Revenge of the Tipping Point: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

To learn more about tipping points, Gladwell goes to visit a real estate agent named Richard in his hometown, which seems like an ideal community where people know one another and actually live in the homes they own rather than renting them out. Gladwell calls this town Poplar Grove to deliberately withhold the real name, and he says that even Richard is a pseudonym. It would be impossible to guess where Poplar Grove really is because despite it seeming like a desirable place to live, it’s not the type of town that usually makes headlines. A recent crisis has started to change that, though. Although Poplar Grove is very different from Miami, where Philip Esformes lives, Gladwell asks how each place might have its own overstory that shapes life for people who live there.

Gladwell thinks a different crisis, in the world of zoos, can help explain the crisis in Poplar Grove. Starting in the 1970s, zoos started to focus more on breeding animals in captivity instead of capturing them in the wild. This strategy successfully bred stable populations of many animal species in zoos, but not cheetahs, which often died in captivity. Geneticist Stephen O’Brien tells Gladwell that he thought the failures with getting cheetahs to breed and survive in captivity were strange, so he went to investigate them. His experiments with cheetahs led him to a shocking conclusion: most of the cheetahs were so genetically similar that they were nearly twins, probably due to a catastrophic loss in their population at some point in the past. The result of all this inbreeding was a monoculture.

Back in Poplar Grove, Gladwell explains the work of two authors, Abrutyn and Mueller, who have looked at the social pressure children in that town feel to measure up to their parents’ upper-middle-class expectations. Most high schools have different cliques, where different groups place different value on academics and popularity. At Poplar Grove, however, students in all groups feel pressure to be both smart and popular. Abrutyn and Mueller explain how they struggled to find a rebel who rejected the Poplar Grove norms, noting that in a monoculture like Poplar Grove, it only takes a slight variation to become a rebel.

The danger of a monoculture is that it is defenseless against epidemics from outside. To illustrate this concept, Gladwell turns back to the cheetahs. Melody Roelke-Parker is a veterinarian who took care of cheetahs at an Oregon Zoo called Wildlife Safari, beginning in the 1980s. She noticed that seemingly healthy cheetahs would often die unexpectedly. She did an autopsy on one and found evidence of a coronavirus that was previously only known to affect domestic cats and that was much more severe in the cheetahs. Roelke-Parker realized that the cheetahs at the zoo were all vulnerable to the disease because of their similarity, and that epidemics were less of a problem in wild cheetahs because they tended to be solitary animals.

Continuing the story of Poplar Grove, a crisis began one day when a young woman named Alice jumped off a bridge in a suicide attempt. She survived, and people are surprised that someone whose future seemed so promising would attempt suicide. From then on, there were several more suicides and suicide attempts at the local high school, with a rate of over one death by suicide per year (compared other high schools, where the rate was closer to one or two deaths every 10 years). Suicide spread like an epidemic in the monoculture.

Later in the 1980s, O’Brien and Roelke-Parker both got involved with saving panthers in Florida. Like cheetahs, the panthers were also frail due to a monoculture, so the conservation group came up with the idea of breeding cougars with panthers to increase genetic diversity. Although some breeders protested against any deviation from the “pure” panther, the interbreeding of cougars and panthers went ahead and successfully reversed the decline of the panther population.

Gladwell believes that in places like Poplar Grove, people often create monocultures for their children with good intentions, but these can have negative side effects. He compares it to iatrogenesis, the process by which a doctor trying to help a patient accidentally does more harm than the disease the doctor was originally trying to cure. The monoculture remains strong at Poplar Grove, starting in elementary school, and Mueller and Abrutyn have moved on to studying a new school in Colorado that might have an even worse epidemic than Poplar Grove.