This post is not going to be the tipping point for this blog however it is interesting to think about which one might. The beauty of setting up a blog is that it is almost like writing a secret journal and then leaving it behind, open on a bus. You are really writing for yourself in the first few posts – or even worse – for no one, not even yourself (see my soccer posts for a case in point ). But I did not start this blog for myself – I am familiar enough with my own ideas that it is redundant to write them down purely for my own edification.

I read most of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point last year. I didn’t finish it because I felt it was a fairly flawed work however I did rapidly finish all of (the not-un-flawed) Freakonomics. What was it that I felt unsatisfied about with Tipping Point? Afterall I believed in the concepts Gladwell was discussing – they led me to the book in the first place. Unfortunately Gladwell spends too much time trying to be compelling.

My first annoyance with this book came with the Paul Revere annectdote – something that Gladwell returned to so often that I eventually threw the book down the reference after the reference that caused me to utter “If he mentions Revere one more time…” (you can add fist waving to your mental image if you want to).

Excuse me, everyone else, for a sec… Malcolm, if you ever read this – the Revere annectdote was weak and unverifiable. You chose it because it was something close to the American psyche – a story parents told to kids. For chrissake – Revere is not just his name – it describes how the American public relates to the legend of this man. It worked from an illustrative standpoint however you drew it too close to the core of your argument by so regularly returning to it. With artifice at the core your book felt as compelling as the news they wrap fish and chips up with.

Freakonomics appealed to me more as it stands as more than just opinion supported by fairytales. It is not without its own transgressions from the objective to the subjective but only a fool would expect any work to be purely objective. This wouldn’t have mattered for Tipping Point if it was purely a documentation of the phenomena of social inflections. However part of its appeal was that it explored how ideas travelled and how small changes could lead to big ones. Of course that is appealing, it smacks of efficiency, of complexity theory and most of all it hinted at a magic well of infinite success if such phenomena could be harnessed.

But I didn’t believe the Paul Revere story the first time. I didn’t think I needed to – I saw it as a great illustrative story which could be supported by actual research. I didn’t expect it to be used to prop up the research! Most telling was the coincidental cross-over between Freakonomics and Tipping Point. Both discussed the extraordinary drops in crime in New York.

Gladwell posited that the Broken Windows policy of Mayor Giuliani was responsible. Freakonomics much more convincingly put forward the idea that changes in abortion laws twenty years earlier as a reason for the reduction in crime. Big changes versus small changes. It seems to make sense that the work put in should be closer to the magnitude of the resulting flow-on changes.

Broken Windows policy is not a small policy to implement however it is piecemeal. It doesn’t confront the root cause of a problem but rather addresses smaller outward manifestations of it. I liken it to the The Sorceror’s Apprentice. Or a knight trying to fight an infinite-headed hydra. The truth is you cannot expect to affect change by pushing around the edges. Changes in abortion laws meant less children growing up in broken homes. That meant less disadvantage and eventually less crime. It didn’t mean making small changes and relying on some magic flow of social change to catch on pay it forward.

All that makes sense to me and my experience thus far. Do I believe it? Not really. Not yet. Its a set of ideas to continue exploring. Just because Malcolm Gladwell can’t enlighten me to the mysteries of complexity doesn’t mean I don’t think knowledge of how things interact can lead to an advantage. I hope to explore some of these ideas (and many others) here. If the world can truly be manipulated (and my theorizing concludes that it can) then by rights, hard work should get these writings to an audience that is wider than my social sphere. The goal is to accelerate my learning and to feed that back.

Damn its good not to have written about Soccer. Bring on Italy.

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