Review: David Epstein's "Range"
Two Stars out of Five
With my dissertation complete and a long drive ahead of me, I’ve gotten the chance to read a few audiobooks on vacation. I’ve been hoping to read Epstein’s range for a while now, and was thrilled to get the chance. I see why it has won awards. I also have concerns—hence this review.
Before I engage in critique, let me say this clearly: Range is fun to read. David Epstein writes with charm, precision, and narrative flair. His examples are memorable, his arguments compelling, and the book offers a buffet of the very best from psychology, sports, and leadership. He is correct that we need more lateral thinking, and that emphasizing general knowledge rather than early specialization is one path toward achieving it. I finished the book convinced that we should expose more people to more fields—and that creativity often thrives in unlikely combinations.
But the very strength of Range—its rhetorical polish—is also its greatest weakness. It’s all verve and vibes; great flair, but thin on evidence. I came away admiring Epstein as a storyteller, but frustrated by how selectively and sometimes carelessly he marshals the empirical research.
I have three core concerns:
1. Generalism, But Only in One Direction
Epstein champions breadth—but curiously, his examples of "generalists" are almost exclusively people who move from quantitative fields into creative or humanistic ones. His heroes are CEOs who once majored in philosophy, engineers who play jazz, or tennis stars who dabbled in skiing. These are fun stories. But for a book that calls for intellectual diversity, there’s an odd absence of quantitative generalists—people who bridge artistic curiosity and statistical or scientific rigor.
In that sense, Range doesn't argue for true range. It argues for moving away from STEM into the arts and humanities. And while I love the humanities, I’m skeptical of the underlying message: that generalism = de-specializing. Real range would involve becoming conversant in both Kahlo and calculus, logic and literature.
A more rigorous statistical lens could have strengthened the argument in two ways: a little coding, a little data engineering, a little economics would help a great many students think more laterally, true enough—but it would also have protected Epstein from his overuse of individual cases. Epstein offers a parade of anecdotes: each one starring a brilliant generalist who succeeded because they flitted, shifted, or explored widely. But what about those who flitted and failed? There’s no accounting for base rates, survivorship bias, or opportunity cost. (Epstein himself is a survivor in the survivorship bias sense, and never seems to see it. ) For a book that rightly defines confirmation bias, it succumbs to it over and over again: a serious grapple with his intellectual opponents would have improved the quality of the book a great deal.
2. Correlation ≠ Causation
I loved the book’s emphasis on creativity and the arts. Epstein shines when he discusses lateral thinking, analogy, and non-traditional problem solving. But, again, the lack of statistics rears its ugly head: the implied causal chain—dabbling leads to creativity leads to success—is never rigorously defended.
Many creative people have nonlinear careers. That’s true. But that doesn’t mean nonlinear careers make people creative. And the case studies fall apart when scrutinized. A quick glance at today's top CEOs—Bezos, Cook, Nadella, Huang—suggests that many high performers specialize early, build deep expertise, and rarely flit between fields. Their backgrounds are boringly homogenous: computer science, engineering, operations. Epstein and I can go toe-to-toe with anecdotes and never get anywhere—and so, needing a something more persuasive, I fault him for not giving me stronger evidence with better firepower.
The danger here is real. Range will be read by college students, mid-career wanderers, and frustrated dreamers. Many will see in it an endorsement of meandering: of not committing, not specializing, not developing core competencies. I am a college professor. too many of my students believe that the next change of major is going to be their pivot into greatness. Instead, they just drift.
The book never reckons with that.
3. Misused Evidence and Educational Confusion
Some of Epstein’s biggest rhetorical punches come from misapplied or misrepresented studies. According to Epstein, the following were all caused by too much specialization and too little generalization:
The Challenger explosion.
The Flynn effect (rising IQ scores).
The Ehrlich-Simon bet.
Except that Challenger was the result of not looking at good, available data—as Epstein himself lays out! It might be due to conformity culture or group psychology too—but it felt like a stretch to blame it all on generalists! The Flynn effect is—in my view—primarily the result of better drinking water and access to medical care, but if there is a cognitive effect it is likely due to our schools improving in teaching the narrow set of things that are considered the academic subjects of the 21st century; we are succeeding because we are specializing! The Ehrlich-Simon bet was because Simon was a generalist, but he wasn’t: he was an economist!
Most frustrating for me—as a teacher of educational psychology—was Epstein’s treatment of cognitive science. He criticizes blocked practice and champions interleaving without clarifying that interleaving works because students have first developed fluency. Fluency practice—especially in foundational skills—is not a villain. It’s the prerequisite for higher-order thinking.
This matters. Epstein’s portrayal will be weaponized by those who want to ditch traditional learning progressions and jump straight to critical thinking. But real critical thinking is built on knowledge, not a substitute for it.
As an aside, while Epstein and I agree that general education is crucial, I suspect we’d disagree on how to do it. I’ve seen no evidence that requiring a slate of random humanities courses turns students into insightful, creative thinkers. We’re still producing bored philistines. Generalism without rigor is just aesthetic preference. If you want to do GE right, try giving students a strand of classes—two or three at least—in content areas like economics or statistics or coding. No more random requirements and forced classes: a little more specialization even in the general fields could do a lot of good.
Final Verdict
Range is worth reading. Epstein is a master of narrative and a skilled communicator. But read it skeptically. The stories are inspiring, the case compelling—but under the surface are problematic assumptions, misused studies, and a seductive thesis that may encourage drifting over depth.
It’s a great book of ideas. Just not a great book of evidence.