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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Communities have their own stories, and those stories are contagious. Actually, the word story isn’t quite right. A better word is overstory. An overstory is the upper layer of foliage in a forest, and the size and density and height of the overstory affect the behavior and development of every species far below on the forest floor. I think that small-area variation—such as what distinguishes Waldorf schools from other schools and what sets Boulder apart from Buffalo—is more like an overstory than a story. It’s not something explicit that’s drilled into every inhabitant. The overstory is made up of things way up in the air, in many cases outside our awareness. We tend to forget about the overstory because we’re so focused on the life going on in front of and around us. But overstories turn out to be really, really powerful.

The best solution to a monoculture epidemic is to break up the monoculture.

Epidemics love monocultures. But so do we. Sometimes, in fact, we go out of our way to create them—even though in doing so we put our own children at risk.

tipping points can be deliberately engineered. People, it is clear, behave very differently in a group above some mysterious point of critical mass than they do in a group just a little below that point.

This is what it looks like to take tipping points seriously. If there really is a dramatic shift for the worse, right around a specific number, then you have to make absolutely sure you never reach that number.

In Denver in 2006, Stedman discovered, 5 percent of the vehicles on the road produced 55 percent of the automobile pollution. That’s the Law of the Few: It’s a very large problem caused by a very small number of actors.

That’s the nature of an overstory: Most of us don’t bother to look up at the ideas circulating above in the forest canopy.

Overstories matter. You can create them. They can spread. They are powerful. And they can endure for decades.

Once the opioid epidemic was off and running, the epidemiologist Mathew Kiang calculated, the top 1 percent of doctors “accounted for 49 percent of all opioid doses.” People like “the candyman” and Michael Rhodes prescribed 1,000 times more opioid doses than the average doctor. Purdue fueled an epidemic that would end up consuming the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans based on the seduction of no more than a few thousand doctors concentrated in a handful of states.

Epidemics have rules. They have boundaries. They are subject to overstories—and we are the ones who create overstories. They change in size and shape when they reach a tipping point—and it is possible to know when and where those tipping points are. They are driven by a number of people, and those people can be identified. The tools necessary to control an epidemic are sitting on the table, right in front of us. We can let the unscrupulous take them. Or we can pick them up ourselves, and use them to build a better world.