In a collection of essays, Malcolm Gladwell explores the relationship between power and prestige on the one hand and weakness and struggle on the other. Two theses run through the essays in David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. The first thesis is that in a contest where one side is obviously superior to the other by conventional standards, the weaker side often has one or more underappreciated advantages. The second thesis is that too much strength can be a bad thing—a phenomenon represented graphically by an inverted-U curve: as strength increases along the horizontal axis, the benefit, on the vertical axis, at first rises but eventually begins to fall.
The Introduction and Part One develop both claims. The first example of hidden advantage on the weaker side is David, the Biblical shepherd boy, who uses a simple sling to overcome the heavily armored and physically imposing warrior Goliath. Later examples include an unskilled girls’ basketball team that wins games with the full-court press, and T. E. Lawrence and his Bedouin guerillas, who use sabotage and surprise to defeat the Turkish army during the First World War.
The moral is that weakness encourages innovation. The basketball team, for instance, adopts the full-court press because the team stands no chance of winning by playing the way other teams do. Gladwell also considers the value of being a Big Fish in a Little Pond instead of a Little Fish in a Big Pond. The French Impressionists found success by creating a Little Pond for themselves, in the form of a self-staged exhibition. Similarly, a college student choosing between a prestigious school and a less-prestigious one will often have a better experience, and will be more successful, at the latter.
A chapter primarily about school class sizes illustrates the concept of the inverted-U curve. According to conventional wisdom, students learn more in small classes than in large ones. This is true, according to Gladwell, for class sizes above twenty-five or so. But a class size of fifteen is smaller than ideal. Family income also illustrates the point: more income is good when it enables a family to afford necessities, but not when the added income makes it harder for parents to say “no” to their children.
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