Malcolm Gladwell Takes a Hit
It's hard for any non-fiction writer to write critically about New Yorker star Malcolm Gladwell, because we are all, myself included, insanely jealous of him. The magazine's celebrity sociologist-journalist has written two books that have been on the bestseller lists since before Reagan was president, and he's making millions of dollars, buying New York real estate that ordinarily only Wall Street secretaries and up can afford.
So it's hard not to sound petty (I've already admitted to jealousy) when suggesting some doubts about Gladwell. And in the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I know Malcolm very slightly, and think he's a fine and gifted person. The world of journalism is definitely better off for his presence.
But...Blink? A deeply flawed book which takes about 100 pages to make one argument, then for the rest of the book completely contradicts itself. The journalism feeling increasingly contrived and, frankly, near self-parodic? (The dog whisperer? The hit-makers?) The dubious self-deprecation, like this line from his website:
My great claim to fame is that I'm from the town where they invented the BlackBerry.... The image-shaping haircut? The concern that much of the journalism is really just a marketing vehicle for his immensely lucrative speechifying to corporate America? That the buck-raking drives the journalism, rather than the other way around?
I enjoy Gladwell's writing, but I've always been slightly mystified by its popularity. Gladwell, it seems to me, has perfected the art of writing stuff that is
just smart enough—which is to say, it makes the people who read it feel smart, without really challenging their intelligence. I'm not joking when I say that that is a real talent. But the downside is that you can only go to that well so many times. After a point, his approach starts to feel like a computer program: If most people feel
x, but don't really think about it, then I write
y....
Now Gladwell has written a "semi-defense of Enron"—a phrase that is perhaps too clever—and he's taking some heat for it. Joe Nocera, a very smart business writer, considers Gladwell's suggestion that Enron's collapse was not so much a matter of illegality, but of Wall Street analysists who didn't read the fine print—and finds it unconvincing.
Nocera writes:
The point is not the sheer volume of disclosure; it’s whether disclosure illuminates or obfuscates. Enron usually did the latter. In effect, Mr. Gladwell has conflated fraud with overvaluation. ...You could find plenty of evidence of overstated earnings in Enron’s financial documents — but you’d never know that the company was a Potemkin village. The kind of information that would have led to such a conclusion was precisely the information Enron hid from investors.
Nocera goes on to show that Gladwell supports his thesis by taking one study clearly out of context in a way that is either amateurish or deliberate.
From my read, it's a devasting piece. On his blog, Gladwell has not yet responded.
