Ross Douthat discusses Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book Outliers.
This means that while meritocratic success tends to be inherited, in an important sense — because the whole culture of obsessive hyper-achievement is just that, a culture that some Americans are raised in and steeped in and some aren’t — everybody doesn’t inherit the same level of success. Getting into the right kind of schools because you have the right kind of parents is generally a necessary condition for ascending the meritocratic ladder, but it isn’t a sufficient one; it tends to create a floor for failure, but it doesn’t guarantee a ceiling for achievement.
