Malcolm Gladwell is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers including Outliers, and is a celebrated speaker including appearances on TED.
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The capitalization rate that Malcolm Gladwell describes is the rate that society capitalizes on its human potential. The cap rate application that HSe4Metrics aspires to is that of the individual—the rate that a young person capitalizes on personal potential.
Mr. Gladwell succinctly asks the question: What percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing it?
Illustrating his point, Gladwell gives an example: In East Tennessee only one student in 6 who gets a college scholarship in sports goes to college. That’s a cap rate of 1 in 6; hence, 16.67%. Thus he asks: In a society so focused on sports, if the cap rate is only 16.67% [rather than multiples greater] how bad are the cap rates for young people with other (less celebrated, less in the limelight) talents?
And don’t forget NAEP results: 50% of all U.S. high school graduates cannot reach minimum proficiency in reading, writing, math, or in any other NAEP category. Moreover, the likelihood is that the cap rate for young people in the top 50% may be no less a tragedy, albeit at a different level on the NAEP scale.
Further, Gladwell notes a study in the 1920s, the Terman longitudinal study, where 250,000 young people were tested to find the cohort with a threshold IQ of 140, considered genus level. Lewis Terman’s prediction was that IQ would be the single most determinate of success over a course of 50 years.
However, after only 30 years, the “obvious constraint” was determined to be poverty.
The HSe4Metics innovation for K-12-age young people (and kids years before kindergarten) is engineered to thrive in adverse conditions such as poverty, no less so than in conditions of wealth.
Rather than a dispassionate observer, as with the Terman study, the HSe4Metrics social media app will bring conditions of its own into play. Although the results of having the HSe4Metrics social media app in a young person’s life may be measured in countless ways, there will be objective metrics measured in hard-number results.
In the mix will be cap rate.