Originally appeared in the Boston Book Review in 2000
Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker and
author of "The Tipping Point." (2000)
These three 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 same three principles that
define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks
every winter. Of the three, the third, epidemic, 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
"The Tipping Point"
HB: What got you interested in the material that led to
"The Tipping Point"?
MG: I covered the HIV epidemic for the Washington Post and
got very interested in epidemiology. A lot what I learned about how epidemics
work surprised me. Then, in 1996, I wrote "The Tipping Point" article
for The New Yorker dealing with crime as an epidemic. That was inspired by the
work of Jonathan Crane, who had written on the subject, and by George Kelling,
who had put forward the broken windows idea. Once you have that paradigm, the
fun thing to do is to see how many other places you can make it work.
MG: Mavens is a term I borrow from all the market maven
research and expand to cover ideas as well as products. Connectors is my word
but it's hardly a novel concept. All three capitalized terms are my words.
HB: Are you the only person bring the study of epidemiology
to bear on marketing?
MG: I don't know whether anyone has so aggressively applied
the idea as I have. But certainly viral marketing is a hot concept now.
HB: Viral marketing. As in the Blair Witch Project?
MG: Blair Witch Project was a classic kind of virally
marketed movie. Viral marketing is an attempt to use organic ideas to promote
products. I'm a translator and a packager of some of these ideas, not a huge
innovator in the field.
HB: Looking at the book, and a number of your New Yorker
articles, including the recent piece on John Rock and the birth control pill,
there seems to be a common thread to your work, and that is an attempt to
dispense with mythologies and expose us to realities as science presents them.
MG: That's an elegant way of putting it. I'm very interested
in the difference between what is and what we think is.
HB: I sometimes feel a kind of glee in your work at tearing
aside myth and convention.
MG: It's funny you should say that because there are times
when I do something intellectually audacious and don't get credit for it. For
example, in a story I wrote 2 1/2 years ago on whether science can make you
live longer, there was a little argument pointing out why we might not want to
cure cancer. It was a mortality versus morbidity argument, a purely statistical
argument made by a number of epidemiologists that showed that the effect of
curing cancer without curing anything else would essentially be to dramatically
increase morbidity. On the face of it, this outrageous, but actually, if you
run the numbers, cancer is so overwhelmingly a disease of old age that what you
do if you cure it is convert people into dying of Alzheimer's.
It's about as counterintuitive an argument as can be made,
and it's in the story because it's a great way to think about what our
priorities should be when we attack the problems of old age. We should be far
more concerned with diseases of morbidity than we are. But that argument is so,
well, out there. But no one ever said anything about it. Either I'd made it
seem reasonable or people didn't read the article or people just dismissed me
out of hand.
But I do get a kind of glee out of these highly
counter-intuitive cases.
HB: Do you have a science background?
MG: No. My dad is a mathematician but I have no formal
science training.
HB: Why did you become a science writer?
MG: Actually, I don't think of myself as a science writer. I
think of myself as someone who will write about science when it's interesting.
Take the John Rock piece, on the birth control pill. That was really the first
science piece I've been happy with since coming to The New Yorker. But the
point of that piece is not really a science point. It's a point about the way
that culture and belief connect.
HB: John Rock wanted to make the pill conform to what the
Catholic Church thought of as natural, as in the rhythm method of birth
control. You show tht in terms of human evolutionary history, the rhythm method
is not natural at all.
MG: That's the value added. The science is there to
illustrate a cultural or psychological point. That is the way I like to use
science.
HB: You like to find situations where our views are out of
step with science.
MG: Where there's a dissonance.
HB: You take on the likes of Hillary Clinton on childhood
development, and describe her as believing that the decisive things happen to
us early on and that nothing later can matter much. And then you ask, is that
liberalism? Liberalism is about the belief that changes in the environment
*can* matter. You argue that it's not only changes in the environment of
childhood that matter but also changes in the contemporary environment.
MG: One of the things I'm really proud of in the book is the
argument you've just put your finger on. I think it's an interesting argument
and would love to see more people engage it. Social psychology talks about the
importance of context and challenges a lot of the founding mythology of both
right and left. We so often think that character dictates our behavior. But
there are many cases where our environment either improves on or thwarts our
character. I give an example of seminarians hurrying past a person who needs
help because they are late for their sermons. I have no doubt that those
seminarians are profoundly caring and thoughtful people but they are in a rush.
They are in a situation where their generosity and benevolence cannot be
employed.
HB: So what you're throwing in the face of conservatives, I
think, is that much as they like to think character determines behavior, in
many cases it is context that is primary. And what you're saying to liberals is
that the important context is the immediate context, not only the childhood
context.
MG: Right. I remember years ago writing a piece on a 1960s
debate, carried on in many magazines and journals, about how to build
playgrounds. One party favored straight structures, the other curved
structures. Both sides thought you could make a fundamental difference in the
way poor children turned out by designing inner city playgrounds. That actually
isn't true, we now know the playground isn't decisive. But I think it's
wonderful to entertain the notion that it could be. Astroturf was invented by
these same people, liberal reformers who thought that it was very important for
inner city kids to play on grass. Astroturf was the attempt to give inner city
kids the equivalent of a suburban environment. There again, Astroturf is not
going to solve your problem. But I love the idea that someone would look at
something like Astroturf and wonder whether it could solve the problem.
There's this wonderful experimental quality to '60s
liberalism. It's that part of the liberal impulse that liberals have given up
on. A lot of the things they worried about in the '60s turned out to be pipe
dreams but that doesn't mean the impulse was wrong. The impulse is incredible
important. I think of New York City subway director David Gunn's campaign to
clean up the subway as reviving the liberal impulse of the '60s. Lots of subway
advocates went after him saying, you're wasting your time, why spend all of
this energy fixing the subway when we can name fifty other things that are more
serious? He stuck to his guns, he wanted to experiment, he wanted to try
something. The book, in one sense, is a call for experimentation.
HB: But you could say that what reduced up crime New York
City was not so much cleaning up the subway or fixing broken windows. It was
Guliani's police cracking down. And that, in turn, has led to a whole series of
police killings.
MG: Other cities have brought down the crime rate without
Guliani style confrontations. New York could have done it without
confrontation. There are a number of ways to change context. In community
policing, the cops establish a personal presence. Community policing is about
using the police as the eyes of the street. New York City could have done that.
There was no reason for antagonism.
The idea is to get below a certain threshold. Kids carry
guns because they think that other kids are carrying guns. If you get below the
threshold, kids no longer have to carry guns because no one else is carrying
them and gun carrying on the street literally plunges. So in some
neighborhoods, we got below the threshold, and the crime rate tipped down. The
question is: how do you get below the threshold? The cops were doing lots of
spot-checks -- shaking people down and arresting them for carrying guns. The
question is, can you get below the gun-carrying threshold without having a
confrontational attitude towards the population?
HB: One of the counter-intuitive things you do is defend
band-aid solutions. You argue that the band-aid is very versatile, works in all
sorts of contexts and is cheap. Why throw it out? But doesn't that view
encourage us to think that we never have to get to the root of anything because
band-aid solutions are sufficient?
MG: I was saying you can do small things that will make a
huge difference in crime. That doesn't mean you can then walk away. I hope that
is not the way it is taken.
Liberals have traditionally argued that our obligation to
those less fortunate than we are has is that there are consequences if we don't
come through.
HB: Social revolution being among them.
MG: Yes. The formative insight of the Newt Gingrich
right-wing revolution of the 1990s was that this wasn't so. The disturbing but
brilliant insight at the heart of the Republican view was, basically, that you
can do anything you want to poor people. I once did an article for the
Washington Post on Guliani when it was clear that he was trying to drive the
poor out of New York. There was no other explanation for his policies, and he
realized he could get away with it. I find that incredibly disturbing. And it
has occurred to me that one way "The Tipping Point" could be read is
that by cleaning up graffiti, by picking up litter, by shaking down people in
the street, you are dealing with poverty.
HB: The book could be read that way. This is not a time when
the poor have a voice that matters.
MG: But we have to admit that the old liberal argument that
there are dire consequences to cutting welfare and the like, is wrong. The
consequences are moral, not social. It's isn't that there will be a social
revolution and the poor are going to storm the suburbs. They're not going to
storm the suburbs.
I think you should not justify obligation to the poor in
non-moral terms. The attempt to make non-moral arguments is also what I object
to in the debate about smoking in this country. The argument is always made
that we have to go after tobacco companies because the health care costs
associated with smoking represent an incredible economic burden on society. For
one thing, that's not true; it's been proved false a million times.
HB: Because smokers die young?
MG: They die young, on an average of five or six years
earlier than nonsmokers. The truth is that the savings from lower social
security payments to lung cancer victims are greater than the expenses incurred
by higher health care costs. And that's not even counting the amount that
smokers pay in extra taxes.
HB: So why target smoking?
MG: Because it's bad, it's bad for society that people
should die. Why do we need to make an economic argument? The economic argument
is false and it obscures the real point, which is that people should not be
addicted to things that make them die young -- regardless of the economic
consequences. Why do we need, in this day and age, to put everything in dollars
and cents? Why do we have to help the poor only because otherwise the poor
might rise up and take over the suburbs? We don't need that argument.
HB: There is so much in your book that would seem to appeal
to marketers. Are you now or have you ever been a high-priced marketing
consultant?
MG: I do actually give talks to marketers. But part of my
thinking in writing the book was to remystify the marketing process. The
standard model is: I would like to sell a product so I set up focus groups. But
what is actually important are much more subtle and organic forms of
communication, such as word of mouth. And those are much harder to set up and
manipulate. Mavens and connectors and salesmen -- I know who mine are but not
how to identify them by and large. I was explicitly referring to categories of
people who cannot be easily identified by age, income, gender, IQ -- whatever.
They can only be identified by personality traits that are randomly distributed
through the population. That's actually a hard model to use in a marketing
context. If I was a marketer, I would read "The Tipping Point" and
think, this is much harder than I thought.
I haven't written a blueprint for marketing campaigns -- on
the contrary. Though it is true "The Tipping Point" is being sold in
the business section of Barnes and Nobles.
HB: In what section should it be sold?
MG: I have no idea. I wrote it for my New Yorker audience,
and my New Yorker audience is simply intelligent and curious people.
HB: You pay special tribute to Judith Rich Harris, writing
that her book, "The Nurture Assumption" "changed the way I
thought about the world." How so?
MG: Judy Harris reintroduced the idea of "culture"
to our conception of behavior and personality development. I had been trapped
in the static biology and family-based idea that maintained we are the
permanent creations of heredity and home. Harris made me realize that in fact
we are powerfully in the grip of the world around us.
To read "The Nurture Assumption" is to be struck
by how subtle its arguments are. Harris spends a lot of time talking about the
story of Cinderella. When Cinderella goes to the ball, the ugly stepsisters
don't recognize her. Harris asks if that is plausible or not. This leads her
into a brilliant discussion of how our family relationships matter -- for how we
behave in our family. Outside the family, we adhere to a completely different
of rules.
HB: But don't parents have a lot to do with shaping the
environment for children outside the home by deciding where to live, where to
send their kids to school, what kind of friendships to encourage? .
MG: Harris makes that point. At the end of the book there's
a call for parents to worry even more about the environment in which their kids
grow up -- the school their kids go to and so on. She completely dignifies all
those traditional parental preoccupations.
HB: Doesn't the Harris view imply less guilt all around?
MG: Yes.
HB: Is it good to have less guilt?
MG: I think in many cases, yes. Remember, Harris is in her
sixties. The height of parent torture was in the '50s and '60s when parents
were held responsible for everything. What caused schizophrenia? The frigid --
the "schizogenic" -- mother. Think about the misery ideas like that
created for parents. That's what she's reacting against. If she's putting a
nail in that coffin, god bless her.
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