The one-sentence summary

Tipping points have a dark side when contagious social or physical phenomena take off in unwanted and unanticipated directions.

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • Twenty-five years after the publication of his groundbreaking first book, the author reframes a number of its lessons in a revealing and somewhat darker light. As ever, through a series of interlinked stories, we learn about troubling forms of social engineering, outbreaks of crime, social experiments, and two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis.
  • The original book, according to the author, struck a chord because it offered a hopeful message that matched the mood of a hopeful time. The new millennium had arrived, crime and social problems were in freefall, the Cold War was over, and The Tipping Point offered a recipe for how to promote positive change by using little things to make a big difference. A quarter of a century later, this is a new set of theories, stories and arguments about the strange pathways that ideas and behaviour follow through our world.
  • One of the prevailing themes is that of the An overstory is the upper layer of foliage in a forest, and the size, density and height of it affect the behaviour and development of every species below it. In a social context, communities have their own overstories, and those overstories are contagious. They provide the backdrop or context against which events are viewed and decisions are made. They are different from stories in that they are not drilled into everyone and are often outside of our awareness because we are so focused on what is going on in front of us. But they are very powerful.
  • Small-area variation is a phenomenon discovered in the 60s by a physician called John Wennberg who looked at variations in the scale and nature of medical issues in US states. What started off as an idiosyncratic observation about the variation in healthcare in the small towns of Vermont has turned into an iron law that shows no sign of going away: how your doctor treats you, in many cases, has less to do with where your doctor was trained, or how well they did in medical school, or their personality, than where your doctor lives. People of all types flock together in various ways, including behavioural.
  • Monocultures is a word used by biologists to describe an environment where individual differences have been sanded down and every organism follows the same path. They are rare because the default state for most natural systems is diversity. Cheetahs were subject to a mass die-off around 12,000 years ago and it is estimated that the surviving population was no greater than 50-100. Because this may have led to incest, the remaining population was working on fewer and fewer genes, making it susceptible to any new disease. In a similar but different example, suicide rates among teenagers rocketed in a small well-off community where parental expectations of perfect grades and achievement were universally and unreasonably high.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • When it comes to social engineering, tipping points are everywhere. In the 1950s, the term white flight was coined to explain the change in racial mix in US cities after African Americans began to move out of the south. After a certain percentage move into a previously white city, a ‘tip point’ occurs, and the majority leave. This is where the author got the Tipping Point phrase from.
  • On the darker side, the question is whether such tipping points can be intentionally engineered. There have been many studies looking at what the ratio is to trigger such a change. The range appears to be between 20% and 33% of any group or population. Some found the Magic Quarter, others the Magic Third. To give a simple example, introducing one woman into an all-male sales team or board leads to isolation for the woman; where there are two out of ten, there is still little movement, but where there are three, things really begin to change.
  • The engineering can take sinister turns. There was consternation in the 1920s at Harvard when too many jews were passing all their exams and reducing the proportion of what were deemed to be the ‘right’ students. They changed their admissions criteria to be more subjective so they could prevent it. Now they have all sorts of obscure minority sports that enable them to place the emphasis on athletic criteria as well as academic, to keep the mix where they want it.
  • Equally shocking is the manner in which the Purdue drug OxyContin was marketed to create the US opioid crisis. After a sustained campaign in the 1940s by Paul Madden of the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, certain states had adopted a triple prescription system, in which every doctor’s number of opioid prescriptions was monitored by law. Purdue targeted all the states that did not use this system and created an effectively lawless set of superspreader doctors who handed the stuff out in vast quantities, despite them being addictive.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • Not much. There are fascinating stories here with the author’s trademark interweaving. You can’t pick it up in bite-size chunks though – you have to roll with the narrative from the start otherwise certain references later on won’t make any sense.