Individualization
I’ve discussed this topic before, but now I’m reading Gladwell’s latest book, “Outliers,” and it is stirring up lots of good ideas.
One premise of the book– as determined by me, just a chapter in– is that small initital differences in life trajectory can work out to huge differences in where a life ends up. One particularly striking example is the birth month of elite hockey players. Turns out they are (very) disproportionately born just after the Jan. 1 cutoff date. The tracking, sifting, and promoting systemization of their hockey leagues that stretches all the way down to 5 and 6 year olds is essentially (accidentally) selecting for the small advantage a 5.9 year old will naturally have over a 5.1 year old, and multiplying that advantage down through the years. At every stage, the “better” (older) player gets more training, more attention, and more play time, which results in these older players ultimately BEING much better overall.
Gladwell points out that such accidental selections could be minimized by having multiple leagues (a Jan league, May league, and August league, for example). Of course, that is less efficient. Which got me to thinking about our society as a whole.
Our society is based on efficiencies of scale. Our banking system is huge and interconnected. Our school system is mostly nationalized. Everyone starts school in August and goes until May (because, of course, they’re needed at home to harvest during the summer…). We have a powergrid, a telephone network, and a highway system that span the nation. We gain a great deal through these standardizations.
But I believe we’re approaching an era where all of these things are decreasingly necessary. The cellular network is already replacing the telephone grid–putting up cell towers at discrete points is much easier than laying miles of contiguous wire. Alternative energy like solar power could potentially render a power grid less necessary. Someday, home learning via computer could make brick and mortar schools as outdated as brick and mortar banks.
I don’t know if “individualization” is a realistic or worthwhile goal, but it’s certainly interesting to me, just from a perspective of poetic symmetry, that we are rapidly developing the technological capability to de-centralize, after so much effort was put into standardization and centralization in the first place!