Malcolm Gladwell is a genius, he doesn’t need me to say it,
it is a well known fact. I have followed his work from his New Yorker columns
to his books; Outliers, What the Dog saw, The Tipping Point, Blink . As a
reader you get where I’m coming from, I am a big fan and supporter. He has
recently launched a wonderful podcast titled Revisionist History, I can
describe it as an audio version of his New Yorker magazine columns. Each week
he takes a topic and in his own unique style comes at it via an interesting
perspective to engage the listener in exploring an unfamiliar topic.
Revisionist History recently tackled the topic of America’s higher education in
a three-part series and how it plays a role in the increasing inequality and
lack of social mobility in American society.
In the conclusion to the series titled “My Little Hundred
Million” he introduces the story of an engineering entrepreneur, Henry “Hank”
Rowan who began the trend of large charity gifts to educational institutions.
Hank Rowan donated $100 million dollars to a small public university in
Glassboro New Jersey (my first time hearing of the town too!). The podcast goes
on to highlight the increasing trend for ever larger gifts to university and college
endowments. Endowments are giant pools of money invested on behalf of
universities, the interest on this capital is then able to meet ongoing
operational costs. The contrast is that Hank Rowan’s gift was to a small
publicly funded university, Glassboro State College, but the largest donations now
increasingly go to the richest and well known universities in the American
collegiate system, the very institutions that need it the least. This is all to
draw a contrast between two fundamentally different ways of looking at how
improvements in living standards or innovations occur.
The question explored on the podcast is this, are
innovations driven by a few individuals or are they more a series of
incremental iterative improvements? The question is further explored using football
(sorry, soccer for any US based readers!) and basketball as examples. A poorer
player has a greater impact on a football team than on a basketball team.
Though there are a few times when he has done it, good as he
is Messi rarely picks the ball up from the keeper and dribbles through from end
to end to score. He relies on Claudio Bravo to keep the goals out, Pique and
Mascherano to mark opposing strikers, Jordi Alba and formerly Dani Alves to
patrol the wings, Busquets to keep the midfield under control, Iniesta to combine
with and provide through-balls, Neymar and Suarez to occupy defenders, create
and finish chances. All of that is to say that a star footballer is a highly
valuable part in an inter-related machine. A poor player will have a grossly
outsized impact on team performance, and no don’t mention the fact that Djimi
Traore and Igor Biscan have Champions League winners medals.
Basketball in contrast is a star-players league a super-star
who can play both defence and offence can literally bend the game to his or her
will. I challenge you to name the other starters with Lebron James in the 2015
NBA play-offs, and he took what was a historically great Golden State Warriors
team to six games despite losing two of the team’s likely starters. What does
this all have to do with innovation, inequality and development?
If you want to improve your football team, as a team owner
you get the most benefit by each year replacing your worst player,
strengthening your weakest link, rather than seeking to upgrade your team’s
superstar. In basketball the focus is to make sure you get and keep the best
available superstar on the market that year, which is why the Golden State
Warriors are the book makers favourites for the regular season record.
Well, if you believe innovation is similar to basketball,
then the focus will be on the best universities which is why Harvard has a $36
billion endowment
and Stanford has $22 billion. These are incredible sums of money, I come from
Zambia, a nation of 13 million souls and the total amount of goods and services
produced in the country in 2015 was still less than the amount of money
Stanford has to invest. Leaving aside what that fact may or may not say about
the utility of GDP as a statistic, the crazy part is that these universities
who need it the least keep getting more
and more
and more.
Bear in mind that these universities already have some of the lowest applicant
to acceptance ratios in the world and are not demographically reflective of
their societies. Is this really the best use of philanthropy, to help the few
and already advantaged?
Hank Rowan in his original $100 million dollar donation saw
the development of skills, innovation and industry as a weak-link problem, like
a football team he wanted to put his money to use where it would have the
biggest impact. Judging by the lovely song sang by the Glassboro State College
students at his wake, he did just that.
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