Malcolm Gladwell: The future of the media
Interesting interview with Malcolm Gladwell. Something I found interesting, on the caste system in the US:
ours [British] being a society where there may still be some correlation
between success and the class you are born into. Really interesting, though,
is the hole Gladwell punches through the hoary stereotype we sometimes hold
about America – that by contrast, it is a classless meritocracy."Both countries stack the deck in favour of certain people over others,"
he begins. "They choose to stack it in different ways. Americans do
perhaps use more subtle mechanisms for doing so. But there is certainly an
Ivy League caste system here that rewards and promotes kids by virtue of
having gone to a small set of colleges and entry into those colleges. While
it appears meritocratic, in large part it is not. You get there because your
dad went there or you are a jock of some kind." Here is something that
surprised me. Gladwell cites studies showing that Europeans in the lowest
economic classes have a far greater chance of moving up in the world than
Americans. "Once you are rich in America you stay rich... but if you
are at the bottom it just never happens, statistically, it never happens
that people make it. And that's very different from western European
counties." Oh well, so much for the land-of-opportunity myth.