A book with a great start that unfortunately ends with a fallacious conclusion.

At the end of the ninth chapter, the author asserts that there would be twice as many hockey players if we had two cut off dates. This is ridiculous. It would of course mitigate the bias of age (i.e. what month you are born would not have such a big impact on getting selected). At best we would have marginally better players (though it is quite possible that some other arbitrary cutoff would replace the old one). There can be only so many NHL teams and therefore so many professional players.

He also asks, what if a million teenagers had access to the same advantages as Bill Gates, how many Microsoft would we have today? Well, it's quite obvious from his own argument that if so many had the same advantages, Bill would simply no longer be an outlier, and there would probably be no Microsoft. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, the combined contributions to society from these teenagers might be greater than those of Microsoft, a company with dubious achievements).

Ultimately the biggest let down is that this book frustratingly refuses to address the subject of inequality. If outliers are, basically, those who got lucky among those who were capable, then what implication does this have for social policy? Is it reasonable that these outliers amass extraordinary amounts of wealth when fundamentally their contributions are the result of chance (not exclusively, of course. Outliers are all hard working individuals, my point here is about the difference in renumeration compared to other similar yet not as lucky individuals). Tyrants are outliers as well. And we could do without them.