When Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success came out last year, there was an outcry from some in the Asian American community over one of the chapters which made the argument that the reason why Asians are so good at math had to do with our history as rice farmers. Now, just hearing that out of context does make the statement sound ridiculous and possibly racist. But many of those who found fault with Gladwell’s thesis hadn’t actually read the book so their complaints were based on a superficial (mis)understanding of what Gladwell was trying to say.

Obviously our blog was not around a year ago, but we’re here now and I’ve actually read the book. I noticed in this past Sunday’s LA Times that Outliers is still the best-selling hardcover title so thought it might be a good time for another installment of our on-going series where we look at things that may or may not be racist and offensive. So I present Gladwell’s argument for why rice farming made Asians good at math, so you can decide for yourself if this is indeed: chinky or not chinky?

Gladwell starts off this chapter by explaining how rice farming has been an integral part of life in East Asia for all of recorded history and how it is different and more difficult than other types of farming. Unlike wheat fields, rice paddies are “built” as opposed to “opened up.” You don’t simply clear the land and plow. Rice fields are carved into the land in an elaborate series of terraces or constructed from marshlands and river plains. A complex system of dikes, channels and gates must be constructed for proper irrigation. Claypans must be carefully engineered for the rice seedlings and the correct type and amount of fertilizer laid down at the right time.

Gladwell goes on with more details, but the basic point he’s making is that those who grow rice must work harder than any other type of farmer. Working in rice fields is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive that working on the same sized corn or wheat field. Some estimates put the annual workload of a rice farmer in Asia at 3,000 hours a year which basically means you have no time off.

Historically, Western agriculture has been “mechanically” oriented. In the West, as the farmer becomes more efficient, he can introduce more sophisticated machinery making his work easier. In Asia, farmers do not have the money to buy new equipment nor are there vast amounts of farmable land for expansion so they must be smarter and make better choices to increase their yields and be more successful.

Because there was no feudal system in Asia like in Europe where farmers labored for masters, Gladwell also argues that Asians found more meaning in their work because they were more autonomous. And since the job of rice farming is so exacting and requires specialized skills, you had to really care and bust your ass or you wouldn’t have a crop. Hence, the formation of an attitude and work ethic shared by many Asians summarized in this Chinese proverb which Gladwell quotes: “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.”

Obviously, from there, it’s easy to make the leap to Asian students becoming math whizzes, right? Here’s an excerpt of the conclusion  Gladwell reaches: “Go to any Western college campus and you’ll find that Asian students have a reputation for being in the library long after everyone else has left. Sometimes people of Asian background get offended when their culture is described this way, because they think that the stereotype is being used as a form of disparagement. But a belief in work ought to be a thing of beauty.”

I’m not sure if this link from rice farming to math skills completely makes sense, and any sort of stereotyping, even when it’s a propagation of a “good” stereotype, can have negative ramifications. But elsewhere in the chapter, Gladwell makes a more cohesive argument for why Asians might be good at math (though I’m skeptical about how much it applies to Asian Americans born and raised in the U.S. who are still burdened with the model minority label). It’s a lengthy excerpt, but I’ve included the whole section so as not to misrepresent his point:

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.

That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene’s book “The Number Sense,” and as Dehaene explains:

Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is ‘si’ and 7 ‘qi’) Their English equivalents—”four,” “seven”—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.

It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one would think that we would also say one-teen, two-teen, and three-teen. But we don’t. We make up a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty, and sixty, which sound like what they are. But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound what they are but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second: twenty-one, twenty-two. For the teens, though, we do it the other way around. We put the decade second and the unit number first: fourteen, seventeen, eighteen. The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten one. Twelve is ten two. Twenty-four is two ten four, and so on.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children, at that age, can only count to fifteen, and don’t reach forty until they’re five: by the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can perform basic functions—like addition—far more easily. Ask an English seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty two, in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is nine and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens nine.

“The Asian system is transparent,” says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist, who has done much of the research on Asian-Western differences. “I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different. Instead of being a rote learning thing, there’s a pattern I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. There is an expectation that it’s sensible. For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, ‘out of five parts, take three.’ That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It’s differentiating the denominator and the numerator.”

The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among western children starts in the third and fourth grade, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn’t seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.

Asian children, by contrast, don’t face nearly that same sense of bafflement. They can hold more numbers in their head, and do calculations faster, and the way fractions are expressed in their language corresponds exactly to the way a fraction actually is—and maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle.

When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have built-in advantage. . .

So, let’s do the math: Rice farming background creates strong work ethic + a culture/language that makes math more logical = Asian math whizzes!  Chinky or not chinky?

POSTSCRIPT: It didn’t get as much attention, but Gladwell also devoted a chapter in his book to Korean Air and why it had one of the worst crash records for any commercial airliner and how it turned itself around (it’s now one of the safest airlines). Possibly more on this in a future edition.