Our confusion only grows at the end of the piece, when Gladwell counterposes the failure of a Wall Street good old boy to the success of Weinberg. After the departure of a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, Gladwell writes:

The Sachs brothers—Walter and Arthur—were desperate for a replacement, and they settled, finally, on a young man named Waddill Catchings, a close friend of Arthur Sachs from Harvard. He had worked at Sullivan & Cromwell, Wall Street’s great patrician law firm. He had industrial experience, having reorganized several companies, and ‘on top of all that,’ Ellis tells us, ‘Catchings was one of the most talented, charming, handsome, well-educated, and upwardly mobile people in Wall Street.’

That Catchings was a poor decision maker became clear in the 1929 crash, when he lost Goldman a lot in both money and reputation, and it spurs the article’s closing observations:

Privilege did not prepare Catchings for crisis. The Sachs brothers then replaced Catchings with a man who was not from privilege at all, and perhaps now we can appreciate the wisdom of that decision. Wall Street needs a few less Waddill Catchingses and a few more Sidney Weinbergs.

Now, wait a minute. First of all, Gladwell told us early on that Weinberg’s strength was not financial acumen but interpersonal intuition:

Weinberg was not a financial wizard. His gifts were social.

So Catchings’s bad judgment doesn’t serve as a true counterexample, at all.

And the piece ends with a prescription— “Wall Street needs a few less Waddill Catchingses and a few more Sidney Weinbergs”—but, and here is the point we feel strongest about: Gladwell hasn’t earned the right to give it. The idea that Wall Street’s problems somehow stem from character issues—that Weinberg would not have sold defective CDOs, or something—is entirely bogus and, in any case, journalistically out of nowhere.

We need better from The New Yorker both as a cultural critic and certainly as a reporter on the financial crisis.