The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little Brown in 2000.Gladwell defines a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do." The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the precipitous drop in the New York City crime rate after 1990.
Gladwell also includes two chapters of case studies, situations in which tipping point concepts were used in specific situations. These situations include the athletic shoe company Airwalk, the diffusion model, how rumors are spread, decreasing the spread of syphilis in Baltimore, teen suicide in Micronesia, and teen smoking in the U.S.
Economist Steven Levitt and Gladwell have a running dispute about whether the fall in New York City's crime rate can be attributed to the actions of the police department and the "Fixing Broken Windows" effect (as claimed in The Tipping Point). In his book Freakonomics, Levitt attributes the decrease in crime to a decrease in the number of unwanted children because of Roe v. Wade, arguing that the city's changes in enforcement were not the key cause, since crime dropped nationally, in all major cities, "Even in Los Angeles, a city notorious for bad policing, crime fell at about the same rate as it did in New York once the growth in New York's police force is accounted for."
Read More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point
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