Lounge
Malcolm Gladwell's ‘Revenge of the Tipping Point’ is just some shallow fun
Summary
Malcolm Gladwell's new book, a sequel to his best-selling debut 'The Tipping Point', packages old wine in a new bottle
Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell shot to the best-seller lists in 2000 with his very first book, The Tipping Point. It built on, and popularised, a hypothesis that existed in the scholarship of behavioural economics, pushing it into the lexicon of a new generation of business leaders, start-up CEOs, and corporate professionals.
In Gladwell’s words, “The best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of the unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics." While it may seem counterintuitive, he argued that big changes are often caused by seemingly small triggers that tip the status quo over the inflection point.
Diving deep into an eclectic array of examples, from the sudden rise of Hush Puppies shoes in the US in the 1990s, to the unexpected success of the children’s TV show Sesame Street, he pronounced that “ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do." Once picked up by a few, innovations, like viruses, take on a life of their own, spreading through the population uncontrollably, much like a contagion.
In the intervening quarter century, the world has literally suffered a health pandemic, the word ‘viral’ is now part of common parlance, and virality an aspiration for millions desperate to find their 15 minutes of social media fame. Indeed, there’s a compelling reason for a reboot of Gladwell’s ideas, but The Revenge of the Tipping Point isn’t that book.
Also read: ‘Speaking with Nature’ excerpt: When Mira behn took exception with Nehru
For one, this self-proclaimed “forensic investigation of social epidemics" makes but a passing reference to the role of the internet in shaping human behaviour over the last 25 years. This neglect is shockingly cavalier and undermines the seriousness of Gladwell’s thesis. As a result, The Revenge of the Tipping Point feels anachronistic, like a Sherlock Holmes mystery set in the 21st century, where the tools of the detective’s trade aren’t yet blessed by the internet, cell phones or 5G connectivity.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that Gladwell’s efforts into digging up oddly fascinating case studies are all wasted. Take, for instance, his chapter on Poplar Grove, a pseudonym given to an upper-middle class settlement in America by two social scientists, Seth Abrutyn and Anna Mueller, in their book Life Under Pressure. In this town, families put inordinate premium on the education and achievement of their children, sending them to highly competitive schools, to set them up for “successful" careers. Eventually a tipping point is crossed and the town sees a flurry of teen suicides.
Enter Gladwell and, soon, layers are unpeeled to identify the inflection point at which well-adjusted, smart young people tipped. The interviews are insightful, the research is sharp but not once does he mention the possible role played by mobile phones and the internet in this suicide contagion. After all, it erupts in the 2010s, when TikTok or Snapchat may not have yet invaded young minds, but Facebook, Group Chats and mobile phones were widely prevalent. According to a Pew report from 2010, the percentage of teens aged 12-17 who own a cell phone exploded from 45% in 2005 to 75% in 2010 in the US. And so, Gladwell’s conclusion—that Poplar Grove was a classic example of a “monoculture" and that “epidemics love monocultures"—makes sense, if you take out technology’s power to disrupt monocultures.
Even more irksome is Gladwell’s fondness for what psychologist Steven Pinker described, in a withering review of one of his books, as the “Straw We": he “disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus," often based on “cherry picked anecdotes and examples" drawn almost exclusively from American culture and society.
Making an ingenious case for his “law of the Magic Third", Gladwell refers to Palo Alto, which saw, among other parts of the US, a growing incidence of “white flight" in the 1950s. “Something dramatic happened when a once-insignificant set of outsiders reached between one-quarter and one-third of the population of whatever group they were joining," he writes. Note, here, the slippery range—"between one-quarter and one-third"—that immediately contradicts the concept of a “law," which is supposed to be a universal and immutable concept.
To further bolster his thesis, Gladwell studies The Lawrence Tract, a neighbourhood where white, black and Asian communities mutually agreed to have equal residential claims to ensure a balance of populations. With the optimal representation of each group ensured and kept in that range, white flight was arrested, and the racial balance of the area didn’t become skewed towards any one community. Based on the success of this experiment, Gladwell decides, "The Lawrence Tract was an attempt to show the world that different races could live in harmony."
The statement is both ludicrous and highfalutin. For one, plenty of nations in the Global South don’t need a lesson in racial harmony from the US, where racial attacks remain the worst form of hate crime more than half a century after the civil rights movement ended. According to a survey from 2022, 40% of registered voters in the U.S. reported feeling like White nationalism is a critical threat to the US. Further, Gladwell doesn’t really probe the magic behind the Magic Third. Why is it that differences and animosities disappear, or become civil, when populations hit this number?
Even more naive is Gladwell’s faith in the Magic Third’s power inside boardrooms. A numerical increase from 1-2 women executives to 3 in the composition of a board of directors can tip the scales in favour of a more inclusive and collaborative environment, we are told. But once again, we don’t know exactly why—or any empirical reason behind such turnarounds.
Also read: Why E.M. Forster's ‘A Passage to India’ remains relevant today
It’s hard to fault Gladwell for his enthusiasm to connect seemingly distant events. In the section on “The Overstory" (which seems like another name for “Context", that is the say, the influence of environment on outcomes, as articulated in The Tipping Point), he looks at two examples. The first is a mini-series called Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss that aired on American television in 1978. It was due to this show, Gladwell argues, that the devastations of the Holocaust became entrenched in public memory in the US. The second is the impact of the sitcom, Will and Grace (1998-2006; then again 2017-2020) on the fate of same-sex marriage laws in the country, especially after former President George Bush’s 2004 opposition of the same.
In both instances, Gladwell says, the Overstory (a term which he borrows from botany) had a positive influence on mass psychology. Just like the forest canopy impacts the ecosystem that thrives near the ground, the overstories told by these shows shaped the public’s understanding of anti-Semitism or the reality of being an ordinary, successful gay man in America.
The inconvenient truth, however, is that television is equally susceptible to becoming a tool for spreading propaganda, where mythological tales and epic battles of good over evil can inform religious ideologies and give rise to militant nationalism. Once again, by ignoring the Damocles’ sword that is the internet as an agent of transmission in the 21st century, Gladwell pushes through his theory of positive change.
The Revenge of the Tipping Point is bookended by an analysis of the US' opioid crisis, where the writer is at his sharpest. Harvesting a huge mass of data, he concludes that the epidemic of drug abuse was concentrated to a handful of states that did not have the statutory obligation to inform regulatory authorities of every prescription for painkillers they wrote. This nexus of trigger-happy physicians, unscrupulous sales representatives from pharma companies, and an unethical insurance regime led to a disaster that was dubbed as a national crisis, even though it was the making of very few actors. Another section, where Gladwell explores the subtle “social engineering" carried out by Ivy League universities to favour elite students gain entry into the system, offers fresh insights to an age-old problem.
For the reader, the real takeaway is that Gladwell the Wunderkind of 2000 (who popularized terms like “critical mass" and “10,000 hours") wants to wow his reader with the same rabbit out of the hat. His old formula of oddball ideas meet eclectic research meets outlier research doesn’t always hit the jackpot any more. Indeed, Gladwell himself is prepared for such a possibility.
In a recent interview with New York Times, Gladwell made light of his writing career that is equal parts faux-humility and self-preservation. “The fun of reading one of my books is not to be converted to a way of thinking," he said. “The fun is to meet a new idea and play with it and decide whether you like it." In 2024, the reader can have no less fun by browsing YouTube or scrolling through the sinkhole of Reddit. A book of over 300 pages needs to offer something more to grab their attention.
Somak Ghoshal is a writer based in New Delhi.
