The Ripping (off) Point: an unfinished story

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell seeks to analyze those minimal aspects that make society go from one equilibrium to another one. Some examples are the creation of fashion trends, or a sudden decrease in crime rates. He compares these changes with epidemics (I think he calls them social epidemics at some point, from what I can recall).

As a dismal scientist, the idea of unstable equilibria came to my mind. More precisely, how a very small exogenous shock could make a long run equilibrium unstable and make us go to another long run equilibrium. An example of this is how excited I was about this book and how fast I was reading it, but it only took a few minutes for some bastard to steal it (this morning) and I have been forced to switch to a non-reading equilibrium (at least temporarily).

Any readers out there recommend that I buy the book again? I'm just asking because I've already been through the experience of books that are really good at the beginning but then turn out to be a complete disaster: the most extreme example of this is The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch (simply throw the book away once you finish the second or third chapter).

Living Wage Campaign at UVa

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was going to free-ride on Jeff's comments on the document written by the supporters of the living-wage campaign.

Well, I have fulfilled my promise. I added some comments to his, and this has resulted in a second draft response which can be found in this post in his blog.

What is missing? Your comments of course!