The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

by Todd Rose

To our twenty-first-century minds, it has come to seem so natural and obvious that talented people are “above average” while incompetent folks are “below average” that it seems simplistic to attribute the origins of this idea to one person. And yet, it was Galton who almost single-handedly supplanted Quetelet’s conviction that human worth could be measured by how close a person was to the average with the notion that worth was better measured by how far a person was from the average. Just as Quetelet’s ideas about types took the intellectual world by storm in the 1840s, so did Galton’s idea about rank in the 1890s, and by the early 1900s, the notion that people could be sorted into distinct bins of ability from low to high had infiltrated virtually all the social and behavioral sciences. The Age of Average—a cultural era stretching from Quetelet’s invention of social physics in the 1840s until today—can be characterized by two assumptions unconsciously shared by almost every member of society: Quetelet’s idea of the average man and Galton’s idea of rank.