The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea,
and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to
understand the emergence of fashion trends, the
ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter,
the transformation of 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. Ideas
and products and messages and behaviors spread just
like viruses do.
...
[T]hree characteristics--one contagiousness; two,
the fact that little causes can have big effects; and
three, that change happens not gradually but at
one dramatic moment--are the...three principles that
define how measles moves through a grade-school
classroom or the flu attacks every winter. Of the
three, the third trait--the idea that epidemics
can rise or fall in one dramatic moment--is the most
important, because it is the principle that makes
sense of the first two and that permits the greatest
insight into why modern change happens the way it
does. The name given to that one dramatic
moment in an epidemic when everything can change
all at once is the Tipping Point.
-Malcolm Gladwell,
Introduction to The Tipping Point
Though this epidemic metaphor of Malcolm Gladwell's is interesting and offers a new, and somewhat helpful, perspective for considering human behavior, it is ultimately pretty circular and of rather severely limited utility. Similarly, though much of what Gladwell has to say in the book is fresh and on first glance exciting, upon further consideration many of his claims fall flat. In particular, his seeming desire to offer a third way of looking at human behavior, neither conservative, with its emphasis on morality, nor liberal, with its emphasis on material conditions, fails miserably as one section after another of the book confirms conservative dogma.
Gladwell's basic argument, deficient analysis, and unintentional confirmation of conservatism are evident in his discussion of how New York City broke its crime epidemic. He first charts the explosive growth of crime in the City and the nearly primitive conditions it created, culminating in the Berhard Goetz incident, with an otherwise model citizen forced to take the law into his own hands and receiving the approval of a jury for his action. By 1992 there were 2,154 murders and over 600,000 serious crimes in one year in New York City. But then crime begin to fall precipitously, with murder falling by 60+ percent and all serious crime by over 50%. The epidemic had hit one of Gladwell's Tipping Points, but why ?
Gladwell hypothesizes that there are basically three rules which govern these idea epidemics :
* The Law of the Few : that a few key individuals
are generally responsible for most of the spread
of the idea.
* The Stickiness Factor : "...that there are specific
ways of making a contagious message
memorable..."
* The Power of Context : "that human beings are a
lot more sensitive to their environment than
they may seem."
He argues that the drop in crime is especially a result of the Power of Context, and in particular of the imposition of "Broken Windows Policing." The basic concept here (first outlined by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, in a 1982 piece for Atlantic Monthly) is that when people live in neighborhoods where even the windows are broken, they receive the implicit message that societal constraints have ceased to function. In this situation they will naturally feel less constrained themselves, with the likelihood that crime will be more prevalent. Thus, on the New York City Subways, where cars were coated with graffiti, had no heat or air conditioning and where fare dodging was prevalent, a general sense of lawlessness took over and fed a rising tide of crime.
David Gunn, head of the New York City Transit System, hired George Kelling and put Wilson and Kelling's theory to the test. They first attacked the graffiti problem, eventually reaching a point where trains weren't allowed to ride the line if they had been tagged. Several years later, William Bratton was hired as head of the transit police and the department went after fare dodgers with a vengeance, frequently finding that those they arrested had other outstanding violations and crimes to their names. Soon, not just these crimes, but all crime on the transit system began to plummet.
Gladwell correctly notes that by changing several relatively minor facets of their law enforcement strategy the Transit system reaped huge rewards. However, his overall argument has several weaknesses. It helps to describe what happened, but isn't terribly useful for understanding what happened. First, while these changes were important, the drop in crime in New York City, and nationwide, also coincided with a twenty year economic boom, natural aging of the population, "three strikes and your out" legislation, a massive prison building effort, and several well publicized police brutality cases in which jurors refused to convict the officers. It is impossible to scientifically assign responsibility to each of these diverse elements and say, factor X caused 40% of the drop, or whatever. We certainly can't look at this complex series of events and say, as Gladwell does because he wants his idea to have social utility : James Q. Wilson, George L. Kelling, Rudy Guliani, David Gunn, and William Bratton pushed the crime epidemic to the Tipping Point by resorting to Broken Window Policing. Gladwell's problem here is the same as that which has plagued intellectuals, and through them the rest of us, since time immemorial, the belief that a few people with a good idea can effect precise changes on the rest of the population. Life just doesn't work that way (see Orrin's review of The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek).
Second, Gladwell's thesis is not testable. In order to show that Broken Window Policing caused the epidemic to tip, you would have to find a city with similar problems and attempt it as the only solution. But, of course, a city in the grip of such a reign of crime is hardly likely to settle for such a minimalist response. The fact that the entire nation has simultaneously experienced a decline in crime, though New York's has probably been the most dramatic, also serves to cast doubt on his premise.
Meanwhile, Gladwell is so intent on appearing iconoclastic and to differentiate himself and his theories from classical categories of liberalism and conservatism that he puts a spin on his notions that the facts do not bear out. Thus, in his analysis of why Broken Windows Policing worked, he says that the Power of Context suggests :
...that the criminal--far from being someone who
acts for fundamental, intrinsic reasons and who
lives in his own world--is actually someone acutely
sensitive to his environment, who is alert to all
kinds of cues, and who is prompted to commit crimes
based on his perception of the world around
him. That is an incredibly radical--and in
some sense unbelievable--idea. The Power of Context is
an environmental idea. It says that behavior
is a function of social context. ... Guliani and
Bratton--far from being conservatives, as they are
commonly identified--actually represent on the
question of crime the most extreme liberal position
imaginable, a position so extreme that it is
almost impossible to accept.
This statement is either disingenuous or ignorant. Liberals and conservatives both argue that the social environment is the key to human behavior, but are divided over whether the economic environment (liberals) or the moral environment (conservatives) is more important. As mentioned earlier, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that these have been economic boom times, so the liberals should be able to claim at least a little vindication, that rising incomes have reduced crime. However, let us accept Gladwell's position for a moment, that Broken Windows Policing is the single most important factor--the Tipping Point. It is also, indisputably, a matter of changing the moral environment, As such it was propounded by conservatives, implemented by conservatives, and today--when, despite its manifest success, it is under attack from the Left because it is supposedly too absolutist and brutal--is defended almost exclusively by conservatives.
It is at least arguable that Broken Windows Policing demonstrates that
the entire conservative attack on Modernity is absolutely correct.
The conservative critique, in its simplest most classical form, maintains
that the moral relativism which intellectual elites have foisted upon Western
Civilization over the last century or more has led to a steady decline
in the quality of that civilization. The debilitation, delegitimization,
and even destruction of Judeo-Christian morality and of various social
institutions has led to any number of social pathologies, not least among
them the extraordinarily high crime rates in the West. Liberalism,
with its modern basis in Marxist materialism, places its emphasis
on Man's financial well being. It assumes that all of society's
problems are a result of too low
standards of living and too great income disparities. But the
20th Century effectively disproved their
case. Despite the greatest rise in standards of living in human
history, social behavior, rather than
improving, declined to Hobbesian levels. Obviously wealth has
fairly little to do with it.
The standard liberal response to crime has always been to spend more money. Raise welfare payments, increase the minimum wage, hire more cops, fund midnight basketball, etc., etc., etc.... Conservatives have always insisted on law and order. As James Q. Wilson has said of Broken Windows Policing :
...the most important requirement is to think that
to maintain order in precarious situations is a vital
job.
Why then does Gladwell think that conservatives would be surprised when imposing order leads to huge social benefits ? Liberals love to scoff at the conservative "slippery slope" argument; the example of New York City would seem to prove it, by reversing the process. Take even the most minor seeming moral transgressions seriously and soon the major ones will be effected too. Guliani and Bratton don't represent extreme liberalism; they represent entirely traditional conservatism
Another section of the book, where Gladwell tries to be more specific about why things tip, ends up being unintentionally humorous. He says that one of the things that makes a fad take hold is the "stickiness" of the idea behind it. He discusses this stickiness factor in the context of children's television. He starts with Sesame Street, which was apparently developed to conform to every single inane child rearing and educational theory that had been dreamed up at the time of its creation. The show was then rigorously test marketed to kids to see of the theories worked. It will come as no surprise that they turned out to be mostly wrong. For instance, in the initial versions they segregated humans from the Muppets, having been told that children could not separate fantasy from reality. This would surely have been news to Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Stan Lee. So then they showed the program to kids and found that they only paid attention when the Muppets were on screen and completely ignored the segments with live actors. Duh? Or take the creators of Blue's Clues, who had the revolutionary insight that they could just take one episode of the show and then broadcast it every day for a week, because--are you ready for this ?--kids don't mind repetition. In fact, they like it and learn better from it. Have any of these people ever had a kid ? Do you know a kid who doesn't want to read the same book over and over and over again? Here again, this cutting edge, revolutionary, radical, whatever you care to call it, social science merely proves that the traditional intuition of conservatives is right : we've done things the same way for thousands of years because they work, and no half-baked theories dreamed up by a bunch of pointy headed intellectuals in a lab are likely to improve upon them.
But these objections to the Tipping Point idea pale in comparison to its most fundamental problem. As a general matter Gladwell's Tipping Point idea, like Darwin's idea of Evolution, is grounded more in literary metaphor than in science. If you ask, as Gladwell does, why Hush Puppies suddenly became fashionable again after years of declining or stagnant sales, the answer must be that they hit a Tipping Point. If you ask why they stayed unpopular for so long, the answer must be there were no Tipping Points during that time. Why did the book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood become a best seller, while Rebecca Wells's previous books hadn't, or other (better) novels didn't ? One hit a Tipping Point, the others didn't. But this doesn't really add anything to our understanding of the human behavior and desires that fueled the crazes nor does it help us to determine how to tip other products and processes in the future. Gladwell's argument, like all pseudoscience, is a closed loop--if something tips then it hit a Tipping Point; if it doesn't, then it didn't. Rather than explaining what happened, the metaphor, once accepted, stifles intelligent analysis. The fact that something happened comes to seem a sufficient explanation and a justification for saying that the process occurred; the actual elements of this theoretical process need never be demonstrated, nor tested; it's as if the circular beauty of the metaphor precludes questioning its validity.
One final quarrel, the big attention grabbing application of his ideas here is that since most cigarette smokers get hooked as youths, and the young seem to react with predictable rebelliousness to adult messages that smoking is dangerous, Gladwell proposes a simple reduction in the nicotine levels of cigarettes as a way of preventing addiction. This is a fine, predictably technocratic, remedy. But as the book has accidentally shown, old-fashioned absolutist morality seems to work best. Rather than attempting a solution which accepts the teenagers law breaking, how about this ? Kids seem to start smoking mostly because they think it makes them cool. But what is the pinnacle of cool for teenagers ? Driving a car. Why not just deny a drivers license to anyone who gets caught smoking before they are 21. I'm just not seeing a whole lot of kids who are willing to act the hoodlum at the cost of riding Shank's mare, are you?
I don't mean to dismiss the book out of hand. The Tipping Point
metaphor is thought provoking and there's a lot of other interesting stuff
here. Just don't take the premise too seriously; it's more an artistic
tool than a scientific theory.
(Reviewed:06-May-01)
Grade: (C+)
