Revenge of the Tipping Point

Twenty-five years ago, Malcolm Gladwell published his first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference. Two people came to the first stop on his book tour: a stranger, and the mother of one of his friends.

But, like the epidemics it analyzed, the book started to spread. Eventually, the phrase “tipping point” became common lingo to describe sudden shifts in behavior.

Now Gladwell has written a new, often-darker version: Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.

A lot has changed for Gladwell since that first book. As he writes in the new author’s note:

“I moved on to write Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, and The Bomber Mafia. I started the podcast Revisionist History. I settled down with the woman I love. I had two children and buried my father and took up running again and cut my hair. I sold the Chelsea apartment. I moved out of the city. A friend and I started an audio company called Pushkin Industries. I got a cat and named him Biggie Smalls.”

I first met Malcolm a decade ago, for a debate, which turned out to be the start of a very generative relationship conceived in disagreement (and running intervals). I recently invited him to discuss his new book, and he was, as ever, fascinating and provocative. Our conversation is below.

David Epstein: I want to start with chapter five, because it’s about Ivy League athletes, and I was an Ivy League athlete, as was one of the most engaged readers of this newsletter. The chapter opens with a livestream of a Harvard women’s rugby game that six people are watching in which Harvard beats Princeton 61 to 5. You go into how this team was created, starting in 2013. In short, the coach is flying all over the world recruiting players who come from pretty specific upper-class circumstances. And you write that this is the way of many sports at Harvard, which happens to have more Division I sports than any other school in the country. Harvard has way more student-athletes than, say, the University of Michigan. And so you argue that the reason they’re spending all this money flying around the world to populate sports that most colleges don’t have has to do with a tipping point — specifically with avoiding a tipping point. Can you describe your argument as to why Harvard is doing something that seems peculiar from the outside?

Malcolm Gladwell: Two things are going on. They’re going to extraordinary lengths to recruit athletes who are good at sports that almost no one plays — fencing, rowing, rugby, on and on — not just the big ticket ones like football and basketball. And the second thing that they’re doing is in order to ensure that these athletes will get into Harvard, they are giving these recruited athletes an admissions break that is enormous. Basically, they have an affirmative action program set up in place for students who excel at a specific number of sports. If you ask them why would they do those two things, the answers they give are completely unconvincing. They’re bullshit. They can’t even come up with a good line. They’re like: “Well, it’s sort of good for school spirit,” or basically versions of that, which make no sense. So you’re compelled, if you want to explain this phenomenon, to come up with a more convincing reason why they’re doing it, and my argument is that a school like Harvard is powerfully incentivized to maintain a certain kind of privileged culture. It’s the basis on which their exclusivity and their brand value rests, and to do that, they would like to maintain a certain critical mass of wealthy, privileged, largely white — not exclusively — kids, and it’s very difficult to do that if all you’re doing is picking the smartest, because the overlap between rich and smart is limited. So you’ve got to create a mechanism to get rich kids in the back door, and sports is the mechanism.

So if you’re going to let in tennis players, the only way you could ever get a DI or even a DIII slot on a tennis team at an exclusive school is you had to have played junior tennis. There’s just no way around it. In order to play junior tennis in America right now, you need to be spending, at minimum, thousands, in some cases, well over 100-grand a year. So right there, by saying I will set aside special spots on my sports teams and give enormous admissions breaks to really good tennis players, what I’m saying is I’m going to guarantee that a certain number of rich kids will always be at Harvard. That’s what it’s about.

DE: And this relates to the larger theme of the book…

MG: I’m interested in this because I have a whole section of the book where I’m really interested in group proportions. If you want to maintain the culture of a group, how large does the dominant group need to be? Or if you want to change the culture of a group, how large does the dissenting group need to get? And my argument is: Harvard is playing this game very explicitly and making sure that no non-privileged group ever creeps above what I call the “magic third,” which is the threshold by which cultures tip. Harvard doesn’t want to be Berkeley, or Caltech, or UC-Irvine, which are basically overwhelmingly Asian, and they desperately do not want to be that.

DE: Caltech is interesting because you have this chart in the book that shows that, over a number of years, the proportions of students from different ethnic backgrounds at Harvard are quite stable, whereas at Caltech — where they’re not using non-academic measures as much, like what you did over the summer, or are you an athlete — the proportions can jump all over the place. And it shows that, starting around 2000, the proportion of Asian students at Caltech shoots up. But you don’t see that at Harvard. At least in the period that you looked at, they’re maintaining pretty stable ethnic proportions.

MG: No elite institution should, over time, have stable ethnic proportions, because the composition of academic elites at any given time in a country like America is under constant flux. I make a little mention of Nigerians in the book. I was at Penn last week, and there was a guy there, he had like a Ph.D., an M.D., a master’s in public health — he’s a superstar, everyone wanted him. He’s Nigerian. And it powerfully reminded me that, if you look very closely, the Nigerians are basically where the Koreans were a generation ago, where the Jews were in 1920; they’re knocking on the door. And if all you do is let in the best students, there’s going to be a Nigerian bump coming soon. That’s what the group dynamics of elite institutions look like when they’re left alone. But Harvard doesn’t want that, so they’re using sports to kind of control their proportions.

DE: You quote from one of the Harvard admissions lawsuits, where they talk in explicit detail about their admissions process, and they have this ranking of academic prowess from one to four and, let’s see, I’m looking in the book… If you have an academic rating of two, which is not the best, but it’s very good, you have a 10% chance of getting in, or a 50% chance if you’re legacy or the child of faculty or staff. And then the Harvard administrator who’s testifying in the case says that if you’re a recruited athlete at an academic rating of two, you’re in. So it’s a big difference.

And this topic, I think, goes back to Jews and to my alma mater, Columbia University, where the main library is still named after Nicholas Murray Butler, who invented Jewish quotas in higher ed. Can you describe your argument about what the Harvard admissions strategy had to do with the surge of Jews at Columbia in the early 20th century?

MG: So, originally, the Ivy League schools, the original elite institutions in American higher ed, basically just let in the students who scored the best on entrance exams. It was a pure meritocracy, and they were able to do that because in the late 19th and early 20th century the kind of student who was in a position to do well on the Harvard entrance exam, or the Columbia entrance exam, or the Yale entrance exam, was a privileged white male from one of the private schools of the Northeast. So they were able to maintain their cultural traditions, even as they were simultaneously a meritocratic institution. Jews come along and they destroy that system. They’re first generation immigrants; they’re impoverished; they’re the furthest thing from genteel Waspy members of the university club who went to St Paul’s, and yet they start outperforming their Waspy counterparts on the entrance exam. And so there’s kind of a wake-up call in the Ivy League. They can either go Jewish, or they can construct a new kind of admissions system that keeps the Jews in check, and they decide to create the same admission system we have today, which is not a pure meritocracy. It’s the balance of meritocracy with, you know, letters of recommendation, and considerations of character, and how good your essay is, and all kinds of subjective criteria which are invented just to keep Jews out, to keep your — David — to keep your grandfather out.

DE: I would’ve been completely screwed because you quote from Abbott Lowell, who was the president of Harvard, who came up with a system where they ranked prospective students — J1, J2, J3 — for admissions based on how certain they were that they were Jewish. So I’m a pretty obvious J1. And there’s still a house named after Lowell at Harvard, so some fitting landmarks at Columbia and Harvard.

But there’s something else interesting, which is that this was not like Black students in the South, where schools didn’t want any of them at all. They were ok with some Jews, they just didn’t want a proportion that would change the culture, right? There’s a study you refer to several times in the book in which people are made to play a group game in pairs. Players are paired up and shown a photograph of someone’s face, and they just have to come up with a name that they think fits that person. And if the two people in a pair pick the same name, that’s good; they want agreement. After each try, players are reshuffled to other pairs, and this continues until the entire group settles on choosing the same name. But they can’t consult each other at all. So it’s sort of this game of taking cues from other people and trying to reach consensus even without communicating all at once. And what the study found is that if you seed the group with a few people who will choose the same name and never deviate, even if the name doesn’t fit the picture well, they can pretty quickly get the entire group to conform. But you need a critical mass of those seed people; they have to be at least a quarter of the group, and that’s when it tips the entire group. And so you write that Harvard was looking at Columbia, which had this big influx of Jews, and feeling that if more than a quarter of the population becomes Jewish, suddenly the culture will tip and be totally different.

MG: Yes, that’s right. They are very much conscious of the nonlinear dynamics of epidemic change, and aware of the fact that an institution like Harvard can tolerate 10% of its undergraduate population being Jewish, and you still wouldn’t call Harvard Jewish, but if 30% of their undergrads were Jewish, it would be Jewish. That’s the theory behind these kinds of cultural change dynamics.

I think an equally fascinating parallel — and I don’t go into it in the book — but you probably know this: girls now so completely outperform boys in high school that the only way to have a 50/50 distribution by gender in an elite school is to put a thumb on the scale for boys in a pretty major way. If you see a school like Brown, which is 50/50, that’s because they let in boys with way lower academic qualifications than girls. And why do they do that? Why is it so important for these schools to have 50/50? Because they fear that if they don’t do that, and it becomes 70/30, then they are no longer a mixed institution. They think they essentially become a women’s college. You don’t need 100% women, you just need to have reduced the number of men to the point that they’re no longer seen as significant in the culture. And like Tulane — have you been to Tulane? There are no men at Tulane! It’s hilarious. Tulane is becoming the southern Smith. I had a friend whose daughter got in. She’s so excited; she took one visit, she’s like, “Dad, I’m going to the University of Texas.” He goes, “Why? You really wanted to go to Tulane.” She says: “Dad, there are no boys there.” It’s gotten so bad at some smaller institutions, some insane percentage of boys are student athletes. Athletics becomes the only way you can have a substantial representation of boys. So if you talk to admissions counselors, they’re so aware of this phenomenon of how group proportions can shift the culture of a group in a very short time.

DE: Speaking of group proportions in schools, you show some stats in the book about how in elementary and I think middle schools, the race gap in math scores gets larger over time in classrooms with very few Black students, but it’s smaller if at least a quarter of the class is Black students. And you write: “If you were an elementary-school principal with three classes of fifth graders, each with a sprinkling of students of color, you might be tempted to consolidate all your minority students into one class, as difficult to explain as that move would be.”

College admissions stats just came out showing the first classes since the Supreme Court limited the use of race in admissions. And the proportion of Black students at some of the colleges is down significantly. I’m curious if you’ve thought about that at all, and if you think that might cause a self-reinforcing decline in achievement.

MG: I think that’s absolutely a fear. It’s funny, when I was at Penn last week, I met with a group of Black doctors in the medical school, and they were talking about residency matches and how they had twelve spots in their department, and they were at zero minorities one year, and they have gotten it back up to like five or six or seven out of twelve. And they were talking about how much easier it is not just to recruit minority students when you have a critical mass already of minority residents, but also how the experience of being a minority resident is so much different when you are in numerically significant numbers.

I think it’s an incredibly serious problem right now where these schools have a shrinking number of minorities. What that means is that the life of those who are left gets harder and harder, and it becomes a self-reinforcing phenomenon where fewer minorities — even those who could get in — will want to go, or will thrive if they get there. And so we ignore these kinds of group dynamics at our peril. And the only upside to this is, I have become so convinced — particularly in STEM — of the overwhelming advantage of HBCUs as a kind of feeder for the STEM pipeline of minorities, that if this attracts more quality students to HBCUs, I think that’s probably a plus, and maybe that’ll offset some of the damage being done at elite institutions. But this is a hugely significant shift.

DE: By the way, on this topic, my high school made the news last year because they decided to list some calculus class as specifically for minority students. I really don’t know the details; I don’t think it said that others couldn’t be in there, but it was advertised that this is aimed at minority students. So that blew up in the news. I just went on their site before we started talking to look at the language they have now in the course listing. And it says at the end of the description of the class: “…a graphing calculator is required. The course will emphasize examples that some individuals in the Black community identify as shared experiences.” And I can see how that’s an unusual thing to have in a course listing for math. But maybe they’re trying to recognize the principle you’re talking about, and maybe started doing it in a clumsy way because it’s new territory. Anyway, they received a lot of scorn.

MG: It’s very easy to belittle this kind of stuff and dismiss it as virtue signaling, woke-something-something, and sometimes it is. But on this question, the book argues that this is deadly serious stuff, and that when we are faced with underperforming groups, in any context, whether it’s women in positions of leadership in traditionally male industries, or minorities trying to compete in academically rigorous environments, you absolutely have to pay attention to how many people there are in any setting at any given time. And that the reason the majority overlooks that is that the majority has always been in the majority, and the majority has never had to confront what it feels like to be a token, or what it feels like for your group to be below the critical mass.

DE: I want to switch gears and talk about a different idea that I thought was fascinating in the book.

In typical Gladwell fashion, in a few pages you span bank robberies, Medicare fraud, vaccination rates in schools, and the portion of kids who get their tonsils out. And what you see in all these phenomena is a tremendous amount of variation, often in a small geographic region, and the variation seems to respect borders somehow. One of my favorite examples in the book was the two towns in Vermont, Stowe and Waterbury, that are right near each other. They’re similar in all these ways, except for that in the period in question 70% of the kids in Stowe had their tonsils removed, and only 20% of the kids in Waterbury had their tonsils removed. And this occurs for all sorts of medical care. You write that doctors who move from Boulder to Buffalo, their treatment patterns very quickly start to resemble Canadians more than Coloradans. You quote a researcher saying that this isn’t really about learning what works, it’s more about the influence of your environment. And you relate this to an idea you call an “overstory.” Can you explain what that is, and what it has to do with social epidemics or crime or tonsil removal, and why they seem to respect borders?

MG: The beginning point in all of this is this weird fact that emerges in healthcare economics fifty years ago. This guy John Wennberg, who does this study, as you said, in Vermont, and he went in with the task of mapping the utilization of healthcare in Vermont, and thinking there would be normal variations based on socioeconomic status, and the presence of a teaching hospital, or something like that. What he discovers instead is something way, way, way different and more puzzling, which is: Stowe and Waterbury, two towns right next to each other, one town all the kids get their tonsils out, and in the other town, none of them do. And the same thing’s true of hysterectomies and a long list of medical procedures. And he calls this “small-area variation,” and he ends up proving that it’s everywhere — that if you go across the United States, the variation from community to community in how much healthcare is delivered and in what form is dramatic. And these differences are bordered. They arise out of communities. They’re not random. It’s not random patterns of variation across the entire country. It’s that one town thinks one way, another town thinks another way. And so healthcare companies have struggled to make sense of why this would be the case, right? You would think rationally that, you know, most neurosurgeons are trained in a small handful of academic teaching hospitals and they disperse throughout the country; you would think that neurosurgeons would act the same as a group regardless of where they are. It’s not what happens. And so I propose, in the absence of any kind of definitive answer, that it must be the case that communities have a kind of set of stories they tell each other about appropriate standards of behavior, or the way to frame certain kinds of problems, that there must be some kind of common element in the air of certain communities that informs the way we behave in ways that we’re not necessarily aware of. So in other words: there is a Boston-ness to Boston; there is a Brooklyn-ness to Brooklyn; there is a Toronto-ness to Toronto. I know all those three places have stereotypes that attach to them, that purport to explain the differences between a Brooklynite, a Torontonian, and a Bostonian. If you and I met anyone from those three places, we would sort of semi-seriously say: “Oh yeah, I can spot the guy from Toronto, and that guy’s so Boston,” or whatever. We use those. And my suggestion is: we’re picking up on something real there, and that these kinds of community-based stories play an unacknowledged but powerful role in how we make up our minds about things, why we behave the way we do. And they’re the thing that is fueling this kind of community variation that you see across various domains in the United States.

DE: I like your coinage of “overstory” for this idea because it’s like the upper canopy of the trees. It’s there around everything, but you’re not really paying attention to it in an explicit manner. It really reminded me of this quote from English economist Alfred Marshall. He was talking about cities, and when people live in close proximity, he said: “The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries but are, as it were, in the air.” He’s talking about how people learn trades and skills without being formally trained.

One of the locations you talk about with a unique overstory is Miami. I love this one line — because you got to spend some time in your reporting following around a Medicare fraud investigator, which was highly entertaining color in the book — and you write that “growing up in Miami, if you’re in the business of chasing Medicare fraud, is like growing up in the Alps if you want to be a downhill skier.” And you write about the overstory of Miami, where, for instance ex-Governor and now Senator Rick Scott famously was CEO of a company that had to pay the largest settlement in healthcare fraud history. But you tell the story of a guy who moves to Miami and becomes basically a Medicare fraud kingpin when he wasn’t a criminal before. And the idea is that he falls into the story of Miami. This made me think back to when I was doing, with Selena Roberts, the reporting where we first broke the news about A-Rod’s steroid use, and I was always in Miami because it was the center of a lot of doping and every dietary supplement shenanigan, so it was always the place to start reporting. One time when I was there with my colleague George Dohrmann investigating dietary supplement companies, we went to a factory and I bumped into the editor of the scientific journal that publishes research about dietary supplements, because he had an office in the headquarters of one of the major supplement companies! And he’s just like, “Oh, hi,” like it was just normal. So it’s interesting, this idea that the place has its own story that people conform to when they get there.

But then you also write about an overstory in a larger way, for a common experience that can affect the entire country. You write really interestingly about a connection between gay marriage and television. You write about how, for much of the 20th century, if gay characters were on TV, they had to fit a certain type where they’re not a main character; their sexuality is the only interesting thing about them; and their part in the plot is about how hard it is for other people to deal with their sexuality when they reveal it. And then something changes in the late 1990s, and all of the sudden states that were voting against referendums on gay marriage, just a few years later they start reversing their own course. So what is it that happened in the national overstory that paved the way for gay marriage?

MG: Well, I’m a big believer in the “Will and Grace” hypothesis, and I talk in that chapter about the subtle ways in which that was an extraordinarily revolutionary television show — that it represented an entirely new way of talking about gay people and their capacity for real relationships in a way that had never been done before in the mass media. And there are two pieces to that: one is that you have a show that comes along that introduces a new paradigm in thinking about what it means to be gay; and secondly, that show, by virtue of coming along during the the heyday of broadcast television, reaches an enormous number of Americans on a weekly basis for years and years and years. So you have a radical idea, buried in an otherwise conventional show, that is given a platform that reaches an extraordinary number of Americans. That is a recipe for change in the overstory, right? You can see how a shift in our collective understanding of a phenomenon would happen, given those two conditions. We were being fed something subversive in a very palatable form, and we were all consuming it. That’s “Will and Grace.” Today, there’s all kinds of subversive stuff, but we’re not all consuming it, right? And previously, there was all kinds of stuff that wasn’t subversive that we were all consuming. “Will and Grace” is this moment when those two things overlap, briefly.

DE: It didn’t start with them trying to make an activist TV show, right? They were trying to solve some plot problem. I can’t remember exactly what it was…

MG: A love story is over the minute the protagonists kiss. A gay man and a straight woman is a love story that can go on and on forever.

DE: Right. And while reading this part of the book I was thinking about Robert Putnam’s famous book, Bowling Alone, about the decline of engagement in community organizations, and he attributes a good portion of that to TV. But, on the other hand, maybe TV can have this sort of nationwide impact on thinking, at least when people were watching the same things and having a collective experience.

MG: I had not realized that. Yeah, it’s weird, he was part of a tradition — there was a whole cultural tradition in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the height of television’s popularity, that saw television as the root of a lot of our social ills. Now that television has been eclipsed, there’s a whole kind of nostalgic movement that sees television as a solution…so it just depends on the perspective…Do you remember that famous book — you were too young for this — but that book about what was wrong with college students, The Closing of the American Mind?Huge, huge, huge book, and you go back and you read that book, and it’s: conservative guy comes along and laments the fact that students are only interested in pursuing careers and have no engagement with the issues of the day. It’s hilarious! That was the thing everybody was so up in arms about in the 1980s! “Oh my God, they just want to go work at Goldman Sachs, and they don’t care one iota about how the stuff they’re learning in school applies to the real world.” You know, it’s like, everything comes around!

DE: Haha, now it’s: “How do we get these students just focused on going to class and working at Goldman Sachs?”

Okay, I want to switch gears one more time, to another factor that you cite in epidemics, because so much of this book is about the hidden forces behind things that spread. And you take on the opioid epidemic, and there’s some excellent reporting in that section, and…out of curiosity how many pages of court transcripts did you read?

MG: All told for the book, over 10,000.

DE: Yeah, okay. I know I should make some 10,000 joke here… But one of the things that was fascinating to me was you had this chart in the book that shows that in the opioid epidemic, opioid prescribing is really a phenomenon of a very small number of doctors. And in the opioid epidemic you tie together several threads in the book; you have “small-area variation,” so huge variation in opioid use between states, and it depends on their overstory — whether it’s a state that is more concerned about opioid abuse and has a system in place that basically forces a doctor to pause and think and fill out paperwork when they prescribe.

But then you have Purdue Pharma, the creators of OxyContin, working with McKinsey to realize that we don’t need to market to all doctors. We need to look at a certain set of doctors who, maybe they’re only moderate opioid prescribers now, but they’re young, so they have a lot of room to grow. And, by the way, this reminded me of back when I was reporting on Lance Armstrong and doping in cycling, how teams would actually look for people who were very good, maybe not great, but also had a low proportion of red blood cells in their bloodstream, because they had a lot of room to dope. So, like that, Purdue Pharma would look at doctors who seemed to like prescribing OxyContin somewhat and say: maybe we can get them to prescribe a lot more. And that really worked. In the book you show this chart, where just 350 physicians in America are writing 10% of the OxyContin prescriptions, and 2500 physicians are writing 30% of the prescriptions. And Purdue realizes the capacity to basically go viral by really focusing on these superspreaders, right? And so they have sales reps visiting them incessantly. I think you wrote that one doctor was visited 300 times over an eight year span, which is more than we all see our best friend. So this was pretty frightening to read. And, to me, one of the messages of the book was that, whether for better or worse, to cause change sometimes you have to single out small groups, and that people who are doing certain bad things have already figured that out in many cases. And I’m wondering, how do you think we can use this knowledge — that there are likely to be superspreaders in social phenomena — for good instead of bad?

MG: This is the thing that I’m doing a podcast on now — the parallel of this in fighting crime. It’s what was wrong with stop-and-frisk in New York. It was a misunderstanding of the dynamics of criminality. It said you should stop any young Black male who looked a little bit suspicious and search them, and that was the best way to bring down crime. And the problem with that strategy is that they only found a gun in whatever it was, 1% of stop-and-frisks, and they did 4.5 million frisks in eight years, between 2004 and 2012. What we’ve understood after stop-and-frisk ends is that: no, no, no, the most effective way to fight crime is to be as precise as possible. It’s to figure out: oh, okay, if for every 100 people you frisk you only find guns once, then can you predict who that one person is? The answer is: yes, you sort of can. You can zero in much more precisely on the people who are actually at higher risk for committing an act, being victimized by an act, carrying a gun…and that’s where the real opportunity lies in crime fighting. But that idea is routinely neglected. We pay lip service to the idea that, you know, there’s an 80/20 principle at work, or not every one of my customers is of equal value to me, but I don’t know whether we take that lesson to heart the way we should. I even argue in another chapter that Covid transmission is the same thing. It’s 5% of the population that are doing all the work in Covid transmission, and what 95% of us do is irrelevant. We should be able to go to school, and work in restaurants, but if we can understand who the 5% are, who are the superspreaders, that’s who we should be focused on. Now, that’s tricky socially to do that.

DE: Yeah, I mean, singling out people who have viscous saliva or whatever it is that makes them superspreaders…

MG: But I think there’s no way, if we want to create solutions to problems, there’s no way around having to go down this route. The day when we could use broad-brush solutions to complicated problems is over. I don’t think we have any choice but to follow the policing pattern, and use precision in our identification of who is the most at risk for spreading any kind of contagious behavior or message.

DE: So that idea is kind of using the strategies of advertising, where they’ve gotten very good at targeting, but in public policy it often feels objectionable, but maybe it could be very effective.

On that note, I want to ask you a question that you once asked me, on stage at the 92nd Street Y, that I found very difficult to answer. Here it is: if you were emperor of the world, what’s something you would change based on what you learned researching Revenge of The Tipping Point?

MG: If Covid happened again, at the outset, task number one is to figure out who the superspreaders are, and in the most socially acceptable way constrain their exposure to others, and not everybody else’s. I give that same instruction to police. They do it in New York, but there are still many communities in America where they don’t do that kind of precision policing. That’s the way to go. Let’s stop victimizing entire communities. A guy I was talking to the other day, said: in a place like New York or Chicago, the number of people who meaningfully contribute to the homicide problem is in the single-digit thousands. New York is nine million people; it’s probably 10,000, maybe 12,000 people who are even reasonably in the universe of people who are potentially victimizers or victimized. Tiny! That’s what I would do if I were czar. I’d be like: let’s use the tools that we have to make sure our interventions are as targeted and have the lightest touch possible.

DE: My first semi-stable job in journalism was as the overnight crime reporter at the New York Daily News. I was the only person on duty, and when I’d tell people my job they’d say: “Watch out for Central Park!” I never once in that entire time reported to Central Park. The large majority of overnight violent crime was happening in a small number of areas, and nothing happened in Central Park. I realized it was news when something did happen there specifically because almost nothing ever did.

Now I want to share a final point. I think I’ve told you before that, of anything I’ve read in a book, one of the points that has stuck with me the most is from your 2019 book, Talking to Strangers. Specifically, the section on “coupled” versus “displaced” phenomena. This was the idea that we believe that certain behaviors are “displaced,” meaning: if you disrupt a crime on 125th St., well, it’s just going to take place on 126th St. But actually, behaviors we think are displaced are often “coupled”, meaning that if you disrupt that crime on 125th St., it just doesn’t happen. Or, it’s less likely to happen because it’s tied closely to that place and moment. And I felt like there was a certain continuity with that idea in Revenge of the Tipping Point. You’re looking at these epidemics or social contagions that respect boundaries because of the people who are involved, or because of the story that a specific community has. And so these phenomena are coupled to a place, and if someone moves out of that place, their behavior changes; or if the story of the place changes in a dramatic way. And I was thinking about this as I was reading because I live really close to a bridge that has had, in our area, the highest number of people jump off over a few years, dying by suicide. And this was something you wrote about in Talking to Strangers — you cited research that looked at people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, and over some period of time, I can’t remember the numbers but it was like 500 people who had jumped and survived or been grabbed as they tried to jump, and like 80% of them were still alive 20 years later. If you could interrupt them at that place and moment, you usually saved their life for the long-term. But people don’t really believe that. They say: “Well, they’ll just go to the next bridge and jump,” because we don’t recognize that some behaviors are coupled to places and to specific stories about those places. And so citizens will often protest that putting a net or fence around a bridge won’t change anything. But it turns out it does.

To bring this back around, approval was just granted to put up taller guardrails at this bridge near me. And I think that’s because the overstory about suicide changed, and there’s more recognition that if you stop someone in the moment, you may well save them for the long run. In this new book, you write that changing the overstory is what storytellers can do, at their best. I have no idea to what extent your writing about bridges and suicide and coupled versus displaced trickled down to people who are making decisions about bridges near me, but I think telling those stories matters. And I think it did matter, along with others telling similar stories, and now fewer people will jump off that bridge. So, to me, a lot of this book was a continuation of the idea in Talking to Strangers that behaviors are tightly bound to the circumstances of the place where they occur. That’s not really a question, I was just thinking about it as I was reading, and maybe you had some impact in my backyard.

MG: That’s very kind of you. And I lived on the other side of that bridge for 10 years. I lived on the bad side, you live on the good side —

DE: Haha, I’ve lived on both sides…

MG: That’s, I mean, that’s the best case. If that’s true, it’s the best case scenario for those of us who write books, and I include you in this, those of us who write books about ideas. We hope our ideas filter down and have some impact on the way people behave.

Thanks to Malcolm for his time, and thank you for reading. Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering is out today.

If you appreciated this post, please share it.

Share

And if you’re new here, please consider subscribing.

Until next time…

David