Tipping pont

Have you ever thought why some good ideas become big successes while others as good just don’t happen? Have you ever wondered why some trends just abruptly increase or decrease as some point, without a clear drastic change in the factors influencing it?

It’s more or less the following: there are 50 people with a disease that lasts 1 day. They get in touch with 50 people every day and the contagiousness rate is 2%. This means there are going to be 50 sick people every day. If they start having contact with less people, the number of people infected will slowly decrease. However, if in winter people start having contact with 51 other people in average (just 1 more person), there are going to be 61 people infected (and counting) in 10 days. Epidemic has started!

A book called Tipping Point by Malcolm Grandwell tries to bring some insights about the patterns of such tipping points: who is involved? How do the ideas spread? What’s the underlying context?

One of the interesting examples is the decreasing criminality rates of New York in the 90s, following a continuous increase of the previous 3 decades. According to Grandwell, the drop was due to the application of the Broken Window theory, which says that if you’ve got a house with a broken window and don’t repair it, soon you’re going to have another broken window, people will think the house is abandoned, other things are going to be destroyed and rapidly you’re going to have just ruins of what was a house. In practice, this means that murders and rapes in New York were fought through combating small well being infractions, such as graffiti, not payments of public transport fares, peeing in streets, leaving trash in inappropriate areas and so on.

To say the least, it was very interesting…