Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [28]
K. Anders Ericsson, an enthusiastic, bearded, and burly Swede, is the ringleader of a merry band of relative-age scholars scattered across the globe. He is now a professor of psychology at Florida State University, where he uses empirical research to learn what share of talent is “natural” and how the rest of it is acquired. His conclusion: the trait we commonly call “raw talent” is vastly overrated. “A lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with,” he says. “But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it.” Or, put another way, expert performers—whether in soccer or piano playing, surgery or computer programming—are nearly always made, not born.*
And yes, just as your grandmother always told you, practice does make perfect. But not just willy-nilly practice. Mastery arrives through what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” This entails more than simply playing a C-minor scale a hundred times or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
The people who become excellent at a given thing aren’t necessarily the same ones who seemed to be “gifted” at a young age. This suggests that when it comes to choosing a life path, people should do what they love—yes, your nana told you this too—because if you don’t love what you’re doing, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it.
Once you start to look, birthdate bulges are everywhere. Consider the case of Major League Baseball players. Most youth leagues in the United States have a July 31 cutoff date. As it turns out, a U.S.-born boy is roughly 50 percent more likely to make the majors if he is born in August instead of July. Unless you are a big, big believer in astrology, it is hard to argue that someone is 50 percent better at hitting a big-league curveball simply because he is a Leo rather than a Cancer.
But as prevalent as birth effects are, it would be wrong to overemphasize their pull. Birth timing may push a marginal child over the edge, but other forces are far, far more powerful. If you want your child to play Major League Baseball, the most important thing you can do—infinitely more important than timing an August delivery date—is make sure the baby isn’t born with two X chromosomes. Now that you’ve got a son instead of a daughter, you should know about a single factor that makes him eight hundred times more likely to play in the majors than a random boy.
What could possibly have such a mighty influence?
Having a father who also played Major League Baseball. So if your son doesn’t make the majors, you have no one to blame but yourself: you should have practiced harder when you were a kid.
Some families produce baseball players. Others produce terrorists.
Conventional wisdom holds that the typical terrorist comes from a poor family and is himself poorly educated. This seems sensible. Children who are born into low-income, low-education families are far more likely than average to become criminals, so wouldn’t the same be true for terrorists?
To find out, the economist Alan Krueger combed through a Hezbollah newsletter called Al-Ahd (The Oath) and compiled biographical details on 129 dead shahids (martyrs). He then compared them with men from the same age bracket in the general populace of Lebanon. The terrorists, he found, were less likely to come from a poor family (28 percent versus 33 percent) and more likely to have at least a high-school education (47 percent versus 38 percent).
A similar analysis of Palestinian suicide bombers by Claude Berrebi found that only 16 percent came from impoverished families, versus more than 30 percent of male Palestinians overall. More than 60 percent of the bombers, meanwhile, had gone beyond