david and goliath

malcolm gladwell

Intro - Goliath

David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. By “giants,” I mean powerful opponents.

The first is that much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty.

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.

It is how the phrase “David and Goliath” has come to be embedded in our language—as a metaphor for improbable victory

Ancient armies had three kinds of warriors. The first was cavalry—armed men on horseback or in chariots. The second was infantry—foot soldiers wearing armor and carrying swords and shields. The third were projectile warriors, or what today would be called artillery

On one level, the duel reveals the folly of our assumptions about power.

Saul thinks of power in terms of physical might. He doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well—in breaking rules, in substituting speed and surprise for strength. Saul is not alone in making this mistake. In the pages that follow, I’m going to argue that we continue to make that error today, in ways that have consequences for everything from how we educate our children to how we fight crime and disorder.

“Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?” Sticks plural? David is holding only one stick. What many medical experts now believe, in fact, is that Goliath had a serious medical condition. He looks and sounds like someone suffering from what is called acromegaly—a disease caused by a benign tumor of the pituitary gland. The tumor causes an overproduction of human growth hormone, which would explain Goliath’s extraordinary size. (The tallest person in history, Robert Wadlow, suffered from acromegaly. At his death, he was eight foot eleven inches, and apparently still growing.) And furthermore, one of the common side effects of acromegaly is vision problems. Pituitary tumors can grow to the point where they compress the nerves leading to the eyes, with the result that people with acromegaly often suffer from severely restricted sight and diplopia, or double vision.

Chapter 1 - The Advantage of disadvantage (and the disadvantage of advantage)

During war, even with 1:10 troops, just under a third of the time, the weaker country wins. However, if they use guerilla tactics, they win two thirds of the time.

Maurice de Saxe: "The art of war is about legs, not arms."

Lawrence of Arabia - led the Arab revolt against the Turkish army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The severed rail supply lines and captured 1200 men with a fourth as much, only losing 2 in combat.

There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources—and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former.

It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through snake-infested desert on the back of camels. It is easier and far more satisfying to retreat and compose yourself after every score—and execute perfectly choreographed plays—than to swarm about, arms flailing, and contest every inch of the basketball court. Underdog strategies are hard.

We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options. Vivek Ranadivé stood on the sidelines as the opposing teams’ parents and coaches heaped abuse on him.

Chapter 2 - Teresa DeBrito

The push to lower class sizes in the United States resulted in something like a quarter million new teachers being hired between 1996 and 2004. Over that same period, per-pupil spending in the United States soared 21 percent—with nearly all of those many tens of billions of new dollars spent on hiring those extra teachers. It’s safe to say that there isn’t a single profession in the world that has increased its numbers over the past two decades by as much or as quickly or at such expense as teaching has. One country after another has spent that kind of money because we look at a school like Shepaug Valley—where every teacher has a chance to get to know every student—and we think, “There’s the place to send my child.” But the evidence suggests that the thing we are convinced is such a big advantage might not be such an advantage at all

“People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum. There’s some place in the middle which probably works best of all.”

The psychologist James Grubman uses the wonderful expression “immigrants to wealth” to describe first-generation millionaires—by which he means that they face the same kinds of challenges in relating to their children that immigrants to any new country face. Someone like the Hollywood mogul grew up in the Old Country of the middle class, where scarcity was a great motivator and teacher. His father taught him the meaning of money and the virtues of independence and hard work. But his children live in the New World of riches, where the rules are different and baffling. How do you teach “work hard, be independent, learn the meaning of money” to children who look around themselves and realize that they never have to work hard, be independent, or learn the meaning of money? That’s why so many cultures around the world have a proverb to describe the difficulty of raising children in an atmosphere of wealth. In English, the saying is “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.”

But “no we won’t,” Grubman said, is much harder. “No we can’t” is simple. Sometimes, as a parent, you have to say it only once or twice. It doesn’t take long for the child of a middle-class family to realize that it is pointless to ask for a pony, because a pony simply can’t happen. “No we won’t” get a pony requires a conversation, and the honesty and skill to explain that what is possible is not always what is right. “I’ll walk wealthy parents through the scenario, and they have no idea what to say,” Grubman said. “I have to teach them: ‘Yes, I can buy that for you. But I choose not to. It’s not consistent with our values.’” But then that, of course, requires that you have a set of values, and know how to articulate them, and know how to make them plausible to your child—all of which are really difficult things for anyone to do, under any circumstances, and especially if you have a Ferrari in the driveway, a private jet, and a house in Beverly Hills the size of an airplane hangar.

There’s no question that the latter is easier for the teacher: fewer papers to grade, fewer children to know and follow. But a smaller classroom translates to a better outcome only if teachers change their teaching style when given a lower workload. And what the evidence suggests is that in this midrange, teachers don’t necessarily do that. They just work less.

The small class is, in other words, potentially as difficult for a teacher to manage as the very large class. In one case, the problem is the number of potential interactions to manage. In the other case, it is the intensity of the potential interactions. As another teacher memorably put it, when a class gets too small, the students start acting “like siblings in the backseat of a car. There is simply no way for the cantankerous kids to get away from one another.”

Why does a school like Hotchkiss do something that so plainly makes its students worse off? One answer is that the school isn’t thinking of its students. It is thinking of the parents of its students, who see things like golf courses and Steinway pianos and small classes as evidence that their $50,000 is well spent. But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries—all Goliaths—too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages. They don’t, of course. That’s the lesson of the inverted-U curve. It is good to be bigger and stronger than your opponent. It is not so good to be so big and strong that you are a sitting duck for a rock fired at 150 miles per hour. Goliath didn’t get what he wanted, because he was too big

Chapter 3 - Caroline Sacks

Art played an enormous role in the cultural life of France in the nineteenth century. Painting was regulated by a government department called the Ministry of the Imperial House and the Fine Arts, and it was considered a profession in the same way that medicine or the law is a profession today

The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse. The story of the Impressionists suggests a second, parallel problem. We strive for the best and attach great importance to getting into the finest institutions we can. But rarely do we stop and consider—as the Impressionists did—whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest. There are many examples of this, but few more telling than the way we think about where to attend university.

But one set of questions Stouffer asked stood out. He quizzed both soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The answer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps.

On the face of it, that made no sense. The Military Police had one of the worst rates of promotion in all of the armed forces. The Air Corps had one of the best. The chance of an enlisted man rising to officer status in the Air Corps was twice that of a soldier in the Military Police. So, why on earth would the Military Policemen be more satisfied? The answer, Stouffer famously explained, is that Military Policemen compared themselves only to other Military Policemen. And if you got a promotion in the Military Police, that was such a rare event that you were very happy. And if you didn’t get promoted, you were in the same boat as most of your peers—so you weren’t that unhappy.

Stouffer’s point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally—by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.” Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations.

If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad. But can you imagine how difficult it must be to be depressed in a country where everyone else has a big smile on their face?

Caroline Sacks’s decision to evaluate herself, then, by looking around her organic chemistry classroom was not some strange and irrational behavior. It is what human beings do. We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school—except, perhaps, those at the very top of the class—are going to face a burden that they would not face in a less competitive atmosphere. Citizens of happy countries have higher suicide rates than citizens of unhappy countries, because they look at the smiling faces around them and the contrast is too great. Students at “great” schools look at the brilliant students around them, and how do you think they feel? The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.”

The Big Fish–Little Pond theory was pioneered by the psychologist Herbert Marsh, and to Marsh, most parents and students make their school choices for the wrong reasons. “A lot of people think that going to an academically selective school is going to be good,” he said. “That’s just not true. The reality is that it is going to be mixed.”

What happened to Caroline Sacks is all too common. More than half of all American students who start out in science, technology, and math programs (or STEM, as they are known) drop out after their first or second year. Even though a science degree is just about the most valuable asset a young person can have in the modern economy, large numbers of would-be STEM majors end up switching into the arts, where academic standards are less demanding and the coursework less competitive. That’s the major reason that there is such a shortage of qualified American-educated scientists and engineers in the United States.

What matters, in determining the likelihood of getting a science degree, is not just how smart you are. It’s how smart you feel relative to the other people in your classroom.

According to research done by Mitchell Chang of the University of California, the likelihood of someone completing a STEM degree—all things being equal—rises by 2 percentage points for every 10-point decrease in the university’s average SAT score. The smarter your peers, the dumber you feel; the dumber you feel, the more likely you are to drop out of science.

Opponents say that access to selective schools is so important that it ought to be done purely on academic merit. A group in the middle says that using race as the basis for preference is a mistake—and what we really should be doing is giving preference to people who are poor. What all three groups take for granted is that being able to get into a great school is such an important advantage that the small number of spaces at the top are worth fighting over. But why on earth are people convinced that places at the top are so valuable that they are worth fighting over?

We take it for granted that the Big Pond expands opportunities, just as we take it for granted that a smaller class is always a better class. We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is—and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage. It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.

Chapter 4 - David Boies

Some people with reading disorders have neurons lining their ventricles, like passengers stranded in an airport. While an image of the brain is being made, a patient performs a task, and then a neuroscientist looks to see what parts of the brain have been activated in response to that task. If you ask a dyslexic to read when he or she is having a brain scan, the parts that are supposed to light up might not light up at all. The scan looks like an aerial photo of a city during a blackout. Dyslexics use a lot more of the right hemisphere of their brains during reading than normal readers do. The right hemisphere is the conceptual side. That’s the wrong half of the brain for a precise and rigorous task like reading.

rapid automatized naming: See the color. Recognize the color. Attach a name to the color. Say the name.

Many people used to think that what defines dyslexics is that they get words backwards—“cat” would be “tac,” or something like that—making it sound like dyslexia is a problem in the way the words are seen. But it is much more profound than that. Dyslexia is a problem in the way people hear and manipulate sounds. The difference between bah and dah is a subtlety in the first 40 milliseconds of the syllable. Can you imagine the consequences of having a brain so sluggish that when it comes to putting together the building blocks of words, those crucial 40 milliseconds simply go by too quickly?

Dyslexia makes it hard to learn to read because you read really slowly, which then impairs your reading fluency, which then impairs your reading comprehension, because you’re so slow that by the time you’re at the end of the sentence, you’ve forgotten what the beginning of the sentence was

Maybe you were the cool kid on the playground when you were four. Then you entered kindergarten and all your peers suddenly started reading, and you can’t figure it out. So you get frustrated. Your peers may think you’re stupid. Your parents may think you’re lazy. You have very low self-esteem, which leads to an increased rate of depression. Kids with dyslexia are more likely to end up in the juvenile system, because they act up. It’s because they can’t figure things out. It’s so important in our society to read.

What do we mean when we call something a disadvantage? Conventional wisdom holds that a disadvantage is something that ought to be avoided—that it is a setback or a difficulty that leaves you worse off than you would be otherwise. But that is not always the case. In the next few chapters, I want to explore the idea that there are such things as “desirable difficulties.”

Cognitive reflection test - world's shortest intelligence test. Developed by Yale professor Shane Frederick, and it measures your ability to understand when something is more complex than it appears—to move past impulsive answers to deeper, analytic judgments.

• People do better on the test when you make it a little harder (softer, slanted font)

• Making the questions disfluent causes people to think more deeply about whatever they come across. They’ll use more resources on it.

• People overcome hurdles more easily when you make them think a little harder

• 10 pt gray, italicized Myriad Pro

A third of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic.

capitalization learning is when we get good at something by building on the strengths that we are naturally given. Compensation learning is more about the desired difficulties, like David Boies having to become a supurb listener when he entered a field that was meant for someone supurb at reading.

All good parents try to teach their children the art of persuasion, of course. But a normal, well-adjusted child has no need to take those lessons seriously. If you get As in school, you never need to figure out how to negotiate your way to a passing grade, or to look around the room as a nine-year-old and start strategizing about how to make it through the next hour. But when Grazer practiced negotiation, just as when Boies practiced listening, he had a gun to his head. He practiced day in, day out, year after year. When Grazer said that was “really good training,” what he meant was learning to talk his way from a position of weakness to a position of strength turned out to be the perfect preparation for the profession he ended up in. Grazer is now one of the most successful movie producers in Hollywood of the past thirty years

Gary Cohn

Jordan Peterson says innovators have a very specific mix of the big 5 personality traits, specifically being very high on openness and very low on agreeableness.

“If you have a new idea, and it’s disruptive and you’re agreeable, then what are you going to do with that?” says Peterson. “If you worry about hurting people’s feelings and disturbing the social structure, you’re not going to put your ideas forward.” As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Disability may make it a little easier to be disagreeable.

They literally thought that I was conscientiously making decisions to be a disruptive kid, to not learn, to hold the class back. You know what it’s like, you’re a six- or seven- or eight-year-old kid, and you’re in a public school setting, and everyone thinks you’re an idiot, so you try to do funny things to try to create some social esteem. You’d try to get up every morning and say, today is going to be better, but after you do that a couple of years, you realize that today is going to be no different than yesterday

to pretend to be an experienced options trader when in fact he was not. Most of us would have foundered in that situation. We aren’t used to playing someone other than ourselves. But Cohn had been playing someone other than himself since elementary school.

Better to play the clown than to be thought of as an idiot. And if you’ve been pretending to be someone else your whole life, how hard is it to bluff your way through a one-hour cab ride to LaGuardia?

The disabled have an extremely high ability to deal with failure.

Chapter 5 - Emil "Jay" Freireich

British war tragedy by the germans is sometimes attributed by "Stiff upper lip," the stoicism said to be inherent in the English character. (Not surprisingly, this is the explanation most favored by the British themselves.)

Canadian Psychiatrist explains bombing culture by dividing the population into 3 groups.

1. People killed - unimportant because they are unable to go around spreading panic.

2. Near misses - survive deeply impressed (have a powerful reinforcement of the fear reaction in association with bombing).

3. Remote misses - A near miss leaves you traumatized. A remote miss makes you think you are invincible

We are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.…When we have been afraid that we may panic in an air-raid, and, when it has happened, we have exhibited to others nothing but a calm exterior and we are now safe, the contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage

the same event can be profoundly damaging to one group while leaving another better off. That man who worked in a button factory and that young woman whose house was shaken by the bomb were better off for their experience, weren’t they? They were in the middle of a war. They couldn’t change that fact. But they were freed of the kinds of fears that can make life during wartime unendurable.  Dyslexia is a classic example of this same phenomenon. Many people with dyslexia don’t manage to compensate for their disability. There are a remarkable number of dyslexics in prison, for example: these are people who have been overwhelmed by their failure at mastering the most basic of academic tasks. Yet this same neurological disorder in people like Gary Cohn and David Boies can also have the opposite effect.

Too often, we make the same mistake as the British did and jump to the conclusion that there is only one kind of response to something terrible and traumatic. There isn’t

completely irrepressible. He would say whatever came into his mind

The reason most of us do not scream “Murderer!” at our coworkers is that we can put ourselves in their shoes; we can imagine what someone else is feeling and create that feeling in ourselves. We can take that route because we have been supported and comforted and understood in our suffering. That support gives us a model of how to feel for others: it is the basis for empathy. But in Freireich’s formative years, every human connection ended in death and abandonment—and a childhood as bleak as that leaves only pain and anger in its wake

A surprising number of innovators, entrepreneurs and artists lost a parent during childhood

One of the reasons, he concludes, is that they have “inherited an excessive amount of psychological health.” Those who fall short, he says, are children “too conventional, too obedient, too unimaginative, to make the big time with some revolutionary idea.” He goes on: “Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions. In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.”

Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all. Do you see the catastrophic error that the Germans made? They bombed London because they thought that the trauma associated with the Blitz would destroy the courage of the British people. In fact, it did the opposite. It created a city of remote misses, who were more courageous than they had ever been before. The Germans would have been better off not bombing London at all.

Frieriech's dad blew his brains out and that's why there's a cure for Leukemia.

But the question of what any of us would wish on our children is the wrong question, isn’t it? The right question is whether we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma—and the answer is that we plainly do. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences

Chapter 6 - Wyatt Walker

Eugene Bull Connor -

Trickster tales were wish fulfillments in which slaves dreamed of one day rising above their white masters. But as the historian Lawrence Levine writes, they were also “painfully realistic stories which taught the art of surviving and even triumphing in the face of a hostile environment.” African-Americans were outnumbered and overpowered, and the idea embedded in the Brer Rabbit stories  was that the weak could compete in even the most lopsided of contests if they were willing to use their wits. Brer Rabbit understood Brer Fox in a way that Brer Fox did not understand himself. He realized his opponent Fox was so malicious that he couldn’t resist giving Rabbit the punishment Rabbit said he desperately wanted to avoid. So Rabbit tricked Fox, gambling that he could not bear the thought that a smaller and lesser animal was enjoying himself so much.

The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.

Wyatt Walker was a Baptist minister from Massachusetts. He joined up with Martin Luther King in 1960. He was King’s “nuts and bolts” man, his organizer and fixer. He was a mischief maker

They were astounded to watch King become his assailant’s protector. He held him solicitously and, as the audience began singing Movement songs, told him that their cause was just, that violence was self-demeaning, that “we’re going to win.” Then King introduced him to the crowd, as though he were a surprise guest. Roy James, a twenty-four-year-old native New Yorker who lived in an American Nazi Party dormitory in Arlington, Virginia, began to weep in King’s embrace.

march would be led by King’s brother, Alfred Daniel, known as A.D.

Walker and King were trying to set up that picture—the German shepherd lunging at the boy. But to get it, they had to play a complex and duplicitous game. To Bull Connor, they pretended that they had a hundred times more supporters than they did. To the press, they pretended that they were shocked at the way Connor let his dogs loose on their protesters—while at the same time, they were jumping for joy behind closed doors. And to the parents whose children they were using as cannon fodder, they pretended that Bull Connor’s prisons were a good place for their children to catch up on their reading.

The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity

The world doesn’t know this happened, because you didn’t photograph it. I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.” He needed the picture. In response to the complaints over the use of children, Fred Shuttlesworth said it best: “We got to use what we got.”

Grazer and Cohn—two outsiders with learning disabilities—played a trick. They bluffed their way into professions that would have been closed to them. The man in the cab assumed that no one would be so audacious as to say he knew how to trade options if he didn’t. And it never occurred to the people Brian Grazer called that when he said he was Brian Grazer from Warner Brothers, what he meant was that he was Brian Grazer who pushed the mail cart around at Warner Brothers. What they did is not “right,” just as it is not “right” to send children up against police dogs. But we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside. David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others. That’s how people with brains a little bit different from the rest of ours get jobs as options traders and Hollywood producers—and a small band of protesters armed with nothing but their wits have a chance against the likes of Bull Connor

Chapter 7 - Rosemary Lawler

‘Taigs’ is a derogatory word for an Irish Catholic.

Harriet Carson. “She was famous for hitting Maggie Thatcher over the head with a handbag at City Hall,”

Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr (economists at the pentagon-inspired post WWII rand corporation) wrote a report called Rebellion and Authority. It became the blueprint for the war in Vietnam, and for how police departments dealt with civil unrest, and for how governments coped with terrorism. Its conclusion was simple: If you were in a position of power, you didn’t have to worry about how lawbreakers felt about what you were doing. You just had to be tough enough to make them think twice.

They had no way of following along. We often think of authority as a response to disobedience: a child acts up, so a teacher cracks down. Stella’s classroom, however, suggests something quite different: disobedience can also be a response to authority. If the teacher doesn’t do her job properly, then the child will become disobedient.

Instead of responding in a ‘let me control your behavior’ way, the teacher needs to think, ‘How can I do something interesting that will prevent you from misbehaving in the first place?’”

When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave. This is called the “principle of legitimacy,” and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice—that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.

The reason most police departments around the world haven’t followed Jaffe’s lead is that what she did doesn’t seem right. Johnnie Jones was a bad kid. Buying food and toys for people like him seems like the worst form of liberal indulgence. If the police chief in your town announced, in the face of a major crime wave, that she was going to start hugging and feeding the families of the criminals roaming the streets, you’d be speechless—right?

Chapter 8 - Wilma Derksen

The group put together a proposal. At Reynolds’s insistence, it was short and simple, written in laymen’s language. It became known as the Three Strikes Law. Anyone convicted of a second serious or criminal offense in California, it stated, would have to serve double the sentence currently on the books. And anyone convicted of a third offense—and the definition of a third offense included every crime imaginable—would run out of chances entirely and serve a mandatory sentence of twenty-five years to life. There were no exceptions or loopholes

The criminologist Franklin Zimring called it “the largest penal experiment in American history.” There were eighty thousand people behind bars in California’s prisons in 1989. Within ten years, that number would double—and along the way, the crime rate in California came tumbling down. Between 1994 and 1998, the homicide rate in California dropped 41.4 percent, rape dropped 10.9 percent, robbery dropped by 38.7 percent, assault dropped by 22.1 percent, burglary dropped by 29.9 percent, and auto theft dropped by 36.6 percent. Mike Reynolds pledged, on his daughter’s deathbed, to ensure that what happened to Kimber would never happen to anyone else—and out of his grief came a revolution.

What if the relationship between punishment and crime was also an inverted U? In other words, what if—past a certain point—cracking down on crime stopped having any effect on criminals and maybe even started to make crime worse?

It became a very viable option to go into the crime business. The human psyche follows the course of least resistance. The course of least resistance is what’s easy, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to go out and rob and steal and suck drugs than it is to go out and bust your ass forty hours a week and punch in on a job and take a lot of shit off customers. Who needs that? I can go out there and wave a gun around and make as much as I want as fast as I want, and if I get caught, ninety-five percent of all cases get plea-bargained down. They charge me with this, I’ll admit to that, and so let’s make a deal. And then third, I’m going to only serve half the time. Weigh all three, the odds are you’re going to do one hell of a lot of crime before you ever in fact get caught and prosecuted.”

Joe Davis killed Kimber Reynolds because she would not give him the respect he thought he deserved as he held a gun to her head and grabbed at her purse. How on earth does changing the severity of punishment deter someone whose brain works like that?

It may simply be that those who stand ready today to take a chance, often on impulse, often while impaired, on what they view as a very small likelihood of an already very serious sanction will stand ready tomorrow to take the same chance on what they still view as a very small likelihood of a somewhat more serious sanction

Longer sentences work on young men. But once someone passes that crucial midtwenties mark, all longer sentences do is protect us from dangerous criminals at the point that they become less dangerous. Once again, what starts out as a promising strategy stops working

Having a parent incarcerated increases a child’s chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.

“If more than two percent of the neighborhood goes to prison,” Clear concluded, “the effect on crime starts to reverse.”

In California in 1989, there were seventy-six thousand people behind bars. Ten years later, largely because of Three Strikes, that number had more than doubled. On a per capita basis, by the turn of the twenty-first century, California had between five and eight times as many people in prison as did Canada or Western Europe

Some religious movements have as their heroes great warriors or prophets. The Mennonites have Dirk Willems, who was arrested for his religious beliefs in the sixteenth century and held in a prison tower. With the aid of a rope made of knotted rags, he let himself down from the window and escaped across the castle’s ice-covered moat. A guard gave chase. Willems made it safely to the other side. The guard did not, falling through the ice into the freezing water, and Willems stopped, went back, and pulled his pursuer to safety. For his act of compassion, he was taken back to prison, tortured, and then burned slowly at the stake as he repeated “Oh, my Lord, my God” seventy times over.

“I was taught that there was an alternative way to deal with injustice,” Derksen said. “I was taught it in school. We were taught the history of persecution. We had this picture of martyrdom that went right back to the sixteenth century. The whole Mennonite philosophy is that we forgive and we move on.” To the Mennonites, forgiveness is a religious imperative: Forgive those who trespass against you''

Derksen had been talking for a long time, and the emotion had begun to take its toll. She was talking slowly and softly now. “She was very worried,” Derksen went on. “She was so scared. She had seen my anger. And now would I stay locked in that anger and direct it to her? Would I reject her?” To forgive her friend, she realized, she had to forgive Grant. She could not carve out exceptions for the sake of her moral convenience

A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive—and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.

Chapter 9 - Andre Trocme

The local Huguenot pastor was a man named André Trocmé. He was a pacifist. On the Sunday after France fell to the Germans, Trocmé preached a sermon at the Protestant temple of Le Chambon. “Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty,” he said. “Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly. We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the Gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate.”

But the best answer is the one that David and Goliath has tried to make plain—that wiping out a town or a people or a movement is never as simple as it looks. The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak. The Huguenots of Le Chambon were descendants of France’s original Protestant population, and the truth is that people had tried—and failed—to wipe them out before

The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission. You could kill André Trocmé. But in all likelihood, all that would mean is that another André Trocmé would rise in his place.

It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with the sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.