Gladwell's "Talent Grab"

Malcolm Gladwell is assuredly one of the best current non-fiction authors, writing for the best magazine, The New Yorker. In his recent “Talent Grab” he, as usual, hooks in his readers in the opening paragraph. Gladwell tells stories, and the first story is of Marvin Miller, the pugnacious union attorney who freed ballplayers from being the property of the owners, and ultimately the elimination of the reserve clause and free agency.

The question he addresses is why professionals in various fields make so much money. And he makes clear that this situation is one that arose in the recent past. Other examples are publishers/writers, models/modeling agencies, and finally investment bankers. Gladwell has a prism to view these relations from the economists Aya Chacar and William Hesterly, drawing on the work of Alan Fiske. a U.C.L.A. anthropologist. People use one of four models to guide the way the interact with one another: (1) communal sharing; (2) equality matching; (3) market pricing; and (4) authority ranking. For how these apply to real situations, you need to read the article.

Gladwell illuminates human behavior and sees the world in an idiosyncratic way. Of course, he is not always right. But he makes you think. For instance, Robert A. Burton in On Being Certain persuasively argues that Gladwell, in Blink, gets wrong some of the insights of the book that Gladwell admired, Strangers to Ourselves, by Timothy Burton. In his last two articles, Gladwell’s ultimate “conclusion” is only loosely connected to the article. Here, Gladwell is nostalgic for the old days when professionals were the property of Capital. But why do ball-players, writers, movie stars, models and investment bankers make so much money at what they do? Because people freely pay them. How much does it cost to go to a professional sporting event these days? A lot.

Note: You must subscribe to The New Yorker to read this article. Some articles are freely available on-line. Gladwell’s previous article, which compares the civil rights movement to contemporary social revolutionaries, is available here. Again, it seems to me that the "conclusion" is quesitonable.  "If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause."