The Three Lessons of Joe Flom

Jewish lawyers in 1950s-60s New York were excluded from elite WASP law firms, forcing them into 'undesirable' work like hostile takeovers and litigation, which became enormously lucrative when the M&A boom hit in the 1970s-80s.

Being born in a demographic trough (small birth cohort, e.g., during the Depression) creates advantages because there is less competition for resources, schools, and jobs.

The garment industry work of Jewish immigrants instilled a meaningful work ethic that they passed to their children, who then succeeded as professionals.

Skadden Arps was founded in 1948 by Marshall Skadden, Les Arps, and John Slate as a small, unglamorous firm. Flom joined in 1948 and became a named partner in 1954, eventually transforming the firm into a mergers-and-acquisitions powerhouse by the 1970s-80s.

The hostile takeover wave of the 1970s-80s was driven by financial deregulation, junk bond financing, and market internationalization -- structural economic changes that happened to reward the expertise Jewish lawyers had developed through decades of being excluded from elite corporate work.

US birth rates dropped significantly during the Great Depression -- from approximately 21.3 births per 1,000 population in 1930 to 18.4 per 1,000 in 1933 -- creating smaller cohorts that faced less competition for education and employment in the 1950s-60s.

Gladwell argues that Jewish immigrant garment workers transmitted an entrepreneurial work ethic to their children because their labor was 'meaningful' -- involving autonomy, complexity, and connection between effort and reward -- three criteria drawn from sociological research on meaningful work.

Many of the most successful New York lawyers born around 1930 share remarkably similar backgrounds: children of Jewish immigrants, born during the Depression, who attended City College or similar accessible institutions before entering law.