Critiques of Malcolm Gladwell's 'Revenge of the Tipping Point'

Malcolm Gladwell’s cult of smartness

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/book-of-the-day/2024/10/malcolm-gladwell-review-cult-of-smartness-john-gray-revenge-of-the-tipping-point

John Gray:

There is a larger question. Like the US’s mass-shooting sprees, its ferocious woke movement and its insatiable thirst for conspiracy theories, America’s drug epidemic poses a question about the country itself. What is it about American culture that makes it so prone to outbreaks of mimetic insanity?...

Throughout his books, Gladwell writes as if highly literate, educated people are relatively immune to social epidemics. In fact, they are more prone to catching and spreading them than most. The left-progressive “anti-racism” that is de rigueur among higher minds, focusing exclusively on groups formerly oppressed by Western power and ignoring those oppressed by anti-Western states today, is an emblem of a university education. Hare-brained schemes for exporting democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq were backed up by cod-science such as “modernisation theory”. The pub bore banging on about the graveyards of empire was closer to the truth: the smartest people are often the daftest.

 

Is Malcolm Gladwell Out of Ideas?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/29/books/review/revenge-of-the-tipping-point-malcolm-gladwell.html

Anand Giridharadas:

The problem is that he has chosen to be a farm stand that serves salty, fatty, sugary pseudo-thinking. His signature methodology is to convey relatively boilerplate, already well-known ideas, by rebranding the ideas and wrapping them in stories. And the lubricant of this engine is turning everything into little mysteries — why bank robberies spread in Los Angeles in the 1990s, but not in New York in the 1950s — that he, having created them, can now solve for you.

Some may find the faux-thriller construction annoying, but I believe it is necessary as a subsidy to, and concealer of, weak-sauce ideas. In his earlier books, Gladwell at least coined catchy rules of thumb (the mastery of a skill takes 10,000 hours, for instance), even if their validity was questionable. But in “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” even the rules have the consistency of a slushy.

 

Business gurus are killing productivity with their pop science cults
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/04/25/businesses-must-get-rid-new-gurus-fads/
ANDREW ORLOWSKI notes:
“Gladwell’s peculiar talent as a storyteller was to find quirky or counter-intuitive stories, and masterfully maintain the suspense, so by the time the banal revelation arrived, it had the quality of a world-shattering epiphany.
This was also the formula behind the hugely successful book Freakonomics, published in 2005, subtitled “the Hidden Side of Everything”. The established Gladwell and Freakonomics transformed business publishing….
Aided by the TED Talks franchise and the emergence of social media, the barrier to becoming a public intellectual, or a business guru, got lower every year. All one needed was an appetite for self-promotion, and a quirky observation or two. An eager readership in marketing departments, typically the most insecure and fad-obsessed corner of any company, couldn’t get enough”. 

 

Malcolm Gladwell Holds His Ideas Loosely. He Thinks You Should, Too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/26/business/malcolm-gladwell-revenge-of-the-tipping-point.html
As he releases “Revenge of The Tipping Point,” the best-selling journalist talks about broken windows theory, Joe Rogan and changing his mind.