.
In private life, we all know these things matter. But in public we aren't supposed to say so (at least, not about cognition). Giftedness is unevenly distributed, and we do not want to be mistaken for elitists. We'd rather pretend that the world's a level playing field, and that if the outcomes are unequal, something in the environment must account for it. In public life, it's best not to talk about differing abilities at all.
Perhaps Mr. Gladwell's most tortured explanation for differing achievement is his effort to figure out why Chinese kids (as a group) are so much better at math than Western kids. The answer, he says, is found in centuries of rice-based agriculture. Working in labour-intensive rice paddies taught the Chinese self-discipline, perseverance, precision and teamwork. (Plus, the language for numbers is simpler, which makes math easier to learn.) This explanation makes sense only until you realize that rice isn't cultivated in the north of China, that other Asians are also good at math and that Chinese kids born and raised in North America retain much of their advantage.
Here's how Mr. Pinker would explain the math phenomenon: Chinese kids do indeed work hard – but they're also smarter. Not all or even most of them – just enough to make a difference. But we don't want to go there. Malcolm Gladwell's fables about rice paddies are far more reassuring. They tell us that we all can succeed, if only we try hard enough.
