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blue bits. red rocks.
Tuesday 28 July 2009

He recently had a column in the NY Times vainly attacking Chris Anderson’s take on the free economy and then he has a piece in the New Yorker saying the current depression is mostly about psychology, not necessarily about unregulated markets, scammers, and profiteers. Whatever he writes about — the tipping point, the outliers, and other catchy sounding phenomena — Gladwell manages to start out with a false analogy, comparing one event to a completely unrelated event that did exactly what he uses to describe what the event he is discussing, like the depression, is doing. I can’t even recall the analogy with the current decession because it was so far fetched; perhaps it was something that happened in the Middle Ages. It doesn’t really matter what it was, because Gladwell is so skillful at manipulating an argument, he could have compared the current decession with the First Crusade into Jerusalem and made it seem that they were both all about faith. Malcolm Gladwell Doth Metastasize

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