Imagine if there was no Beatles, no Beatlemania, or that the guys in the band from the city were just another band that never got a record deal or split up before they hit it big. The first issue of the Journal of Beatles Studies will be published in September and will feature an essay by Harvard University professor Cass R. Sunstein. Early this year, a preliminary draft was posted online.
The Beatles are popular and influential, and there is an academic journal devoted to them. John Lennon said in a 1980 interview that they were destined for greatness. Maybe not. Early on, record executives were not impressed. The group almost split up. They were carried along their winding road by an enthusiastic manager, a risk-taking producer, a big local fan base, and more. If seven or 17 things had gone differently, the Beatles wouldn't have made it.
Sunstein can't prove the theory that the Beatles got by with help from their friends. The point is not that. He uses Beatlemania to explore the effects of early social influence. Sunstein says that a lot of success in business, politics, academia and most other professions owes much to early opportunities.
Duncan Watts is a computational social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book Everything Is Obvious. There is a process that selects a very small number of people to be famous.
The process sketched out by Sunstein includes informational cascades, which are statements and actions of others.
Watts and his colleagues showed the power of early popularity in one of the few experimental examples of such processes. In a 2006 experiment, they played 48 unknown songs by unknown bands. The viewers decided which to download. They could see how many people had downloaded each song. The best songs were usually better than the worst. Sunstein writes that the results varied widely and that everything turned to initial popularity. If other Democrats cared about a Republican issue, it could become an issue for them, and vice versa.
It turns out that literary fame is not the same as being famous. Novelists and poets such as Jane Austen and John Keats were not as well-known as they are today. Mary Brunton was much more successful than Austen was because she made a little money from her novels. He was mostly unheralded. A biography propelled Austen to fame. Brunton is mostly forgotten now. Heather Jackson is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto. Entry into the literary pantheon requires meeting thresholds for quality and quantity, butadventitious circumstances take over, according to Jackson.
Everyone needs a champion. Sunstein says that many talented people never find one. The idea of lost Einsteins, an unknown number of people who could have been innovative geniuses but were born and raised in communities where innovation was not cultivated, was introduced by Harvard economist Raj Chetty. Being born to a lower-income or minority family can determine success or failure.
We might throw open the doors of opportunity if we accept that fact. It could make us more hopeful about our chances in life.
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