[Pen-l] Accidental billionaires

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

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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