the fact as I listened both to our previous speaker and also the ones before that everyone

has been speaking about very consequential and high-minded things this morning, and I'm

not going to do that at all. In fact, I intend to give what I am sure will be the most solipsistic

talk ever at a Google Zeitgeist. I simply want to talk about why on earth I

decided to say yes and come here. Here's the situation. I'm a writer. Part of

what I do to make my living is I go and give speeches at conferences like this. And I get

paid, right, as one would, and it's that money that I use to make my living.

So how much is Google paying me for this? Zero. It is a company with, what, $50 billion

in the bank, and they don't have a dime for poor little old Malcolm.

Now, we could talk at length about what this says about Google, but that's not what interests

me. What interests me is what that says about me. Why on earth would I say yes under such

a circumstance? Why -- you know, I'm busy. My time is really valuable. Why did I fly

all the way out here, across the country, to give away my intellectual property for

free? In fact, it wasn't even free. I had to print out my speech this morning in the

business center. And -- this is the bill -- it cost me $9.87. It is costing me to be here.

[ Laughter ] >>Malcom Gladwell: Now, you can say that I

came here because there is all kinds of interesting people here, which is true. I don't mean to

cast any aspersions on any of you, but my life is lousy with interesting people. I got

more interesting people than I know what to -- So you could say maybe I should have come

here -- I should come here because I can make contacts that will help me, you know, in the

business world. I'm not in the business world. I don't need to meet a V.C. I work out of

my apartment. If I want to renovate my kitchen, I will just go to the bank for a loan. There's

no -- it doesn't make any sense, in other words, for me to be here.

So why did I say yes? Well, the answer is that this conference is run by Google, one

of the most prestigious and successful companies in the world. I would not have agreed to speak

for free at a Yahoo! conference, would I? [ Laughter ]

>>Malcom Gladwell: In other words, my decision to do something that is not in my best interest

was caused by my association with an elite institution. And this is what I want to talk

about today. It is an argument that I make in my new book, "David and Goliath," which

in further proof of how baffling my decision was to come here is not available for sale

at this conference. [ Laughter ]

>>Malcom Gladwell: I like to call this problem elite institution cognitive disorder, or EICD.

And it is simply that elite institutions screw us up in all kinds of ways that we're not

always conscious of. And since the theme of this morning's session

is "Imagine a Better World," I want to try and imagine what the world would look like

if we freed ourself of the scourge of EICD. So I am going to give you a couple of examples

of EICD in action. Let me start with the very thorny question of science and math education

in this country. STEM as we call it. We have a problem in turning out enough science

and math graduates, right, in this country. And it is not for lack of interest, by the

way, among high school seniors. Lots and lots and lots of high school seniors want to get

science and math degrees, but approximately half of them drop out by the end of their

second year. So we have a persistence problem in science and math education in this country.

So the question is why? Why do so many kids drop out? Well, the obvious answer is that

science and math are really hard and you need to have a certain level of cognitive ability

to master those subjects and we don't have enough smart kids, right?

So if that's true, if science and math education is a function of -- we should be able to see

in the statistics that persistence is a function of your cognitive ability. So let's take a

look. By the way, this is the first time in my life

I have ever used PowerPoint. This is like a fantastic moment for me. I feel like I have

finally joined the 20th century. It is really kind of amazing.

Oh, wow. Okay. So this is -- I've just chosen Hartwick

College as a proxy for American colleges for totally random colleges. Hartwick is a small

liberal arts college in upstate New York. What we have a distribution of math S.A.T.

scores by -- among the people who are intending to major in science and math.

What you can see is that there is quite a wide range of native math ability among the

kids entering the freshmen STEM programs at Hartwick, right? So what do we see when we

look at the -- who ends up graduating with a STEM degree? What we see is that at Hartwick

College, the kids in the top third, the top third S.A.T. scores, end up getting well over

half of the STEM degrees and the kids with the bottom scores end up getting very few

of the STEM degrees. Those kids over there are dropping out like

flies. This would seem to suggest that our original hypothesis that persistence is a

function of cognitive ability is true. And this would also -- we can also go further.

We can say if this hypothesis is true, as we go to more and more selective institutions,

we should see a very different pattern of persistence. We should see less kids dropping

out because the kids are all smarter, right? So let's go to Harvard. These numbers are

a few years old. But at Harvard, you can see that the bottom third of math S.A.T. scores

among kids doing science and math are equal to the top third at Hartwick. The dumb students

at Harvard are as smart as the smart students at Hartwick. So you would think everybody

at Harvard should be getting a math and science degree, right? Why would they drop out? Everyone

is so smart. What do we see?

Oh, dear. What we see is the exact same pattern at Harvard

that we saw at Hartwick. The smart kids -- the top kids are getting all the degrees. The

kids at the bottom aren't getting any degrees. They are dropping out like flies, right? Even

though these kids are brilliant. Right? So what's happening? Well, clearly what we're

seeing here is that persistence in science and math is not simply a function of your

cognitive ability. It's a function of your relative standing in your class. It is a function

of your class rank, right? Those kids who are really, really brilliant

don't get their math degree not because -- not as a function of their IQ but as a function

of where they are in their class. And, by the way, if you look at any college

you want, you will always see, regardless of the level of cognitive ability among the

students, you will always see the same pattern. The kids who get the science and math degrees

are the ones in the top of their class. And the kids in the bottom of their class never

do. Look over at that bottom third -- the bottom third chart over there.

So the name given for this phenomenon amongst psychologists is relative deprivation theory.

And it describes this exceedingly robust phenomenon which says that as human beings we do not

form our self-assessments based on our standing in the world. We form our self-assessments

based on our standing in the -- in our immediate circle, on those in the same boat as ourselves,

right? So a classic example of relative deprivation

theory is which kind of country -- which countries have the highest suicide rates? Happy countries

or unhappy countries? And the answer is happy countries.

If you are morbidly depressed in a country where everyone else is really unhappy, you

don't feel that unhappy. [ Laughter ]

>>Malcom Gladwell: Right? You are not comparing yourself to the universe -- the whole universe

of people out there. No. You are comparing yourself to your neighbors and the kids at

school and they are unhappy, too, so you are sort of fine.

But if you are morbidly depressed in a country where everyone is jumping up and down for

joy, you are really depressed, right? That is a very, very, very profoundly serious place

to be and so as a result, you get that sad outcome more often.

So what's happening at Harvard then? The kid in the bottom third of his class at Harvard

does not say rationally: I'm in the 99.99th percentile of all students in the world when

it comes to native math ability, even though that's true.

What that kid says is: That kid over there, Johnny over there, is getting all the answers

right and I'm not. I feel like I'm really stupid and I can't handle math so I will drop

out, get a fine arts degree, move to Brooklyn, work, make $15,000 a year and break my parents'

heart, right? [ Laughter ]

>>Malcom Gladwell: So what is the implication of this? The implication of this is that if

you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to Harvard, right? In fact, we can

run the numbers on this. Mitchell Chang at UCLA recently did the numbers and he says

as a rule of thumb, your odds of graduating -- successfully getting a science and math

degree fall by two percentage points for every ten-point increase in the average S.A.T. score

of your peers. So if you are a kid and you have a choice

between -- if you get into Harvard and University of Maryland is your safety, University of

Maryland has 150 -- on average S.A.T. scores are 150 points lower at Maryland. That means

your chance of graduating with a STEM degree from Maryland is 30% higher than it would

be at Harvard. Right? Now -- so if you choose to go to Harvard and

not Maryland, you are taking an enormous gamble. You are essentially saying this STEM degree

-- by the way, the most valuable commodity any college graduate could have in today's

economy, I am going to take a 30% gamble in my chances of getting that degree just so

I can put Harvard on my resume'. Is that worth it? I don't think so. Right?

But how many kids given a choice between Harvard and Maryland choose Maryland? Not that many.

Why? EICD. Now, why does EICD persist if it is so plainly

irrational? Well, I think it is because as human beings, we dramatically underestimate

the costs of being at the bottom of a hierarchy. Let me give you another really remarkable

example of this. This is from a paper that was -- just came out from a guy named -- two

economists John Connelly and Allie Sundy -- Allie Under, rather. They looked at graduates of

Ph.D. programs, economics Ph.D. programs at American universities.

And what they were interested in was what is the publication record of these graduates

in the six years after they took an academic position? So as you know, the principal way

by which we evaluate economists is how often and how well do they publish. So what these

guys did is they did a little algorithm, took the top economics journals, and rated them

according to their level of prestige, and came up with a number of how many -- your

score after six years of graduation. So we get this chart here. What you can see,

first of all, look at the 99th percentile. So what this says is, the kids who are in

the 99th percentile of their Ph.D. program at Harvard, M.I.T., Yale, Princeton, Columbia,

Stanford, Chicago, the 99th percentile, that's what they publish. The Harvard students publish

4.31 journal articles in their first six years after graduation. That's amazing. Right? Astounding

number. Same with M.I.T., 4.73. All the way down the

list. What we see here is that the best students

at the very best schools are extraordinary, and that comes as no surprise. You just saw

Larry Summers here. I don't know where he went. Larry Summers, that's Larry Summers,

right? Brilliant. Genius. We knew that. [ Laughter ]

>>Malcom Gladwell: Let's look at the 85th percentile. Now, the 85th percentile at these

schools, these are schools that might take two dozen Ph.D. students every year. So if

you're in the 85th percentile in the M.I.T. economics program, you're the fifth or sixth

best student in your class. That's really smart, okay?

The 85th percent student at M.I.T -- or at Harvard, let's do Harvard, publishes basically

one paper in their first six years versus 4.31 in the top student.

So the gap between one and five is enormous, right? It is 5X. Now, let's go down to the

55th percentile at Harvard. So the 55th percentile at Harvard is the -- let's say, the 12th best

person at the greatest economics program in the world.

They could arguably say they are one of the 20-top Ph.D. economic students in the world,

right? Look what their publication rate, .07. Basically, they're not publishing at all.

By any standard by which we judge academic economists, these people are complete failures,

right? Now, I've picked lousy schools.

[ Laughter ] >>Malcom Gladwell: And I've started with Toronto,

which is where I went to school. So this is a little masochistic moment where I basically

confess to how paltry my academic pedigree is.

I have also picked B.U. and then I have also picked -- non-top 30 is simply all the schools

that are so terrible I can't bring myself to name them.

[ Laughter ] >>Malcom Gladwell: We've aggregated them all

so these are schools that if your child -- anyone in this room, if your child said they were

going to go to one of these schools, you would weep, okay?

[ Laughter ] >>Malcom Gladwell: What do we see here? What

we see here is that the 99th percentile at these lousy schools publish more than everyone

at the top schools except for the 99th percentile, right? Do you see that?

Look at Toronto, 3.13. The only people who publish more than the top student at Toronto

are the top students at those top seven schools. The top student at Boston is publishing three

times more than the 80th percentile student at Harvard.

What does this tell us? Well, it tells us that -- oh, before I get there.

The guys that did the study, having done the study, were so stunned at what they were seeing

that they end their article with this whole thing about what on earth is going on with

Harvard? Here's a school which is collecting the most

brilliant, the most accomplished, probably the best-looking graduate students in economics

-- [ Laughter ]