A follow-up to The Tipping Point twenty-five years on, and a noticeably darker book than the original.
The first book was broadly delighted by social epidemics. This one looks at who engineers them on purpose. Opioid marketing, Medicare fraud in south Florida, a suicide cluster in an affluent town. The mechanics are the same as before. The applications are worse.
The idea I keep using is the overstory, the shared background assumption a group operates under without stating it. Change the overstory and behaviour shifts without anyone announcing a new policy.
The usual caution applies. The stories are better than the evidence under them.
Read November 2024.