David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

acromegaly. The stone lodged in Goliath’s enlarged pituitary and caused a pituitary hemorrhage, resulting in transtentorial herniation and death.
    The most complete account of Goliath’s disability is by the Israeli neurologist Vladimir Berginer. It is Berginer who stresses the suspicious nature of Goliath’s shield bearer. See Vladimir Berginer and Chaim Cohen, “The Nature of Goliath’s Visual Disorder and the Actual Role of His Personal Bodyguard,” Ancient Near Eastern Studies 43 (2006): 27–44. Berginer and Cohen write: “We thus surmise that the phrase ‘shield bearer’ was originally used by the Philistines as an honorable euphemistic title for the individual who served as Goliath’s guide for the visually impaired so as not to denigrate the military reputation of the Philistine heroic warrior. They may well have even given him a shield to carry in order to camouflage his true function!”

Chapter One: Vivek Ranadivé
    Ivan Arreguín-Toft’s book about underdog winners is How the Weak Win Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
    “We could not lightly draw water after dark” is from T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Wordsworth Editions, 1999).
    William R. Polk’s history of unconventional warfare is Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq (Harper, 2008).

Chapter Two: Teresa DeBrito
    Perhaps the best-known study of the effects of class reduction was the Project STAR (Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio) in Tennessee in the 1980s. STAR took six thousand children and randomly assigned them to either a small or a large class and then followed them throughout elementary school. The study showed that the children in the smaller classes outperformed those children in the larger classes by a small but meaningful degree. The countries and U.S. states that subsequently spent billions of dollars on class-size reduction did so, in large part, because of the results of STAR. But STAR was far from perfect. There is strong evidence, for example, of an unusual amount of movement between the large- and small-class arms of the study. It seems that a large number of highly motivated parents might have succeeded in getting their children transferred into the small classrooms—and underperforming children may have been dropped from the same classes. More problematic is that the study wasn’t blind. The teachers with the smaller classes knew that it was their classrooms that would be under scrutiny. Normally in science, the results of experiments that are “unblinded” are considered dubious. For a cogent critique of STAR, see Eric Hanushek, “Some Findings from an Independent Investigation of the Tennessee STAR Experiment and from Other Investigations of Class Size Effects,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 21, no. 2 (summer 1999): 143–63. A “natural experiment” of the sort that Hoxby did is much more valuable. For what Hoxby found, see Caroline Hoxby, “The Effects of Class Size on Student Achievement: New Evidence from Population Variation,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 4 (November 2000): 1239–85. For more discussion of class size, see Eric Hanushek, The Evidence on Class Size (University of Rochester Press, 1998); Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth, Schoolhouses, Courthouses and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009), 272; and Ludger Wössmann and Martin R. West, “Class-Size Effects in School Systems Around the World: Evidence from Between-Grade Variation in TIMSS,” European Economic Review (March 26, 2002).
    For studies of money and happiness, see Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 38 (August 2010): 107. Barry Schwartz and Adam Grant discuss happiness in terms of an inverted-U curve in “Too Much of a Good Thing: The Challenge and Opportunity of the Inverted U,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (January 2011): 61–76.
    In “Using Maimonides’ Rule to Estimate the Effect of Class Size on Scholastic Achievement” ( Quarterly Journal of Economics [May 1999]), Joshua Angrist and Victor Lavy acknowledge the possibility that what they are seeing is a left-side phenomenon: “It is also worth considering whether results for Israel are likely to be relevant for the United