Revenge of the Tipping Point

“If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who knows where and when to push has real power. So who are those people? What are their intentions? What techniques are they using? In the world of law enforcement, the word forensic refers to an investigation of the origins and scope of a criminal act: “reasons, culprits, and consequences.” Revenge of the Tipping Point is an attempt to do a forensic investigation of social epidemics.” Malcolm Gladwell

What causes things to go viral? Forget Tik Tok videos, what causes major social upheavals that can happen rapidly and unexpectedly? And what do people try to do to cause them or avoid them?

These are questions that Canadian journalist and writer Malcolm Gladwell has struggled with for decades. His first book, The Tipping Point, came out in 2000 and became a runaway best-seller. He has written several good books since then, but he finally got around to writing a sequel, The Revenge of the Tipping Point, in 2024.

The stories in the book are fascinating and compelling, and Gladwell weaves them into a discussion about various ways small actions can have big results. The book has three main themes:

1- The overstory is a unique set of social conditions that can be limited to a smaller group. It sets the tone for behaviors that would be seen as abnormal everywhere else. As examples he looks at how Miami became the home of rampant Medicare fraud, how medical treatment frequency can vary significantly from city to city, and how the upper-middle class students of a too-homogenous town could become a hotbed of suicide epidemics.

2- The Magic Third is a look at how far minorities can come before a tipping point is reached and the entire group changes. Minority races are fine with white people as long as they stay below 20% or so, but once they start to approach 33%, the majority gets nervous and white flight begins from neighborhoods, schools, and more. A different reaction happens when female participation in corporate boards reaches the magic third- they become more accepted by the male majority and less of a token presence.

3- The Law of the Few shows that big transformative events can be started by a very small minority of people. While many diseases are contagious, super spreaders emit way more germs than the rest of us. The Holocaust was somewhat ignored for decades after World War 2, but an NBC miniseries in 1978 jumpstarted the discussions and prompted museums to open up all over. And the 1998 television show Will and Grace was supposedly responsible for transforming attitudes towards gays and lesbians leading to the Supreme Court decision a decade later. (Though I think Ellen Degeneres coming out in 1997 may have had more of an impact.)

The overstory section got me thinking. It talks about how cheetahs were susceptible to disease because they were all genetically related after a tragic die-off. Diversity in nature means strength, because it gives us other options when one option fails. In the 2020's, we are at war with diversity, and I fear that this urge for conformity will make society weaker, not stronger.

The magic third stories were illuminating, especially the one about the Harvard Rugby Team. I had always wondered why obscure sports like Rugby, Volleyball, Crew, and Field Hockey were a thing in colleges. They don't produce revenue like football or soccer do, but they do set aside precious freshman admittances for wealthy, white athletes who help keep a school below the magic 33% of minorities according to Gladwell.

Finally there's the opioid epidemic. Gladwell explains how a small minority of physicians wrote the vast majority of prescriptions for the drug in the beginning and lit the fires. And then in 2010 another fire was lit that converted Oxycontin users to Fentanyl, where the crisis still lays today.

Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors, and his stories are well-researched and thought-provoking. I wish he could predict future tipping points. There are a lot of things out there I'd like to see get better, but it will take a societal transformation.

Here is Malcolm in his own words in a popular TED talk.