A Perspective with Malcolm Gladwell
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Malcolm Gladwell, author, best known for his unique perspective on popular culture.
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Gatekeepers of meritocratic systems—whether in research funding, legal education, medicine, or sports—systematically fail to identify and cultivate genuine talent, both because they lack predictive ability and because the systems they run often serve gatekeeper interests rather than merit, yet this dysfunction paradoxically benefits those of us already inside the system.
- NIH grant scores show near-zero correlation with research impact, proving expert peer review cannot predict quality
- The LSAT uses speed constraints that favor quick surface-level thinking over the careful analysis actual law requires, serving test administration convenience rather than identifying good lawyers
- Cardiac surgeons' outcomes depend on team context, not individual skill alone, yet meritocratic systems reward individuals, misattributing team performance to personal greatness
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The 'relative age effect' in youth sports (children born early in the selection year appear older/more developed and are selected for elite training, then compound this initial advantage with superior coaching, practice, and competition, eventually becoming genuinely elite) demonstrates how arbitrary initial advantages are institutionally amplified into real ones.
“they get start uh forming all-star teams at the age of nine right and at the age of nine the kids who look like they're the best hockey players are the ones who are relatively the oldest right so the cutoff is January 1st if you're born in January you're going to look better than a kid born in December so we take that kid out and we put them on an All-Star team and we give them way more practice time way better coaches way more access to good competition way more encouragement and lo and behold 10 years later they actually are the best an arbitrary Advantage has been elevated to a real Advantage”
The LSAT is conceptually a 'speeded power test'—it presents extremely difficult questions (power test content) but requires completion within a severely strict time limit (35 minutes per section), deliberately making it impossible for the average test-taker to finish all 101 questions.
“psychometricians make a distinction between power tests and speed tests...a speed test is where I give you a whole lot of relatively easy questions and I'm interested to see how many you can answer uh in a given amount of time...power test is where I give you really hard questions and all I'm really interested in is how many of those questions you can get right...the LSAT is a series of very very hard questions but it we require that the test taker complete them in a limited period of time and the time constraint is um so strict that it's deliberately strict”
Gifted and talented program placement determines which children get into quality schools, which in turn determines access to many downstream advantages and opportunities.
“basically if your kid is among the youngest in your class kiss goodbye to getting into a gifted encounter program and of course we use gifted and talented programs to decide who gets into quality schools and we use quality schools to decide who gets all kinds of advantages on and on and on and on right”
NIH grant review panels show a modest-to-nonexistent correlation between expert scores (on a 10-90 scale) and eventual research impact measured by citation counts, demonstrating that the expert gatekeepers overseeing $40 billion in annual research funding cannot actually predict which research will be influential.
“he discovers that the correlation between your score and how good your research ends up being is modest to non-existence”
Cardiac surgeons performing Norwood operations (a difficult pediatric surgery) show a clear learning curve: mortality rates at high-volume centers (400+ cases/year) are about one-quarter the rates at low-volume centers (under 150 cases/year), demonstrating the critical importance of volume for surgical mastery.
“Norbert operations are a particular kind of very difficult pediatric cardiac surgery and you can see the learning curve with your uh your if you're under like 150 cases a year uh your mortality rate is really high...but once you get to about 400 a year the mortality rate comes down dramatically by you know it's a quarter of what it would be uh otherwise”
In English gifted and talented programs, children born in the youngest cohort (after September 1 cutoff) are roughly half as likely to be identified as gifted in science and math compared to those born in the oldest cohort, indicating that academic identification systems replicate the same relative age bias present in youth sports.
“this is a study of um of uh of gifted and talented programs in England and we they have broken down the composition of gifted and talented programs by birth a cohort in England the cutoff is September 1st and what you see is that if you are in the relatively youngest cohort of your class your chance of being in a gifted and talented program in science and math is roughly half that of the uh of the of of those who are born in the relatively oldest cohort”
The National Institutes of Health receives 80,000 grant applications per year, representing an extraordinary percentage of the most crucial research conducted in the world, with a budget of $40 billion annually.
“the NIH the National Institutes of Health um this is one of the most consequential uh meritocracies in the world probably NIH has a budget of 40 billion dollars a year um they get 80 000 Grant applications a [2:04] year which represent I mean extraordinary percentage of the most crucial research we do uh in in the world”
The meritocratic principle applies to complex intellectual work like the speaker's current talk: the audience cannot determine how much of the talk represents the speaker's individual work vs. team effort, thus cannot accurately assess individual capability without understanding the actual process used to produce the work.
“think about me up here right now how much of this talk is me do you know whether I wrote it or whether the team wrote it right you don't know you have no idea how good I am based on this this particular talk that I'm giving you without knowing the the actual process that I used to come up with these observations”
The failure and non-reform of meritocratic systems is paradoxically good for those already inside them, because fixing the systems would replace current gatekeepers and beneficiaries with more genuinely gifted people, making the institution more competitive and excluding the current occupants.
“I said at the beginning that this observation about our failed meritocracies is a very good thing um how can that be if we fixed meritocracies then most of us wouldn't be here right but think about it if we fix the system the people who would replace us at a conference like this would be so much smarter than we are this conference would have been so much more fun Google would make so much more money and I wouldn't be here someone far more gifted than I would be giving this talk”
Meritocratic systems attribute surgical success to individual surgeon greatness and reward high-performing surgeons accordingly, yet ignore the fact that surgical excellence is a team accomplishment, systematically misidentifying the source of performance and rewarding individuals for outcomes produced by their teams.
“does the meritocratic system recognize that uh being a really good surgeon is not an individual accomplishment but a team accomplishment no it doesn't right the whole metacrotic system is based on the assumption that what we're observing here is the greatness of this particular individual surgeon”
In response to NIH's findings that expert peer review cannot predict research quality, a group of microbiologists proposed that the rational solution would be to replace expert evaluation with random selection: put all 80,000 grant applications in a cylindrical container and select them randomly.
“my favorite response to this guy Dr Lauer's paper is a bunch of microbiologists published this paper where they said well the only rational thing to do now is to tell all of the grant reviewers to go home to shut down that entire cumbersome process of trying to evaluate all of these 80 000 Grant applications just have a big round cylindrical container put all the applications in the container and pick them out at random”
The LSAT's time constraint systematically makes speed-dominant test-takers (like 'Hare') appear better than they are and time-intensive careful test-takers (like 'Tortoise') appear worse than they are, distorting selection away from the traits—carefulness and deep analysis—that actual legal practice requires.
“the result of creating a speeded power test for the LSAT the result of having that time constraint is to make hair look better than he actually is and toward us look worse than she actually is right why would we do this in a profession that is based on Tortoise thinking”
When questioned by the speaker on why the LSAT has a time limit, the LSAC officials gave a purely administrative answer: the time constraint exists simply because 'it's easier to rent the hall for a limited time' rather than for an extended period—revealing that the design serves organizational convenience rather than any pedagogical purpose.
“their answer was yeah just easier you know Kenneth how are you going to rent the hall for the whole day right”
Despite publishing evidence about the relative age effect in 'Outliers' in 2008, and the subsequent public attention to the problem, Canadian junior hockey (and youth sports systems generally) have made no changes to address the bias 15 years later, with the 2022 Canadian junior hockey roster showing the same birth-month distribution problem as pre-2008.
“I wrote my book in 2008 and as a result of the long stuff about the relative age effect in my book there was a lot of kind of public attention to this particular um uh relative age effect...so I thought when I was coming here to talk about meritocracies that what I would do is revisit the hockey example and give you show you about how this particular Canadian institution...has learned its lesson and fixed its ways...I decided I would look at the 2022 Canadian junior hockey roster...they have learned nothing right nothing they haven't done a single thing to fix the problem 15 years ago it was brought to their attention”
Despite clear evidence that meritocratic systems fail (NIH grant scoring, LSAT design, surgical attribution, relative age effect), institutions remain 'powerfully incurious' about fixing these problems, suggesting systemic resistance rather than ignorance.
“for some reason we are powerfully incurious about the problems that we have created with our meritocracies we think we know a good research proposal from a bad one and we don't we think we know that we think we're selecting the right people for law school and we aren't we you know we we we think we know that uh an individual is responsible for their surgical success and they aren't and when we're presented with evidence of the falsity of our of our systems what do we do we do nothing”
Systems pretending to be meritocracies—systems that appear to select on merit but actually select on arbitrary factors—are fundamentally different from actual meritocracies.
“this is not a meritocracy this is simply something that's pretending to be a marketocracy”
Elementary schools do not segregate students by relative age despite decades of evidence that January-born children compete at a disadvantage with December-born children in the same class.
“think about your child's elementary school if there are in first and second grade do they divide the kids up and put the January to March kids in one class and the April to June kids and another and the July to September kids and another no they don't do that right even though we've had [20:14] years and years and years of evidence that it's completely unfair to ask a January kid to compete with a December kid”
The high concentration of elite players born in early calendar months in the 2007 Medicine Hat Tigers (a major junior hockey team) was the original observation that prompted the Outliers book's discussion of the relative age effect.
“this is the roster of the uh 2007 Medicine Hat Tigers this is the actual chart I used in my book outliers and this is uh this is a major January hockey team so this is one rung below [15:33] the NHL and the point of this those who've read Outlaws will know this the point of this chart was that this is a group of elite hockey players in a country that takes hockey very seriously and what is most striking about this group is how many of them are born in the first four months of the year”
Many elite cardiac surgeons maintain privileges at multiple hospitals, operating at high volume at one primary hospital and lower volume at secondary locations on weekends or other occasions.
“but there is a complication with this um and that is what happens to the people the surgeons who do their Norwood operations at a different hospital so lots of Surgeons do this right you [12:25] have privileges at more than one Hospital maybe you do 90 of your procedures at one place but then you go down the street or across town on the weekends or whatever and you do some at another place”