Review: Revenge of the Tipping Point

Revenge of the Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell
Abacus Books, 2024, 352 pages

The Tipping Point was published early in the year 2000, the first book by Malcolm Gladwell, a Canadian born in the UK who had been working as a New Yorker writer. The book and the author became publishing sensations.

Its purpose was to explore the reasons ideas turn into social epidemics. Though written in the first decade of the web and before social media and smartphones, and drawing on examples from history, it was adopted as a manual both for viral marketing in the social media age and for ‘nudge theory’ behavioural psychology (the book’s subtitle was ‘How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference’).

A quarter of a century on, Gladwell says he still does not fully understand tipping points – the connection between ideas and behaviour change – hence this new book. He’s also ready to explore the dark side of social epidemics: the possibility that the same laws can be used with less positive social intentions.

Stories of systematic Medicare fraud may not sound significant to UK readers, but Gladwell is making a case for the importance of place in crime epidemics. This may sound random, but the warning is against monocultures in general: whether it’s crime hotspots, in-breeding, or pushy parents and their similarly ambitious children living in an idyllic small town (spoiler alert: the epidemic in this case was teenage suicide). The conclusion: ‘epidemics love monocultures. But so do we.’

How do the most selective universities avoid becoming intellectual monocultures? By admitting less academic athletes to ensure diversity of enrolment. Yet Gladwell takes this discussion further and suggests a more sinister motive. The effect of lower entry criteria for athletes is not to recruit more disadvantaged students, but rather to select a wealthy elite – because to be a young tennis champion, say, requires parents with the time and wealth to support your development.

The three elements of epidemics proposed here are the overstory (a metanarrative created by powerful storytellers); group proportions (the tipping point, if you will); and superspreaders (or the law of the few).

They come together in the case of the opioid crisis in the US. The overstory was that those States requiring doctors to record their prescriptions in triplicate had protection against overprescription. The superspreaders were those practitioners whose business relied on prescribing painkillers, and who welcomed the attention of Purdue Pharma’s sales reps (as recommended by McKinsey consultants). The group proportions relate to the numbers addicted to prescription painkillers.

But Revenge of the Tipping Point does not amount to a guide to viral marketing or to behavioural economics. Rather, it’s a collection of loosely connected but interesting stories.

Nor does the book address the big change since publication of The Tipping Point in 2000: the emergence of social media and its role in spreading misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories. I had thought this is the direction he would take with a less optimistic revisiting of the concepts behind The Tipping Point.

Luckily there are some strong alternatives (I recommend Poles Apart and Foolproof), but Gladwell’s eye for detail and flair for storytelling would have added much, I’m sure, to these discussions.

Instead we have a book that can be filed as ‘interesting but not essential’.