‘Revenge of the Tipping Point’
Twenty-five years ago, the bestseller “The Tipping Point” turned Malcolm Gladwell into a household name. Describing “the critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point,” Gladwell illustrates his thesis with the sudden rise in sales of Hush Puppies and the sheer drop in New York City’s crime rate, interspersing them with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon trivia game, TV news icon Peter Jennings, syphilis case numbers, teen smoking, rumor spread and many more.
This year, Gladwell came up with the sequel “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” which, unlike its predecessor, has a darker, graver tone, probably reminiscent of the author’s maturing age—and the state of America today. Instead of shoes and children’s shows, Gladwell delves into the opioid addiction crisis, teen suicides in a paradisiacal town, racial quotas in the Ivy League and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I want to look at the underside of the possibilities I explored so long ago,” Gladwell writes. “If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who knows where and when to push has real power. So who are those people? What are their intentions? What techniques are they using?”
Never shying away from controversy, Gladwell makes provocative conclusions. He claims that the Oxycontin crisis was a confluence of greed on the part of Purdue Pharma and longtime owners the Sackler family, advised by McKinsey to focus on superspreader doctors who indiscriminately dispensed the drug, plus the reformulation of a dangerous drug.
“The overwhelming majority of doctors treated opioid painkillers with appropriate caution,” writes Gladwell. “The medical community as a whole behaved admirably … But that was not enough to prevent us from the worst overdose crisis in history. Why? Because a tiny fraction of doctors was not so thoughtful. And that tiny faction was enough to kick-start the epidemic.”
On Covid-19, he argues in the same vein, painting a scenario of how the virus spread during a conference of biotech firm Biogen at a Boston Marriott in February 2020. Rather than several infected people circulating the virus, Gladwell goes into the chemistry of saliva and the physics of aerosol to conclude that 300,000 infections came from just a single person—an older, heavyset executive who boarded a long flight from Western Europe. Dehydrated from the dry cabin air and a natural producer of saliva aerosols, this Mr. Index “speaks loudly, as people addressing a big room naturally do, and because the news from Europe is unusually good and he’s excited, out come millions of aerosolized particles. Mr. Index talks and talks. He answers questions. Afterward, his colleagues come up to give him a hug (or a handshake or a kiss on both cheeks) for a job well done. Mr. Index leaves the meeting on a high.
“Until, that is, he wakes up a couple of days after … with a raging fever, a crippling headache, and the sudden realization that he is very, very sick—followed by a second, even more terrifying realization that perhaps as a result, lots of other people are about to be very, very sick as well.”
And that is why we read Gladwell. He weaves spellbinding real-life scenarios from often dry pieces of evidence. The chapter I enjoyed the most centers around why Harvard selectively admits female students (with less than stellar grades) for its rugby team (which plays only a few games for a small audience). Filipino universities (including mine) recruit promising players for basketball and football to win the UAAP crown (and to satisfy alumni). The reasons are clear.
But rugby is no basketball or football. Gladwell’s shocking contention is that Harvard accepts women for its rugby team, not as its lawyers say, to promote a little-known sport or to make athletes role models—but to preserve wealth and race quotas (as the players come mainly from well-off families).
For genuine meritocratic admission, look to Caltech.
“Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell is available at National Bookstore.
Queena N. Lee-Chua is on the Board of Directors of Ateneo’s Family Business Center. Get her print book “All in the Family Business” at Lazada or Shopee, or e-book at Amazon, Google Play, Apple iBooks. Contact the author at blessbook.chua@gmail.com.
