The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (review)

HUMANITIES 165 Socratic gadfly who initiates the dialogues and prods the participants (and us) to hard thinking. Kate, a >fringe ecologist,= has left academia (never highly regarded by Jacobs) and now edits >a prospering science newsweekly .= Hiram, shrewder and more practical than his predecessor Ben, is a >fundraiser and a facilitator= who consults for environmental causes. Murray, older than the others, voices the perspective of long-considered experience. The dialogues of these five loosely spiral through eight chapters. Chapter 1, >Damn, Another Ecologist,= sets the stage and introduces biomimicry: the study of how societal developments might mimic nature, perhaps the book=s underlying premise. Chapter 2, >The Nature of Development,= argues that positive economic development, like nature, abhors monopoly and depends on adaptative competition. Chapter 3, >The Nature of Expansion,= follows up on this theme. >Diverse ecosystems,= Kate opines, in words that could have come from the ecologist and poet Wendell Berry, >are so much more stable than one-crop plantations.= Chapter 4, >The Nature of Self-Refueling,= stresses the importance of cities in the economic networking necessary for economic health. Detroit=s economy declined because of its narrow focus; Taiwan=s flourished through diversity. Chapter 5, >Evading Collapse,= explores the positive limit principles learned from the redwoods, whose high branches catch the fog that helps water their vast bulk, and negative ones, which necessitated Canada=s ban on cod fishing in 1992. Chapter 6, >The Double Nature of Fitness for Survival,= follows up, among other matters, how cats large and small cope sensibly with oversupply of prey. In Chapter 7, >Unpredictability,= the group circles round again the networking principle via chaos theory and Edward Lorenz=s >butterfly effect=: >the idea that a butterfly beating its wings in Colorado meadow can lead to a storm and flood three thousand miles away.= Chapter 8, >Armbruster =s Promise,= reaffirms the value of simple over complex solutions to economic crises. Whereas Exxon using sophisticated technology on the Alaskan oil spill cleaned up only 12 per cent of the oil, a hairdresser in Atlanta, experimenting with hair clippings and motor oil in his child=s wading pool, came up with a method that would have cleaned up all of it. Jacobs=s argument in The Nature of Economies is neither linear, nor rigidly prescriptive or dogmatic; rather it reticulates developments in botany, zoology, biology, chemistry, and physics as well as economics. Thirty pages of notes, mostly discussing recent studies, document the text. The Nature of Economies defies adequate or even fair summary. Only a polymath with a range as immense as Jacobs=s could do justice to this volume. Her ideal reader would be an intellectual quester like herself, world-vigilant and willing to grow through ongoing dialogue with diverse and studied opinions. (JOHN CLUBBE) Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Difference 166 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Little, Brown. 279. US $25.00. In this daring and wide-ranging book, Malcolm Gladwell discusses the nature of rapid social change by applying medical models to the spread of ideas. Like epidemic diseases, ideas have a >tipping point= where they will grow exponentially: >Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.= How are ideas and diseases similar? According to Gladwell, most diseases reach the epidemic state because a small number of individuals are contagious to a large number of people (he calls this the >Law of the Few=). In like fashion, sweeping social change is sparked by the actions of a minority with the charisma and commitment to spread ideas, fads and behaviours. For example, Hush Puppies, once a scorned relic from the suburban past, were transformed into a desirable nationwide fashion statement for all North American young people by the efforts of a few Manhattan hipsters. The individuals who took to wearing Hush Puppies were zealous enough to promote them through >word of mouth.= Ultimately the product became appealing again to a wide group of people. People likely to provoke social change fall into three main groups: the Connectors (those who bring disparate social worlds together); the Mavens (those eager to share their cutting-edge knowledge); and the Salesmen (those who persuade others to go along...