Gladwell doesn’t acknowledge that Carnegie’s self-mythologizing has little to do with inner city families who can’t pay their rent, and he doesn’t say how these two spheres relate to each other.

The unacknowledged tension between fantasy and reality heightens as the article goes on:

The man who created what we know as Goldman Sachs was a poor, uneducated member of a despised minority—and his story is so remarkable that perhaps only Andrew Carnegie could make sense of it.

His story is remarkable. And in fact has to be. A crucial point, which doesn’t enter Gladwell’s analysis, is that Weinberg’s success—his ability to both understand and selectively disregard the rules governing the behavior of the social and financial elite—is only possible as an anomaly. Loud opinions and personal idiosyncrasies may have helped rather than hindered him in the stuffy circle of elite bankers that he joins. But where one Weinberg is a charmer, many Weinbergs are a problem. So, structural impediments to his rise aside, how could Weinberg possibly be a model for broader social change?

Gladwell attempts to draw broad conclusions—both descriptive and, as we noted, prescriptive—from a series of anecdotes. Rather than placing Weinberg in cultural context, which would have offered some critical perspective, Gladwell focuses on Weinberg himself and only strays into America at large when it suits Weinberg’s, and by extension Gladwell’s, narrative. (An approach that is the intellectual kin of the Great Man theory we recently criticized.)

To offer a counterweight to Weinberg’s story, here is some information from Stephan Thernstrom’s 1973 book, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis 1880-1970:

Youths born into working-class homes in Boston had rather good prospects of moving upward into middle-class jobs in the course of their own careers.

Good. But:

No more than 1 in 10 succeeded in becoming professionals or substantial businessmen—movement all the way to the top of the occupational ladder was far less likely for them than for sons from upper-middle-class families—but about a third of them ended up as clerks, salesmen, or small proprietors.

This kind of moderate rise doesn’t have the drama of Weinberg’s, but it says far more about the way the system works. And if Gladwell wants his story to be anything more than an interesting anecdote—which he clearly does—then he needs to address the system as a whole.

The fact is, enough class mobility exists in this country for the rags-to-riches myth to have staying power, but inertia is as real—or more real—a force. If you don’t believe us, listen to The Economist:

A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society…

America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening and a gap widening between the people who make the decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of ordinary working stiffs.

And the Economic Policy Institute shows working-class incomes falling while the wealthy get more so.

American folklore often emphasizes the rags-to-riches Horatio Alger stories, which suggest that anyone with the gumption and smarts to prevail can lift themselves up by their bootstraps and traverse the income scale in a generation. Reality, however, shows much less mobility.

In fact, the Economic Mobility Project, spearheaded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, raises an interesting point in its report “Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?”:

The belief in America as a land of opportunity may also explain why rising inequality in the United States has yielded so little in terms of responsiveness from policy makers: if the American Dream is alive and well, then there is little need for government intervention to smooth the rough edges of capitalism. Diligence and skill, the argument goes, will yield a fair distribution of rewards.

By this logic the American Dream, in addition to being a motivational force, can be a very dangerous one, dulling our abilities to see the limits of the meritocratic ideal.

These ideas are more than an interesting addition to Gladwell’s story. They are essential to it.

All this effort seems to be in service of the following point:

We have become convinced that the surest path to success for our children involves providing them with a carefully optimized educational experience: the ‘best’ schools, the most highly educated teachers, the smallest classrooms, the shiniest facilities, the greatest variety of colors in the art-room paint box. But one need only look at countries where schoolchildren outperform their American counterparts—despite larger classes, shabbier schools, and smaller budgets—to wonder if our wholesale embrace of the advantages of advantages isn’t as simplistic as Carnegie’s wholesale embrace of the advantages of disadvantages.

What is Gladwell saying? Should we move to impoverished countries? Further underfund our schools? Or just romanticize poverty?

A society of decreasing mobility, as suggested by the observers we quoted above, renders even more ridiculous Gladwell’s call for Americans to return to what he sees as an earlier attitude toward poverty and success: namely that poverty—that great instructor—is in some ways good because it can breed traits that may lead to success.