Review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point: A rehashing

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, for all its flaws, had a freshness and an element of fun, which is lacking in his new book

A quarter century ago, The Tipping Point changed the life of one person, the journalist Malcolm Gladwell, who became a best-selling author and inspired a spate of similar popular books based on glib writing and finding connections in other people’s research. It was the tipping point in his life.

The Tipping Point told us how epidemiology best explained social phenomena that spread like viruses, from footwear fashions to crime waves, and even hinted at the predictability of human behaviour.

Gladwell is a fine storyteller with a gift for using a vivid phrase (remember the 10,000-hour rule to master a skill?) that quickly becomes part of the lexicon. He has given us not so much an update as a retelling of the earlier book written in similar seductive style.

Troubling connections

The same things are touted under different names and disparate anecdotes are yoked together. It might be fun to link bank robberies, forgotten television shows, women’s rugby in Harvard, COVID-19, and how cities can change people. But the mathematical certainty that accompanies the linkages admits of no alternative explanations, and that is troubling. What might be possible explanations are treated as established facts.

Anders Ericsson, the researcher who gave us the 10,000-hour rule that Gladwell promoted (in his Outliers), later admitted the figure was an oversimplification, and an incorrect interpretation of his research. It is catchy (rather like the 10,000 steps we are urged to walk daily), but its foundations aren’t scientific.

“A provocative generalization,” Ericsson called it, and wrote a rebuttal titled The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists.

In his author’s note to Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell writes, “Over the years I would sometimes look back on what I had written in The Tipping Point and wonder how I ever came to write the things I did.” Those expecting Gladwell, now 25 years older (and presumably wiser) to recant or at least introduce an element of doubt will be disappointed.

Gladwell’s technique is to ‘discover’ order and design in arbitrariness. He takes two (or more) dissimilar stories and builds a bridge across them with the surface brilliance of his writing.

If something reaches a critical mass, he tells us here with a straight face, it will cross a tipping point, and is guaranteed to spread. This is not such a startling idea. We learnt this in school, calling it ‘turning point’ (how the murder of Archduke Ferdinand, for instance, was the immediate cause of World War I). And anyway, Gladwell had already told us this in his first book.

Another technique is converting a random number from an anecdote into a ‘universal law’ by repetition. One-third of a group forms a critical mass, he says; it takes that number of women on a corporate board to ensure they get heard. This is a version of the Law of a Few from his earlier book. Superspreader is a label from COVID-19, but there is ‘Overstory’ (borrowed from botany) which, in its previous avatar was the story a place believed about itself.

Cherry picking

The strength of the book lies in the individual stories (which are interesting in themselves), and not in the connections between them. Not how genetic uniformity among cheetahs is connected to the monocultural nature of an affluent community, but the dangers of monoculture itself; not why Harvard decided to field a women’s rugby team but how social engineering is possibly an activity of the establishment.

The Tipping Point, for all its flaws had a freshness and an element of fun. Tipping Point 2.0 is the same mixture as before, but with the freshness gone. The forced associations don’t stand up quite as well, or maybe we have become inured to them by their recurring use in other such books. The cherry picking can get irritating for those who are familiar with the technique. Perhaps the message is: given enough time, a persuasive style and lack of doubt, we can connect any two events.

There is a famous story in the earlier book about the fall in New York City’s crime rate in the 1990s because of the way lesser crimes like public graffiti were handled alongside the fixing of broken windows. The so-called ‘broken windows’ theory was clearly an exaggeration, as subsequent events proved. Gladwell himself confessed in a newspaper interview that the chapter on crime, “ is almost embarrassing to read now.”

We might have to wait another 25 years to see what stories from Revenge of The Tipping Point Gladwell repudiates or is embarrassed by.

Revenge of the Tipping Point; Malcolm Gladwell, Hachette India, ₹799.

The reviewer’s latest book is Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read?.

Published - November 08, 2024 09:02 am IST