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

Journalist Gladwell befuddles with this convoluted revisiting of his bestseller The Tipping Point. Aiming to reveal abuses of the tipping point phenomenon by the powerful, Gladwell’s primary example is Purdue Pharma’s peddling of opioids. To build his case he grafts two new metaphors onto the tipping point concept. One is “overstories”—overarching social ideas which, like the top layer of canopy in a forest, affect the behavior of everything below. The other is a suite of epidemiology metaphors drawn from the Covid pandemic, most notably the concept of superspreaders, which, to be fair, is a great example of “The Law of the Few,” an idea Gladwell wrote about in The Tipping Point that states that a big demographic problem is often actually caused by only a few people. In the end, while he connects Purdue’s misdeeds to both “overstories” (Purdue targeted states without strong preexisting narcotics regulations) and superspreaders (Purdue focused its efforts on prescription-happy doctors), Gladwell never really lands the tipping point angle. He writes that Purdue’s switch to a less easily snortable version of the drug “tipped” OxyContin users into heroin users, which seems, like so much else in the book, to bring the definition of a tipping point right up to its own tipping point into oblivion. As he climbs the rungs of his argument, Gladwell entertains with his deep cache of anecdotes. But it’s a ladder to nowhere. (Oct.)