TED Talks Daily - The tipping point I got wrong | Malcolm Gladwell

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

In his 2000 bestseller "The Tipping Point," Malcolm Gladwell told the story of why crime fell in New York City in the 1990s. Now, 25 years later, he's back with a confession and a mea culpa: "I was wrong," he says. He shares how his analysis contributed to the rise of the infamous "stop and frisk" policing policy in New York City — and shows why journalists should avoid the trap of imagining a story is ever really over. (Followed by a Q&A with TED's Monique Ruff-Bell)

TED Audio Collective. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. 25 years ago, author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point, which went on to become a bestseller, and one chapter in particular changed the way policymakers thought about crime. At TED Next 2024, Gladwell revisits that breakout book and reflects on what he'd do differently. Stick around after his talk for a Q&A with

TED's Monique Ruff-Bell. It's all coming up after a break. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do. And with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests.

Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. And now our TED Talk of the day. I want to tell you a story about when I moved to New York City in 1993. I was 30 years old, and I was moving to what was known as one of the most dangerous big cities in the United States. And every night, I would go up with my friends on a Friday or Saturday night, and at the end of every night, we would have a little conference and we would pool all of our money, and we would figure out how everyone was going to get home,

because you couldn't go home on the subway by yourself, and you couldn't walk home. And if you were a woman, you definitely were not allowed to go home by yourself at one o'clock in the morning on a Saturday night. That's what it meant to be in this very scary city called New York. I used to live in the sixth floor of a walk-up in the West Village, and my bedroom faced the fire escape.

And even in the summer, I had no air conditioning. I had to keep my window closed, because I was scared that somebody would come down the fire escape into my apartment. And then one day I woke up, and I realized that I wasn't scared anymore. And I kept the window open. And I realized that when I was going out with my friends, we weren't having that conference at the end of the evening anymore. We were just going home. This city that I had thought, we all thought, was one of the scariest in the States, wasn't scary anymore. And I remember at

the time, I was absolutely transfixed by this transformation. I couldn't understand it. It was the same city full of the same weird, screwed up people, same buildings, same institutions, only nobody was murdering each other anymore. And I would call up criminologists and I would ask them, what's your explanation? And no one could give me a good explanation. And I would call up criminologists, and I would ask them, what's your explanation? And no one could give me a good explanation. And I remember one day, I used to go to the NYU, New York University has a library called Bobst Library. I used to go to Bobst to look for ideas. And I remember one day, I was on the sixth floor in the sociology section, HM1A6. And I was reading back issues, yes, I was, back issues of the American Journal of Sociology,

and I ran across an article from 1991 by a guy named Jonathan Crane called The Epidemic Theory of Ghetto Life. I'm going to read to you from how it began. The word epidemic is commonly used to describe the high incidence of social problems in ghettos. The news is used loosely in popular parlance, but turns out to be remarkably apt. And what Crane was saying is that if you look at these kinds of social problems, they behave, they come and they go, they rise and they fall exactly like viruses do. He was saying that that term epidemic is not

a metaphor. It's a literal description. And I'll never forget when I read that little paragraph and I was standing in this aisle in Bobst Library. And, you know, it's a library. It's got that hush and that musty smell of books. And I'm reading this crazy article from 1991. And I remember thinking to myself, oh, my God, that's what happened in New York. We had an epidemic of crime. And what is the hallmark of an epidemic? It's the tipping point. It's the moment when the epidemic either goes up all at once or crashes all at once. And so I wrote an article for the New Yorker magazine called The Tipping Point, which was my attempt to use this theory to explain what happened in New York. And then I, because of that article, got a contract for a book called The Tipping Point, which did very well. And

that book led to another book and another book and another book, and I am standing here today because of that moment in the library... ... 25 years ago. So the tipping point, my first book, was about all kinds of things. I talked about hush puppies and Paul Revere and teenage smoking, but at the heart of it was a chapter on why did crime decline in New York. And in that chapter, I talked a lot about a theory called broken windows theory, which was a very famous idea that had been pioneered by two criminologists called George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in the 1980s.

Very influential article in which they said that they argued that very small things in the environment can be triggers for larger crimes, that essentially small instances of disorder are tipping points for very serious things like murder or rape or any kind of violent crime. It was an epidemic theory of crime. And the New York City Police Department took that idea very seriously.

And one of the things they began to do in the 1990s during this crime drop was to say, what this argument means is that we can't be passive anymore. We have to be proactive. We have to go out there, and if someone is jaywalking or jumping a turnstile or doing graffiti or peeing on the sidewalk, we've got to stop them. And if we see a young man walking down the street and he looks a little bit suspicious, we've got to stop him and frisk him for his weapons, right? That's how the NYPD interpreted the broken windows theory in New York. And my chapter was how millions of people around the world

came to understand the crime drop in New York, that it was all broken windows. And here's the thing that I have come to understand about that explanation I gave of why crime fell in New York. I was wrong. I didn't understand this until quite recently, when I went back and I decided on the 25th anniversary of my first book, The Tipping Point,

that I would write a sequel. It's called Revenge of the Tipping Point. And I went back, and for the first time in a quarter century, I reread my original book. Not someone who likes to revisit things, but I did it, and it was a uniquely complicated experience. It was like looking back at your high school yearbook, you know, when you see yourself and you have some combination of,

wow, I look young, and also, wow, I really wore that. It was like that. And what I realized is that in the intervening years since I wrote that explanation of why I think crime fell in New York, the theory of broken windows had been tested. There was a kind of classic natural experiment to see whether that theory worked. And the natural experiment was a court case, maybe one of the most famous court cases in New York history, called Floyd v. City of New York. It involved a young man named David Floyd who had been stopped on a number of occasions by the NYPD

and was the face of a class action lawsuit that said the practice of stopping young men, largely young men of color, just because they look a little suspicious to police is not constitutional. You can't do that. And to everyone's surprise, the Floyd lawsuit goes

before a federal judge, and the federal judge rules in David Floyd's favor. And overnight, the broken windows era in New York City policing ends. And the NYPD goes from, in 2011, they stopped and frisked 700,000 young men, right? And after the Floyd lawsuit was decided in 2013, that number drops to less than 50,000, right? So this is the perfect natural experiment. You have New York before Floyd and New York after Floyd. You have before Floyd, you have the principal tactic of the NYPD is stopping everyone they can. And after Floyd, you have, that goes away. They can't do that anymore, right? This is the perfect test case for whether you think that's why crime fell in New York. And if you believe in the power of broken windows policing, then your expectation has to be

that after the Floyd case, when broken windows goes away, crime's going to go back up, right? And I should tell you that in 2013, in the wake of the Floyd case, everybody thought crime was going to go back up. The NYPD thought that, the city government thought that, the pundits thought that. Even the judge who wrote the opinion saying that stop-and-frisk was unconstitutional

said in her opinion that she strongly suspected that as a result of this opinion, crime would go back up. I thought crime was going to go back up, right? All of us had internalized the logic of broken windows. We said, yes, we know this strategy poses an incredible burden on young men, but what choice do we have, right? If the choice is being stopped repeatedly by police or being killed,

maybe we're better off with the former than the latter. This is the price we pay for a safe New York, right? So what happens after the Freud case? Stop and frisk goes away, and crime falls. In fact, crime in New York City undergoes a second, even more miraculous decline, right? And what's interesting about this is,

when the first crime declined in the 1990s, you see that decline almost everywhere in the United States. Not quite as steep as New York, but crime goes down everywhere. And then in every other city in the United States, crime plateaus. But New York gets rid of broken windows, and crime starts to fall and fall and fall all over again,

to the point, by 2019, that New York City is as safe as Paris, which is not a sentence I ever thought anyone would ever say in my lifetime, right? And what we realized in that second crime decline is that it wasn't broken windows. It's not indiscriminate policing that causes crime to fall. Rather, it is the intelligent and thoughtful and selective application

of police authority that causes crime to fall. Now, there's a couple of really puzzling things here. One is that people don't seem to have internalized the fact that New York underwent this second, even more dramatic crime fall. People still act like it's the year 2000 when it comes to making sense of New York. You know, a whole bunch of very, very wealthy hedge fund guys have very loudly left New York for You know, a whole bunch of very, very wealthy hedge fund guys have very loudly left New York for Miami in recent years. And they all say when they're packing up their offices in

New York, we can't take the crime anymore. Well, violent crime in Miami is twice as high as New York City. If they were really concerned about violent crime, they would leave Coral Gables before they get murdered and move to the Bronx, where it is a whole lot safer. The other... The other even more important thing, though, is that people act like stop-and-frisk actually worked.

No one seems to have internalized the lesson of the great Floyd case, natural experiment. If you listen to people on the, I'm not going to name their names, but people going around the country now campaigning for higher office, they will say things like, it's time to bring back stop-and-frisk and broken windows policing. It worked so well in New York.

They're acting as if we didn't have that great moment of understanding in 2013. And for that misunderstanding, I think I bear some of the blame. I was the one who wrote this book saying this was the greatest tactic ever in stopping crime. And now, back to the episode. Now, how do I make sense of my mistake? Well, I can give you all kinds of excuses. You know, I can say, I'm not a fortune teller. I didn't know that David Floyd was going to come along 10 years after I wrote my book

and give us this great test case in broken windows policing. I could say that I was just writing what everybody believed back in 1996 and 1997. But I don't think those excuses hold any water whatsoever. I think that journalists, writers, need to be held to a higher standard. I wrote... I told a story about how crime fell in New York, and I told the story like the story was over and like I knew what the answer to the story was. And it wasn't over, and I didn't know the answer.

Right? I wrote, I know this is what happened, and what I should have said, and I know that I should have said it, and I know that I should have said it, and I know that I should have said it, and I didn't know the answer, right? I wrote, I know this is what happened, and what I should have said is, this is what I believe happened now, right? And those words, I believe happened now, have to be at the center of any understanding of

how the world works. We have to acknowledge that we be at the center of any understanding of how the world works. We have to acknowledge that we are representing the position of this very moment, and that that position could change if the facts change. The great desire of any writer is to write a book for the ages that will forever explain the way things are, but that's not possible, and no one should ever try. That was my mistake,

and I'm sorry. That was some mea culpa, Malcolm. And so I have a couple of questions for you. If you don't mind, I want to take you back 25 years to that version of yourself. And so you talked about how there was a sense of anxiety and fear about what crime was happening around that time. I grew up in New York around that time, 25 years ago, being in my early 20s,

and having these experiences with my friends where they experienced unfortunate instances with stop and frisk, so much so they had anxiety, hurt, and fear. And so when you were thinking about this and the support, did you ever think about what if they got it wrong? What if it was wrong and innocent people were going to have to experience this? when you were thinking about this and the support, did you ever think about, what if they got it wrong? What if it was wrong and innocent people were going to have to experience this?

What were your thoughts about that back then? Well, I wasn't thinking about that. I mean, somebody... it's funny, I went... When I was sort of trying to figure out what I did wrong in that chapter, I went down to Philadelphia, and I went and met with a group of doctors, all of them black, at the University of Pennsylvania,

because they had done some really interesting work on crime, and I wanted to get their sense. And one of the doctors had read that chapter on crime, and she said, you know, when I read your chapter on crime, you were exceedingly interested. I opened that chapter with the famous story of Bernie Getz, the guy who shot the kids on the subway. And she said, go back and reread the way you wrote that story,

and you'll realize you spent a lot of time talking about the fear of the white guy, and you have two sentences on the kids. And the kids were every bit as much as damaged as the guy who shot them. And I realized, I think I was just in, like so many of us, I was in a little bubble, and I was seeing the problem from one perspective.

And like many, you know, middle- and upper-class professionals in Manhattan, I wasn't thinking about the world through the eyes of someone in the Bronx or Brooklyn. And some of that has to do with youth, and some of that has to do with youth, and some of that has to do with foolishness. And I'd like to think I'm a little wiser now. Right.

So you had a quote, yes. You had a quote. I told this story like I knew the answer, and it wasn't over. How has that insight affected your thinking and your writing now? I've tried to be. I mean, I realize when I look back at my younger self, I was way too certain about the ideas that I was putting forth. And I thought that if you wanted to win over an audience,

you had to communicate certainty. And now I realize that's actually backwards, that you're more willing, you're more capable of winning over an audience when you admit to the fact that you now I realize that's actually backwards. That you're more willing, you're more capable of winning over an audience when you admit to the uncertainty and the fragility of your position.

People want that. They like that. They appreciate that spirit far more. And people are much more likely, I think, to be suspicious of someone who seems falsely certain. Well, we appreciate you bringing your thoughts to this platform and sharing that. And so thank you to Malcolm Gladwell for doing that. Thank you.

Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more

than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. That was Malcolm Gladwell at TED Next 2024. TED Next is our brand new conference exploring what's next and propelling future you to drive change at every level, from personal to global. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.

And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Fazi-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.

I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family? TED now has games designed to keep your mind sharp while having fun. Visit TED.com slash games to explore the joy and wonder of TED Games.