Goliath:David::Pakistan:Taliban

Like most young people, I played competitive sports until I entered college.  I was never the best on the team, but I tended to punch above my weight (at 5′9″ and 140, I wasn’t overpowering anyone).  I played baseball primarily, and I had a good friend who was 6′2″ and 200lbs; he played left field and I played first base, but I could toss a ball almost as far as him.  I didn’t have some freakish ability like the kid in Rookie of the Year,  but I had better mechanics than my friend.  He was so muscular that he could take a small step forward, rotate his torso a bit, and chuck the ball whereas I had to, because of small size, be much more conscientious about my form and timing.   In respect to our throwing distance, we were pretty much the same though our natural abilities were much different.

This is basically the story of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest article, “How David beat Goliath,”  in the New Yorker.  It is similar to Outliers in that it focuses on issues of talent and work ethic while probably simplifying his conclusions to make a snappy point.  His basic thesis is that underdogs often beat the favorites by not playing to the favorites’ strengths; exploiting new tactics allows the underdog to decrease or  surmount the talent differential.  Gladwell gets paternal when he then ties this back into work effort, saying “David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life.”  He sounds like a father coaching his girl’s basketball team, a situation which is the driving anecdote of the piece.

This long excerpt is the interesting fact which provides the theoretical underpinning for his anecdotes:

Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

This is a nice message for underdogs, but I think Gladwell gets too carried away.  Even when underdogs adopt an advantageous strategy, they lose a lot of the time.  And Gladwell’s phrasing suggest they lose that much even when the superior opponent does not adopt its tactics to counter the insurgent.  If Goliath wins without changing strategy, we should hesitate to imply that Davids can always win.  

Gladwell should have also analyzed when Davids lose even once they adopt their advantageous tactics.  He does this at the very end when the underdog basketball team loses because of a biased referee.  But surely Davids can and do lose when there is not evidence of cheating.  It’s a classic example of looking at the successful examples and seeing what they have in common but not finding unsuccessful examples which also have those traits.    (What is the name of this sampling error?)  Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, is called out for this a lot (as is most business journalism).

Like a lot of people, I can’t help but thinking about Pakistan right now.  According to news reports, the army of Pakistan and the Taliban are about to confront each other in the Swat Valley.  This is good news for the Pakistan army because it is going to hold an advantage in conventional warfare; likewise, confronting the Pakistan army so brazenly will probably cause the Taliban to suffer heavy casualties, much like the Vietnamese in 1951.  The fact is that the army of Pakistan is still much stronger than a militia provided the army wants to fight.  But as it stands now, it appears that the Taliban thinks it is a Goliath – hubris and miscalculation if you ask me.

Overall, the article is quite interesting and very encouraging.  I do wish Gladwell had focused more on when Davids lose despite their innovative tactics.