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Can Malcolm Gladwell Still Spark the Idea Economy?

A quarter-century after The Tipping Point, his wide-eyed curiosity seems badly dated. But he’s pivoting.

Oct 04, 20245:40 AM

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Shannon Greer and Amazon.

As many, many, many critics have pointed out, Malcolm Gladwell has built a brilliant career—staff writer at the New Yorker, multiple New York Times bestsellers, an ambitious (if embattled) podcast network, a highly lucrative sideline in speaking engagements—out of boiling down the research of social scientists into digestible rules of thumb that usually run counter to conventional wisdom. Those same critics have also repeatedly pointed out that Gladwell cherry-picks, oversimplifies, and misrepresents that research and its meaning. Gladwell has responded by claiming that he’s just doing his job, that it is the role of journalists to present information to laypeople in a form they can understand.

With Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell returns to his first hit, The Tipping Point, 25 years after that book made him a sensation. Once again, he presents himself as investigating the phenomenon of social contagion and the various conditions that foster or inhibit the spread of ideas and behaviors. It turns out, he writes, that he finds that the ideas in the earlier book remain “useful,” but “I still do not understand so many things about social epidemics.” Is he here to tell us what he got wrong or failed to anticipate 25 years ago? After all, The Tipping Point’s own subtitle proclaims that “little things can make a big difference,” and few things are littler these days than a book. Did Gladwell’s book make a difference in anything but his own life?

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These questions are about the only “mysteries” that Gladwell finds un-intriguing. Instead of revisiting The Tipping Point and considering its impact, Revenge of the Tipping Point is devoted to expounding on Gladwell’s earlier maxims. To the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context, he adds “the Overstory,” “Super-spreaders,” and “the Magic Third.” This book is more of the same, but it is also, in more subtle ways, something quite different.

The cover of the book has a picture of a lit match.

Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

By Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown.

$29.76 from Bookshop.org
$22.40 from Amazon

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To take a page from Gladwell himself, let’s talk about the overstory—or what most people would call cultural narratives; not all that different from the “Power of Context,” really—that has prevailed over his own work. In 1999, when The Tipping Point was published, corporate managers were reeling over the emergence of the internet and unsure how it would affect the future of their businesses. At the same time, people whom those same managers might have previously dismissed as mere nerds were suddenly transformed into billionaires and hailed as entrepreneurial visionaries. The market for experts who knew even a little bit more than average about online interactions and communities was hot, providing a small group of digital prophets, evangelists, and early adopters with many richly compensated writing and speaking opportunities.

The late ’90s and early 2000s saw a flourishing of idealized technocracy. The Tipping Point—with its insistence that if we were only smart enough about interpreting the abundance of data made available to us, we could direct and even control previously unfathomable social phenomena—was a product of that time. Experts who were comfortable with computers and the tools they provided and who could also communicate fluently with old-school businessmen—the kind of guys who had only reluctantly begun to use email—were rare. All you needed to do to be hailed as a “genius” in some industries was to speculate confidently about how technology was going to change everything and how everyone really, really needed to start preparing for that change or they’d lose out.

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The Tipping Point is filled with people presented as extraordinarily talented. Gladwell calls them Mavens (self-made experts in some particular area), Connectors (people who know lots of other people in different walks of life), and Salesmen (charismatic persuaders). The very premise of the book is that a small number of people can exert a disproportionate influence, the technocrat’s credo. Gladwell’s prime example—the (unidentified) street-style pioneers in New York City’s East Village who brought Hush Puppies shoes back into fashion—rescued a storied brand from the brink of discontinuation. As someone who understood how all of this worked, Gladwell himself became exactly the sort of maverick expert he valorized in The Tipping Point, which sold more than 5 million copies and turned its title into a new buzzword.

But then a new and massive generation of digital natives came of age. A mere decade or so after the publication of The Tipping Point, corporations could hire their pick of young people well-acquainted with the internet and the social change it caused. Colleges disgorged large numbers of graduates who had grown up with the expectation that “smartness” would guarantee them an exalted place in the world. But elite overproduction meant too many young people were competing for too few plum jobs. Smartness and technological expertise were no longer enough, especially in media professions like Gladwell’s. New criteria were called for, and moral righteousness on a variety of social issues became a much more valuable currency—as well as an effective tool for dislodging rivals from the most desirable jobs.

If you accept that it is now your job to address serious social inequities—widespread, entrenched problems that have baffled generations of experts—instead of shoe sales, who can say that any such tricks even exist?

Perhaps this explains why, in Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell doesn’t revisit some of the most prescient insights offered in his earlier book. While he can’t be credited with singlehandedly creating the profession of influencer, surely he can claim to have anticipated it by observing that ad campaigns are much less successful at generating sales than recommendations from trusted individuals. Instead, Revenge of the Tipping Point contains exactly zero anecdotes about marketing—a remarkable change, given that its predecessor’s success was largely driven by the idea that businesses could use Gladwell’s rules to sell more stuff.

Gladwell has shifted his focus. In addition to examining how a formerly honest man became a flagrant Medicare fraudster, he contemplates the racial and economic biases embedded in Ivy League athletic programs, the opioid epidemic, and the best ways to integrate corporate boards and suburban neighborhoods (plus the value of diversity in both, as well as in cheetah populations). Revenge of the Tipping Point presents “social engineering” as both a temptation inherent in the concept of tipping points and an ethical Pandora’s box.

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For example, Gladwell recounts the history of a planned community in Palo Alto that achieved successful racial integration in the 1950s by strictly regulating the percentage of each ethnic group: Black residents could only sell their houses to other Black people, Asian Americans to Asian Americans, whites to whites, and so on. This worked very well, but it also meant that potential new residents could be excluded because of their race, which today would be illegal. “The reason we avoid acknowledging the simple solutions offered to us by tipping points,” Gladwell writes, “is that, in the end, the solutions aren’t really that simple.” This is, of course, exactly what his critics have always protested. This is also far from the first time that Gladwell has presented some widely acknowledged premise as a trenchant discovery.

Critics have complained—and will surely continue to do so—that Revenge of the Tipping Point is more of the problematic same from Gladwell: that his claims are not sufficiently supported by the evidence and that he uses the narrative power of anecdote to bypass the skepticism that should greet such claims. And this is probably true. But a comparison between Revenge and its predecessor shows that he has in fact changed his approach in the past 25 years, and in a way that acquiesces to the “overstory” of his own profession. The morally neutral tone and wide-eyed (if sometimes disingenuous) curiosity of The Tipping Point now feels badly dated. The proper concern for a writer of Gladwell’s stature today is not just how the world is, but how it ought to be.

However, this presents a peculiar challenge for Gladwell, who has always capitalized on the notion that his ideas are actionable. Take the Lawrence Tract, that Palo Alto neighborhood that achieved harmonious racial integration in the dark ages of the mid-20^th century. The community was engineered to prevent white flight, the phenomenon of white residents moving out of an area when the Black population reached a certain proportion. For most of Gladwell’s colleagues, it would be enough to denounce the whites who behave this way as racist and who made the Lawrence Tract’s quota system necessary. Done and dusted. But calling people racist, however personally satisfying and socially rewarding, doesn’t accomplish anything and may even be counterproductive if they hear you say it. One of the advantages of fulminating over structural bias and “capitalism,” after all, is that no one expects you to do anything more about it than fulminate.

Gladwell’s reputation, however, is founded on the idea that one person or one weird trick can have an enormous effect on the world if we are smart enough to deploy them. He is obliged by the very fact of his massive audience and their massive expectations to identify such tricks, or else to admit that many of the ideas in The Tipping Point are no longer all that “useful.” This is a fine tightrope to walk. If you accept that it is now your job to address serious social inequities—widespread, entrenched problems that have baffled generations of experts—instead of shoe sales, who can say that any such tricks even exist?

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Revenge of the Tipping Point begins and concludes with Gladwell’s one great contemporary example. He argues that the opioid crisis was far less prevalent and lethal in states that had adopted an irksome system for documenting prescriptions of Schedule 2 narcotics. Devised by an especially zealous enforcement agency head in California, it required physicians to make two copies of every prescription form for opioids, keeping one copy in their own files and submitting the third to the state. According to Gladwell (whose reliability and accuracy on other subjects have been repeatedly challenged, including by the scholars whose work he cites), this single factor caused those states that adopted this practice to have much lower opioid consumption and overdose rates per capita than those that did not.

“That simple bureaucratic intervention evolves into an overstory,” Gladwell writes—“a narrative that says opioids are different, spurring the physician to pause and think before prescribing them.” This proves that “overstories matter. You can create them. They can spread. They are powerful.” Or maybe doctors just don’t want the state to receive paperwork that might call into question their prescription practices and invite the attention of nosy investigators?

The culture no longer looks kindly, let alone admiringly, on technocrats, with their ostensibly creative disruptions and overblown promises to “change the world.” We’re more into finding someone to blame for our problems, or embracing policies as misconceived as Gladwell’s tiny interventions but so grandiose and unpopular that they stand no chance of ever being implemented. (“Abolish the police,” anyone?) Malleable though he may be, Gladwell hasn’t followed us all the way into this new overstory. That’s not really on-brand for him, at least not yet. But maybe he can find some club kids in the East Village to help him catch up.

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