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

first and second rows, showing the racial breakdown of the bottom of the average American law school class.
    Rank
Black
White
Other
1.
51.6
5.6
14.8
2.
19.8
7.2
20.0
    Here is the way that Sander and Taylor analyze the costs of this strategy. Imagine two black law school students with identical grades and identical test scores. Both are admitted to an elite law school under an affirmative-action program. One accepts and one declines. The one who declines chooses instead—for logistical or financial or family reasons—to attend his or her second choice, a less prestigious and less selective law school. Sander and Taylor looked at a large sample of these kinds of “matched pairs” and compared how well they did on four measures: law school graduation rate, passing the bar on their first attempt, ever passing the bar, and actually practicing law. The comparison is not even close. By every measure, black students who don’t go to the “best” school they get into outperform those who do.
    Career Success
White
Black
Black
(Affirmative
Action)
Percentage who graduate from law school
91.8
93.2
86.2
Percentage who pass bar first attempt
91.3
88.5
70.5
Percentage who ever pass bar
96.4
90.4
82.8
Percentage who practice law
82.5
75.9
66.5
    Sander and Taylor argue very convincingly that if you are black and you really want to be a lawyer, you should do what the Impressionists did and steer clear of the Big Pond. Don’t accept any offer from a school that wants to bump you up a notch. Go to the school you would have otherwise gone to. Sander and Taylor put it bluntly: “At any law school the bottom of the class is a lousy place to be.”
    By the way, those of you who read my book Outliers, where I also discussed affirmative action and law school, know that in the book I was interested in making a very different point—that the usefulness of IQ and intelligence starts to level off at a certain point, meaning that the kinds of distinctions among students made by elite institutions are not necessarily useful. In other words, it is wrong to assume that a lawyer admitted to a very good law school with lesser credentials will be a less able lawyer than those admitted with sterling credentials. To back this up, I used data from the University of Michigan Law School, which shows that their black law school affirmative-action graduates had careers every bit as distinguished as their white graduates.
    Do I still believe this? Yes and no. I think the general point about the benefits of intelligence leveling off at the high end remains. But I now think the specific point made about law schools in Outliers was, in retrospect, naive. I was not familiar with relative deprivation theory at the time. I am now a good deal more skeptical of affirmative-action programs.

Chapter Four: David Boies
    A good general introduction to the problem of dyslexia is Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Harper, 2007).
    The Bjorks have written widely and brilliantly on the subject of desirable difficulty. Here’s a good summary of their work: Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork, “Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning,” Psychology and the Real World, M. A. Gernsbacher et al., eds. (Worth Publishers, 2011), ch. 5.
    The puzzles about the bat and ball and the widgets come from Shane Frederick, “Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (fall 2005). The results of Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer’s experiment with the CRT at Princeton are described in Adam Alter et al., “Overcoming Intuition: Metacognitive Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 136 (2007). Alter has a wonderful new book about this line of research called Drunk Tank Pink (Penguin, 2013).
    Julie Logan’s study of dyslexia among entrepreneurs is “Dyslexic Entrepreneurs: The Incidence; Their Coping Strategies and Their Business Skills,” Dyslexia 15, no. 4 (2009): 328–46.
    The best history of IKEA is Ingvar Kamprad and Bertil Torekull’s Leading by Design: The IKEA Story (Collins, 1999). Incredibly, there is nothing in Torekull’s interviews with Kamprad to suggest that Kamprad had even a moment’s hesitation about doing business with a Communist country at the height of the Cold War. On the contrary, Kamprad seems almost blasé about it: “At first we did a bit of advance