His 2000 debut The Tipping Point introduced the world to the concept of social contagion. Two decades on, and after a global pandemic, how have his ideas changed?
‘If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who knows where to push has real power.’‘If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who knows where to push has real power.’
Twenty-five years is a long time. And so I thought it might be interesting to revisit The Tipping Point to reexamine what I wrote so long ago. But as I immersed myself once again in social epidemics, the world seemed very different to my eyes.
In Denver in 2006, Stedman discovered, 5% of the vehicles on the road produced 55% of the automobile pollution. That’s the Law of the Few: it’s a very large problem caused by a very small number of actors. In another study, a group of Italian researchers calculated how much Rome’s air quality would improve if 10% of the city’s cars were electric-powered. As you would imagine, it would make a big difference. But then they did a second calculation: what would happen if the city required just the top 1% of polluters to go electric? Pollution would fall by the same amount. Nearly 40 years after Donald Stedman invented his magic contraption, almost everyone agrees with him.
But then they stumbled onto something strange. It had to do with how the first wave of 28 schoolchildren got sick. It was from one person: a girl in second grade. And her case made no sense. She didn’t ride the bus to school, which the investigators thought was one of the likeliest places for transmission to happen. Nor did she infect students just in her own classroom, which is also the likely scenario for the spread of an infectious virus.
The doctors in Rochester were flummoxed. They knew who their super-spreader was, yet they couldn’t figure out what made her any different. Another leading aerosolist, Harvard’s David Edwards, found the same pattern. He didn’t focus on talking. He travelled to Asheville, North Carolina and Grand Rapids, Michigan and measured the breathing of a group in each city. He ended up testing 194 people. The overwhelming majority were low spreaders: they would be hard-pressed to infect anyone. But there were 34 whom Edwards called high producers.
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