- Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
- Published Date: October 1, 2024
- Pages: 368
- ISBN-10: 0316575801
- ISBN-13: 978-0316575805
- Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is the author’s follow up to his hugely popular The Tipping Point. Both of these books cover how small changes can hit a certain point where they suddenly cause a cascade of change to seemingly completely change the situation ‘overnight.’
I found the original book inspiring and eye-opening, even if some of the details have been disputed over the years. I enjoyed reading Revenge, but it did not seem as special as the original. It included a lot of interesting stories with speculation about causes and thresholds of tipping points, but it did not seem as convincing. He does not always support his theses with data, and even when there is data, it seems more correlational than proof of causation relationships.
Some of the stories he covers in Part One of the book are:
- What is behind the huge number of bank robberies in Los Angeles?
- Why is Miami so weird with so much crime and fraud?
- What is behind the epidemic of teen suicides in a certain area?
In Part Two, he moves more into his speculations on causes and thresholds behind tipping points with stories:
- The magic third, speculating that it takes about a quarter to a third of a population to accept a ‘new’ idea before it is a candidate of ‘overnight’ tipping to adoption by almost all the population.
- How universities recruit, especially in sports, to reduce diversity?
- Index cases in COVID and super-spreader individuals in general?
Part Three moves on to the ‘overstory’ concept of a meta-story that inspires the tipping of society.
- He uses the example of a TV miniseries as the driver for folks being willing to talk about and bring attention to the Holocaust. He uses Will & Grace as the driver for society accepting marriage equality.
Part Four tries to bring the book back together with a discussion of the opioid crisis and how it was largely driven by a single company.
- Overstories, Superspreaders and Group Proportions.
This is not a bad book. The stories Gladwell tells are interesting and there is a lot of good information and potentially true ideas in the book. I just felt that the author is too quick to tell you that he knows ‘the truth’. Maybe if I read all the end notes and the referenced articles, I would believe him more, but I just was not convinced that he was proving his points. There are many ideas that are worth considering in this book. Perhaps they are true, but Gladwell does not convince me in this text.
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Heinlein “Anthrophobia” Challenge from 3/1 to 3/31/2025
