http://bostonreview.net/BR34.3/fischer.php
MAY/JUNE 2009
Accidental Billionaire
Unjust Deserts, by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly
The New Press, $24.95 (cloth)
Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown, $27.95 (cloth)
Claude S. Fischer
“It’s not about you,” declares Reverend Rick Warren, the celebrity
minister and hair-blown invocationer of Barack Obama’s inauguration, in
his best-seller, The Purpose-Driven Life. It’s about God’s purpose for
you. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly’s
Unjust Deserts also declare that “it’s not about you.” For that matter,
it’s also not about Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Beyoncé, Gordie Howe, or
any other wildly successful individual; it’s about the circumstances you
and they were lucky enough to fall into.
Both of these new books argue that a person’s success depends more on
being born in the right place and at the right time than on being the
right person. “Success,” concludes Gladwell, “follows a predictable
course. It is not the brightest who succeed. . . . Nor is success simply
the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is,
rather, a gift.” This is a difficult message for Americans to
understand, raised as we are in a culture that insists more than any
other that every individual earns and therefore deserves his or her own
fate.
Whether Gladwell and Alperovitz and Daly can change the way Americans
think about success is another matter. The authors have a strong wind at
their backs: the current recession is displacing so many workers and
depleting so many investors’ fortunes through no obvious faults of their
own that it becomes harder and harder to believe that everyone is
getting their just deserts.
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