Malcolm Gladwell British-Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell became famous years ago with the term ‘tipping point’, although he did not coin it himself. Now he highlights this phenomenon again in a book that is less about success stories and more about ‘antisocial epidemics’.
West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is in danger of losing the floating ice shelf that currently slows the melting giant at its front. When the ice shelf breaksit will make the glacier even more unstable, which could have catastrophic consequences for the entire West Antarctic ice sheet. And for sea level rise worldwide. The Thwaites Glacier is also called the Doomsday-glacier.
It could happen at any moment: it tipping point is about one and a half degrees of average global warming, scientists think. Or lay; We have already passed that one and a half degree mark for a year.
Tipping points – a small change that throws a system out of balance, which leads to a big change – are everywhere. Hypes in fashion, technology or at the fair. A breakthrough of a political movement. A failing relationship. An unremarkable wave of disease that becomes an epidemic when the number of infections reaches a certain limit.
Or the dialogue from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1925), in which a man is asked how he became bankrupt and answers: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
From marginal to massive
The term was coined in 1957 by the American sociologist Morton Grodzins in his research into so-called ‘white flight‘: when the number of black families in a white neighborhood reached a ‘threshold value’, white families suddenly moved en masse.
But the phenomenon only really became known around the turn of the century thanks to the book of the same name by British-Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell. ‘Tippingpoint’ experienced a tipping point itself, as it were. Gladwell investigated how ideas, trends and behavior can suddenly change from marginal to massive. In the disease metaphor: they go ‘viral’ and cause a ‘social epidemic’.
“People are gradualists by nature,” Gladwell wrote at the time. They think linearly and cannot properly comprehend exponential growth. Suppose you were to fold an A4 sheet fifty times in half – it can be a maximum of eight times – your paper would be thicker than the distance from the earth to the sun. Just try.
In The Tipping Point he described, among other things, why crime figures in New York suddenly fell, how the super boring shoe brand Hush Puppies became a hit after all and how Lexus, a newcomer to the car market, achieved an image boost from a technical setback.
Gladwell distilled three ‘rules’ from it. A small number of special people – charismatic pioneers, networkers and smart salespeople – provide a powerful starting signal (The law of the few). An irresistible story – he calls it Sesame Street – makes popular (The stickiness factor). And the role of the environment; For example, peers or group members have more influence on children than parents, he says (The power of context).
All kinds of haggles were made, but they were compelling case studies with excellent questions: what about this, isn’t this counterintuitive, is the explanation the real explanation?
Social engineering
In The Tipping Point If you look for the name of the pioneering Grodzins in vain. In the sequel, Revenge of the Tipping Point (2024), just published in Dutch translation under the title We have to talk about the tipping point again to havehe still shows up, as a belated amends in a chapter about social engineering.
It did not become the retrospective of his first book that Gladwell had initially envisioned, to see what had remained on the sieve after a quarter of a century. His first book fit into the “hopeful time of a new millennium,” he says. Now the world seemed “too different.” No marketing success stories in this book, but a lot about what your American ‘asocial epidemics: the opiate crisis, spikes in bank robberies, and suicides. They often appear not to be evenly distributed across the country, but mainly locally or regionally.
How this is possible has to do with Gladwell’s ‘third law’, the influence of the environment, for which he now speaks overstory used. Such as the mentality of Californian free school parents and their children, which leads to vaccination skepticism there and only in those schools. Peer pressure returns in many forms, even in its apparent absence, such as in the ease with which rogue healthcare providers in Florida defraud the health insurance fund.
The part about turning points in groups, such as school classes and the ratio between men and a usually smaller number of women on boards of directors, is strong. His question: how large exactly does a minority have to be before it is no longer seen as a minority? Time and again it appears to be between 25 and 33 percent.
In mixed classes, the difference in performance suddenly disappears from that ratio. “When a woman is alone [in een bestuur] she stands out as a woman, but becomes invisible as a person,” he writes. But when women form the “magic third” on advisory boards, “the atmosphere changes radically.” “Then I just feel like one of the voices in the conversation,” he quotes one of them.
Knowing where the tipping point is makes social engineering “irresistible,” according to Gladwell. Such as rejecting men for board positions until the tipping point is reached. Or putting all children from minority groups in one class. But sell that.
Positive discrimination
It’s been tried before. To stem Grodzin’s ‘white flight’, an experimental neighborhood was set up in Palo Alto, California, in the 1950s, with a sophisticated mix of black, white and Asian families; afterwards the starting signal of the affirmative action (positive discrimination). But to maintain that mix, families were only allowed to sell their house to families of their ‘own color’, even if there was a better party. “To preserve multicultural harmony, they had to thwart the very people they were trying to help.” The experiment ended in tears. Tipping points never lead to simple solutions, Gladwell must conclude.
The opioid crisis plays a major role in the book, which opens and closes with judicial interrogations of the Sackler family and their Purdue Pharma. A lot has been written about this, and you don’t really need the idea of an ‘overstory’ for the aggressive and misleading marketing of the addictive painkiller OxyContin. In the few states that continued to adhere to strict rules for writing such a prescription, the crisis also turned out to be much smaller. Duh!
When Gladwell talks about “breaking overstories on a national scale” it even becomes ridiculous. For example, he claims that the real realization of the extermination of Jews “in the world” only dawned after, no Through the American four-part documentary Holocaust from 1978. Because “historians ignored the subject [en] survivors did not want to talk about it.” This after, to name just a few, the Eichman trial (1961), Hannah Arendt’s theory about ‘the banality of evil’ that had a huge impact on the Jewish community in the US in 1963, and the three-part The Destruction of the European Jews by the American historian Raul Hilberg (1961).
Formal compulsion
With the The Tipping Point Gladwell was one of the pioneers at the time who brought a curious look and an engaging style to seemingly everyday phenomena. His fresh science journalism built a bridge between experts and the interested layman – who turned out to be a mass audience, also for the other bestsellers that followed, such as Outliers and What the Dog Saw. With all the interesting things this new book has to offer, you cannot escape the impression that the tipping point frame is suffering from a bit of lack of form after 25 years.
Yet Gladwell has indeed reinvented himself, but with the podcast as a stage. In Revisionist History – now in its fifteenth season – he unravels mysteries where there are none at first glance. The latest episode is about the question why American buildings that are not very tall often do not have an elevator. Gladwell: “Some of you will now say: do you really think I’m going to listen to you for half an hour about elevators? And my answer is: Oh, yes, you are.” And then you hang on his every word.
Source: NRC