Reply to Is it better to be a "Big Fish in a Small Pond" - Gladwell's Elite Cognitive Disorder

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[quote=Anonymous]TLDR - Gladwell, while entertaining, leaves out crucial data that compromises his conclusions, or at least complicates them.

Malcolm Gladwell is entertaining, and he makes readers think that he's letting people in on something that isn't intuitively obvious.
As a professor for over 20 years, though, he examples--as explained by OP, as I haven't read the linked transcript--are not great. First of all, the retention rate at Harvard after five years is almost 100%. At Maryland, it's closer to 80%. You are much more likely to graduate with a degree, period, from Harvard than from UMD; and you are much more likely to drop out of college without a degree if you go to UMD.

Second, the output of papers for econ PhDs is actually not the "best" measure of success. Few econ PhDs actually go into R1 academia or think tanks where they are expected to publish papers. Many end up working for the fed or going into private industry, where they are not publishing papers. And if you end up, like most PhDs in academia, at an R2 or SLAC, publishing frequently is not a criteria for tenure. The number of publications is hardly measure of "success," but the average reader of Gladwell wouldn't know this. 
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