The Tipping Point: Malcom Gladwell

So I just finished reading Malcom Gladwell's 'Tipping Point'. One word - awesome! There are tons of interesting (and scientifically backed) factoids in this book, which Gladwell uses to illustrate how small things can lead to momentous changes. I highly recommend it. The book gets its title from an interesting sociological observation. Gladwell writes:

Th[e] possibility of sudden change is at the center of the Tipping Point and might well be the hardest to accept. The expression first came into popular use in the 1970s to describe the flight to the suburbs of whites living in the older cities of the American Northeast. When the number of incoming African Americans in a particular neighborhood reached a certain point-20 percent, say-sociologists observed that the community would "tip": most of the remaining whites would leave almost immediately. The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.

I thought a bit about this, and my first 'home' in Washington DC - Truxton Circle, which was actually a case in the inverse. There has been a huge influx of whites into this formerly black neighborhood. Gladwell's book got me thinking about the tipping point of the property and rent values, and the impact of that on the incumbent group's living situation. Note that gentrification is not always race-based. The migration of wealthy blacks will have just the same effect on the poor's plight. As rent and property values go up, the original population is forced out. But what is the tipping point?

According to Wikipedia, the Tipping Point

was named as one of the best books of the decade by Amazon.com customers, The Onion A.V. Club, The Guardian, and The Times. It was also Barnes and Nobles’s 5th bestselling nonfiction book of the decade.

I am partly ashamed that I am just reading it in 2012 :)

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