What's the Matter with Gladwell?
by Hawerchuk on Nov 18, 2009 9:00 AM EST
in Prospects
Email
PrintMalcolm Gladwell is a great writer - his writing style is very enjoyable, and his focus on the counter-intuitive has won him many fans. If he wrote about things I knew nothing about, I'd probably find his work very enjoyable too. The only problem is that he likes to write about inefficiencies in sports, and every time I look closely at what he's saying, I find that at best, he's come to an irrelevant conclusion; at worst, he's wrong.
Take hockey, for example: Canadian junior hockey leagues have a disproportionate number of players born in the first three months of year. As a result, Gladwell claims that Canada is "squandering the talents of hundreds of boys with late birthdays." The only problem is that the skewed distribution only exists at levels where it doesn't matter. If you look at NHL stars instead of 16- and 17-year-olds, the distribution of birthdates is almost uniform.
How about basketball? Gladwell detailed how a Silicon Valley executive hired former San Francisco 49ers Roger Craig and his daughter Rometra, who played Division I basketball, to coach his 12-year-old daughter's basketball team. The Craigs found many inefficiencies in the 12-year-old girls' game and exploited them in a way that brought an otherwise miserably bad team great success. From this, we are led to believe that David can beat Goliath. Or maybe the inefficiencies exist because at that age, sports are focused on having fun...And it would never occur to anyone to hire professional athletes to systematically dismantle an opposing team.
Gladwell's latest book discusses football. In particular, he claims that NFL quarterbacks drafted early in the first round do worse in the pros than quarterbacks drafted later. In other words, NFL General Managers are supposedly so bad at their jobs that better quarterbacks would be selected by random chance. (His source for this claim is David Berri, who had previously authored "The Wages of Wins," a book about sports economics. Here's a review of Berri's book [warning: pdf] that made me very skeptical of anything he wrote.) Gladwell's claim is thoroughly debunked on this blog - the median quarterback drafted 1-10 puts up 18148 passing yards during his career; the median quarterback drafted outside of the top 100 has a grand total of zero NFL passing yards.
I find much of Gladwell's response to this criticism incomprehensible, but he does argue that NFL quarterbacks need to be evaluated on a per-play basis and not in terms of aggregate performance. In other words, all these years that I thought that the 210th pick in the NHL draft wasn't very valuable because 90% of players picked in that slot never played in the NHL, I was wrong. I should have looked at it on a per-game basis, which would have led me to the conclusion that it's one of the best picks in the draft (Henrik Zetterberg was drafted 210th overall in 1998, and accounts for the majority of games played by 210th draft picks.)
There are plenty of real inefficiencies in sports that smart people have found or exploited: the West Coast Offense; the A-11 Offense; the Left Tackle; and perhaps most famously, On-Base Percentage; or going back further, we have the goalie mask and baseball gloves. This list could go on for quite a while. But NFL General Managers being no better at identifying quarterback talent than a bunch of guys throwing darts at a dartboard? I'm afraid it's not true, and to use a poorly-researched academic paper to claim otherwise does a disservice to the world of sports analysis.
14 comments
|
0 recs |
Do you like this story?
Comments
By the sounds of things
Gladwell seems kind of like Levitt and Dubner – entertaining unless you know the subject matter even the slightest bit going in.
I think you’re dead on. Down to attacking people for being bloggers and deferring to academics. Unfortunately, this might be true of most writers!
It’s kind of disappointing. I’m an Econ major myself, and the longer I spend in the program, the more so-called “Economists” come out from behind the bushes to show themselves as complete loonies (or just plain unlikable asses).
Quickly, the profession of “Economics” is becoming the profession of “Hey! Look what I can do with numbers wheeeee! im smrtr den u.”
I guess that’s what happens when your theories about the way the world works are so quickly and utterly disproven.
That’s because the loonies get noticed. Almost anything you can think of that would be traditionally considered economics (grow patterns, trade balances, poverty rates, income distributions, and so on) has been done to death as far as the academic world is concerned.
What it takes to get noticed is something creative – optimal strategy as it pertains to the Little League baseball rules about each player needing a certain amount of playing time, determining how the relative per calorie cost of different foods impacts consumption and obesity, evaluating whether or not homosexuals have a higher preference for the arts (this is an actual paper by a graduate school professor I had, who’s actually one of the smartest people I’ve ever met) – that’s what draws attention.
My perception of economics at this point is that it’s largely devolving in to two branches. You have the academics who are interested in using economic/mathematical/game theory approaches to novel problems and people whose interest in economics fails to go beyond “Hey if I major in econ I can, like, win the stock market, right?” (needless to say, these people are usually not PhDs). It can be frustrating, but at the same time it’s the kind of thing that leads to analysis of baseball and hockey that I find fascinating…
You’ve possibly seen this, Gabe, but if you or others haven’t, this response to Steve Levitt is well worth a read.
by Robert Cleave on Nov 18, 2009 12:46 PM EST up reply actions
Great stuff
Someone asked me about Freakonomics the other day as something I might like. I told him (or her) I thought the author’s are frauds. I’ll be sending them the link.
The New Improved Avalanche. Now with Real Coaches!
Jibblescribbits: C'mon over and waste some time
by Jibblescribbits on Nov 18, 2009 1:01 PM EST up reply actions
The map at the end is the funniest part of the whole thing to me. Ray Pierrehumbert is a fellow faculty member, works within a few blocks of Levitt at the U of Chicago, and it never struck him to go over there and ask a few questions? Very odd.
by Robert Cleave on Nov 18, 2009 1:56 PM EST up reply actions
Gladwell has an agenda, well defined by Steven Pinker (although I don’t agree with Pinker that its an apolitical agenda:
The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition."
Why Gladwell’s readers, presumedly well-educated, talented, and intelligent, would buy into this agenda when their fortunes and the fortunes of their children, who they invest lavishly in, are dependent on the very “ideals” Gladwell is trying to undermine, is beyond me and probably a subject for some future historian writing the “decline and fall” book about our civilization.
by Big Picture Guy on Nov 18, 2009 12:52 PM EST reply actions
Interesting point. I think what isn’t readily-apparent about Gladwell (or Levitt or Tom Friedman) is that they’re essentially opinion-writers. Their work is aimed at people buying a book at the airport who aren’t experts in a given field and don’t have another data point to compare Outliers or Freakonomics to. This is why a lot of people found The Black Swan so compelling – what Taleb wrote was still true when it was scrutinized.
undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess
The first part of Pinker’s sentence is right on the money, but I don’t understand this phrase at all. What are the “ideals” of talent? Of analytical prowess?
Pinker doesn’t explain but I took it to mean the middle classes’ faith in a kind of meritocracy , where talent and ability are rewarded not birth or accident (not to get too pedantic but Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a fascinating document in showing the rise of this belief system in the West in the Middle Ages). And my point is that just as this belief system is being undermined in the West, it’s rising in the West’s main competitor, China, where a long tradition of meritocracy under Confucianism was submerged under the nightmare of Mao and the 20th century.
by Big Picture Guy on Nov 20, 2009 8:39 AM EST up reply actions
I call the sort of “science” in books like this coffee shop science. They remind me of the sort of thought experiments I did in college. We would take the ideas and thoughts in what we were learning and trace the points from A to B to C and then reach the grandiose conclusion Z. The basic framework is the same in these books the presentation is just more elegant and isn’t meant to impress the cute anthropology major from down the hall but to sell books.
Economics isn’t the only field that falls prey to this sort of thing. There are plenty of ecology books that make ecologists raise their eyebrows. And I’m sure every field has its set.
Comments For This Post Are Closed
Secondary Sidebar
User Tools
FanPosts
Community blog posts and discussion.
Certain photos copyright © 2012 by Associated Press or Getty Images. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of Associated Press and Getty Images is strictly prohibited.
