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But The Tipping Point doesn’t merely embody social climbing any more than it merely describes it. It contains a sub-rosa promise to make it possible. It’s the kind of book that’s bound to be a success as long as people like to think they’re important. Gladwell even provides a test that readers can take to see whether they themselves might be Connectors. “In the paragraph below is a list of around 250 surnames, all taken at random from the Manhattan phone book,” he writes. “Go down the list and give yourself a point every time you see a surname that is shared by someone you know.” After the list he explains, “There are people whose social circle is four or five times the size of other people’s. Sprinkled among every walk of life, in other words, are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. They are Connectors.” An objective measure of whether one is “truly extraordinary” in less than 20 minutes? Who could resist? The Tipping Point is more like a self-help book than the “biography of an idea” its author grandly calls it, or maybe it’s a parlor game–Who Wants to Be the Tipping Point, the new Monopoly for our fame-crazed era.
To explain his concept Gladwell expands on an old metaphor, “the germ of an idea,” by trying to assess the contagiousness of said germs. This approach requires him first to explain how epidemics work mathematically and then to explain how they work sociologically. He is more successful at the first explanation than the second, but of course the first is by far the less interesting. In his endnotes he offers this straightforward example: Let’s say that one summer 1,000 Canadian tourists with a 24-hour flu come to Manhattan, and that the flu has a 2 percent rate of infection. If the average New Yorker runs into 50 people a day, at first there’s no epidemic–just 1,000 people with the flu each coming into contact with 50 people a day and giving it to one of them. The first 1,000 get well just as the next 1,000 gets sick. But come the Christmas shopping season, and say each infected person runs into five more people a day–just a small increase. By the end of the week, you’ve got 2,000 sick New Yorkers, and by Christmas you’ve got an epidemic.
The key to this explanation is the “stickiness factor,” some combination of persistence and significance. Nicotine, for instance, is very sticky–it provides a serious rush and literally stays with you. But when the commerce is in ideas, calling something “sticky” merely restates the outcome: we know ideas are memorable when people remember them, and we know they’re significant when they act on them.
Or maybe it’s just as he says: any idea can be irresistible under the right circumstances. But unless he can tell us what those circumstances are, or how to bring them about, or how to circumvent them, who cares? We now know that under the circumstances of hyperinflation and debt and international humiliation the idea of exterminating the Jews was at one point irresistible to Germans, but that knowledge doesn’t seem to have helped us prevent ethnic warfare in Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. Gladwell has merely articulated a formal way of saying “I told you so.”
