The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,6
same six bars. Potterat then interviewed 768 people in that tiny subgroup and found that 600 of them either didn’t give gonorrhea to anyone else or gave it to only one other person. These people he called nontransmitters. The ones causing the epidemic to grow—the ones who were infecting two and three and four and five others with their disease—were the remaining 168. In other words, in all of the city of Colorado Springs—a town of well in excess of 100,000 people—the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basically frequenting the same six bars.
Who were those 168 people? They aren’t like you or me. They are people who go out every night, people who have vastly more sexual partners than the norm, people whose lives and behavior are well outside of the ordinary. In the mid 1990s, for example, in the pool halls and roller skating rinks of East St. Louis, Missouri, there was a man named Darnell “Boss Man” McGee. He was big—over six feet—and charming, a talented skater, who wowed young girls with his exploits on the rink. His specialty was thirteen and fourteen year olds. He bought them jewelry, took them for rides in his Cadillac, got them high on crack, and had sex with them. Between 1995 and 1997, when he was shot dead by an unknown assailant, he slept with at least 100 women and—it turned out later—infected at least 30 of them with HIV.
In the same two year period, fifteen hundred miles away, near Buffalo, New York, another man—a kind of Boss Man clone—worked the distressed downtown streets of Jamestown. His name was Nushawn Williams, although he also went by the names “Face,” “Sly,” and “Shyteek.” Williams juggled dozens of girls, maintaining three or four different apartments around the city, and all the while supporting himself by smuggling drugs up from the Bronx. (As one epidemiologist familiar with the case told me flatly, “The man was a genius. If I could get away with what Williams did, I’d never have to work a day again in my life.”) Williams, like Boss Man, was a charmer. He would buy his girlfriends roses, let them braid his long hair, and host all night marijuana and malt liquor–fueled orgies at his apartments. “I slept with him three or four times in one night,” one of his partners remembered. “Me and him, we used to party together all the time....After Face had sex, his friends would do it too. One would walk out, the other would walk in.” Williams is now in jail. He is known to have infected at least sixteen of his former girlfriends with the AIDS virus. And most famously, in the book And the Band Played On Randy Shilts discusses at length the so called Patient Zero of AIDS, the French Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas, who claimed to have 2,500 sexual partners all over North America, and who was linked to at least 40 of the earliest cases of AIDS in California and New York. These are the kinds of people who make epidemics of disease tip.
Social epidemics work in exactly the same way. They are also driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people. In this case, it’s not sexual appetites that set them apart. It’s things like how sociable they are, or how energetic or knowledgeable or influential among their peers. In the case of Hush Puppies, the great mystery is how those shoes went from something worn by a few fashion forward downtown Manhattan hipsters to being sold in malls across the country. What was the connection between the East Village and Middle America? The Law of the Few says the answer is that one of these exceptional people found out about the trend, and through social connections and energy and enthusiasm and personality spread the word about Hush Puppies just as people like Gaetan Dugas and Nushawn Williams were able to spread HIV.
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In Baltimore, when the city’s public clinics suffered cutbacks, the nature of the syphilis affecting the city’s poor neighborhoods changed. It used to be an acute infection, something that most people could get treated fairly quickly before they had a chance to infect many others. But with the cutbacks, syphilis increasingly became a chronic disease, and the disease’s carriers had three or four or five times longer to pass on their infection. Epidemics tip because of the extraordinary efforts of a few select carriers.