TSIS pg. 62 #2

In Malcolm Gladwell's excerpt which explains the concept of a 'Tipping Point" from the book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. In this excerpt it is explained to the reader what a tipping point is and some examples are expressed whether it from the Hush Puppy craze or the crime rate in New York, he came up with a way to realate it all as a tipping point. A tipping point Gladwell describes as a point in an epidemic whre things can all of a sudden have a dramatic rise. In other words it is the climax of a trend. I can agree with Gladwell's theory on a tipping for his exaples and how they do fit in and can be considered a tipping point, excpt for one of them. I do not see the resemblence the New York Crime rate dropping has as a tipping point, since a tipping point primarily has someone who sets it off, as with his example of teen smoking, although you can understand what the tipping point is there, if you look deep into it. His hush puppy example fits in well with the tipping point idea because as he mentions, in his excerpt, the kids in the New York were wearing them and a fashion designer or someone of importance noticed them and wanted them to be in their fashion. After that fiasco, the Hush Puppies became a fad again, and now there are people still wearing them, or atleast there were in 1995. But I have seen Hush Puppies being sold in stores still. However, with the New York crime rate going down I do not agree with the tipping point, because he states at the end of his talk on the crime rate that "...the changes in the drug trade, the population, and the economy are all long term trends, happening all over the country." So, if the drug trade, population and economical changes are occurring all over the country, then what makes the one on New York a tipping point, why is it considered a trend started by one person? I doubt that one person had the power to enforce a big number of individuals to stop drug trafficing in New Your City or to stop killing eachother, and people do not just wake up and decide that, maybe something major happened in all of those drug abusers and killers lives that made them decide they wanted a change, but that I think is unquestionably odd. Another example that he gives us is about teen smoking. He says that more teens are smoking now and that the government has tried to make smoking campaigns that tell of the dangers of cigerettes, but the teens don't care. Then, price of ciggarettes were raised to try and help prohibit teen smoking so that they couldn't afford them, but none of that worked so it must deeper than what the governament is getting at. He states that "Smokers aren't even smokers becuase they understimate the risks of smoking." which he backs with evidence froma harvard study where the students surveyed believed that they were cutting off nine years of their life by smoking while in actuality it was only six. Most of these teens do it, they saw an older person do it and it made that person seem cool or sophisticated, so they wanted to do it, to be like that, in which there is your tipping point.
In conclusion, I do agree with Gladweel on his theory of a tipping point, and that one person can be the reason why a trend or epidemic is started throughout a community or country, but some of his arguments as to show what a tipping point is i do not agree with.