EMERGENCE CAN'T BE NUDGED.

I've enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's work, alluding previously to his The Tipping Point whilst offering reviews of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and of Outliers: The Story of Success.  Thus, when his Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering turned up at a railway station bookstore on the cheap, I bought it, and got it read, mostly during the ensuing train rides.

The short form of Book Review N^o. 12 is Hasty Generalization Fails to Convince.  Let me start with the Very Serious Story with which Revenge concludes: the anomaly of serious opioid abuse in some states but not neighboring states.  His overstory involves a California narcotics enforcer who requires physicians and pharmacists to write prescriptions in triplicate, which makes abusive prescription of pain killers more difficult, physicians in states where prescriptions in triplicate are not required differing in their willingness to prescribe stronger pain-killers, and detail men who identify the physicians more willing to prescribe those pain-killers.  Now, introduce a complication, one with the best of intentions, making the manufacture of pain-killers that can be ground up and snorted more difficult, and now ... the people hooked on prescription pain-killers become ... customers for pushers of heroin or illicit fentanyl.

That story enables him to conclude Revenge on a normative note.

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.

If only.  A few chapters earlier, he investigates the sudden popularity of the term "Holocaust" to refer specifically to Nazi Germany's Endlösung.  He traces it to the eponymous ABC mini-series (the screenplay is pretty accurately captured in Gerald Green's paperback with the same title) that aired in the spring of 1978.  (There were Serious People who panned it at the time, one of them characterizing it as "Ma and Pa Kettle go to Auschwitz.")  That causation, if there was causation, can only be identified after the fact, and if some other mini-series had a title or an overstory that caught on at the time, perhaps some other historical event would all of a sudden get a new name, and the Holocaust would still be "mass murder" or "Nazi ethnic cleansing" or something else.

Perhaps that illustrates how evanescent a tipping point really is.  It's election season, and we hear about preference cascades, and perhaps there are people fretting whether a quarter of a population changing its mind is enough to change everybody's mind.  That's a subject that has long been on my mind.

The information cascade generating the network externality is an illustration of a potentially suboptimal pattern of imitation. It might have been present in the adoption of basic oxygen steel furnaces and the jury on diesel locomotives is still out. But there is another phenomenon in economics, particularly where commitments are not easily reversed, called "economic hysteresis," a potentially suboptimal pattern of delayed action. But modeling the flow of information about desirable and undesirable restaurants, given initial choices, is not easy.

In much the same way that stinking hippies were an emergent equilibrium, that permanent shift of male voters in black or Hispanic neighborhoods to voting Republican, a potential "magic third" outcome might emerge.  Or, it might not, if the major parties change the way in which they appeal to median voters.

Revenge includes a number of interesting stories.  Enjoy them, but pack your skepticism.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)