Here's an interesting piece of trivia: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Bill Joy were born within a year of each other. They would go on to become leaders in the software industry as heads of Microsoft, Apple, and Sun Microsystems, respectively. Proponents of equality of opportunity would hold that their birth dates and their later success are totally unrelated. However, Malcolm Gladwell asserts that far from a coincidence, birthdays are integral to explaining how these men rose to such international prominence.

Outliers: The Story of Success is Gladwell's investigation into the seemingly-innocuous causal factors behind today's pioneers. As it turns out, birthdays matter: look at a list of professional North American hockey players and you will find significantly more born in January than December. In the case of the NHL, this is because children born toward the start of the year are more physically developed when teams start scouting, and are thus more desirable candidates. Younger players may prove equally capable if given the chance, but why waste time and resources bringing the runts up to par when you already have an able squad?

In the case of Gates et al., they had the fortune to develop their education during a narrow window of time when computer technology was entering the consumer sphere. Had they been born earlier, they would have been jaded by the old thinking and failed to seize the opportunity; later, and they would have missed the entrepreneurial bus. Instead, they emerged as the vanguard of the digital revolution, blazing the trail on which the rest of the Information Age has trod.

To be sure, individual effort is also critical. Gates, Jobs and Joy were smart, creative men willing to plunge into an uncertain future. But in order to develop their genius, they needed time. A recurring theme in the book is the idea that mastery of a skill requires 10 000 hours of practice, be it art, music, sports, or computers. Look into the biography of any virtuoso and find recollections of how he or she was dedicated to practice or play. Gates et al. emerged as technological pioneers at early ages because they had been able to devote inordinate amounts of time to their hobbies. Gates' community pooled together to buy a computer for his school, and he and his peers found a way to cheat the time block and program well past allotted hours.

Gladwell presents numerous case studies of how good circumstance has enabled breakout success stories, and how misfortune has impeded the gifted. Compare J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the leading men of the Manhattan Project, and Christopher Langan, who despite claims as "the smartest man in America" is virtually invisible to scholarly circles. Although a certified genius, Langan's impoverished upbringing complicated his formal education and led him to adopt an adversarial attitude with postsecondary institutions. Having shunned university, he lacks academic credentials, and thus, may never see his work published in any leading scientific journal.

All of this challenges the quintessential American myth that anyone can go from rags to riches. If a man such as Langan is unable to find success correlative to his capability, what can we conclude about equality of opportunity? Success requires hard work, but also a certain degree of luck: like Aristotle's aristocrat, someone in the right place to tell the right things to the right people at the right time.

The core of Gladwell's argument, which remains subversively tacit throughout most of the book, is that in order to foster greater individual success, society must strive to provide equality of condition. He offers a hitherto-overlooked defence of affirmative action in the education system, explaining that entry scores are irrelevant to career prospects, and exit scores aren't so critical either: seeking employment in law, for instance, one needn't have the highest mark in the class, merely one good enough. Actively targeting disadvantaged demographics helps them take hold of opportunity otherwise denied by socioeconomic status. Gladwell discusses the United States' Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a college-preparatory charter school network whose attendees are overwhelmingly impoverished African-American and Latino communities. KIPP boasts high success rates, but its regimen is not for the faint-of-heart: school hours are longer, summer break is shorter, and the daily homework leaves little time for family interaction. It is a gruelling routine: the girl who serves as the personability of the KIPP chapter goes to bed late each night, thoroughly exhausted. But in a society unwilling or unable to tackle domestic inequalities, what other options are there for these children to escape their disadvantaged position? That is Gladwell's challenge to the reader.

As Ha Joon Chang colourfully illustrates in 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, it's no good having everyone start at the same line on the racetrack when some runners are strapped with cinder blocks. I was at a restaurant the other day when this notion was reiterated by a group of young women, one of whom I gathered to be either a teacher or teacher's assistant. She was talking about a game conducted in class to educate about gambling: students were given poker chips in uneven distribution to be used at their discretion for activities I didn't catch. At lunch they would be cashed in for food. Understandably, those with fewer chips were much less willing to risk what they had. So it is the same in society at large, with chips translated into economic and social advantage; lack of a social safety net discourages citizens from taking risks lest they lose their life savings. Yes, they have equal opportunity, but social and structural circumstances prevent them from acting on it.

Providing everyone everything they could possibly use to advance their condition is a utopian goal, and will almost certainly never be achieved. Nonetheless, if we hold that all humans are equally deserving of a prosperous future, we must strive to level the playing field as much as possible. After all, who knows how many entrepreneurs are simply waiting for their chance to shine?