Malcolm Gladwell's Insight

We all know about The Tipping Point: (gladwell dot com / books.)

Most people, though, have missed the key teaching from the broken windows theory. This is a crime prevention idea that says that if a neighborhood is filled with small signs of community disrespect (litter, broken windows, etc.) it's way more likely to have violent crime. If you clean up the little things, the crime rate goes down. Malcolm talked about how well this worked in NYC.

Well, here's the latest: it turns out that it doesn't matter at all what the neighborhood is like. New research just published says that what actually matters is what the people who live there think it's like! The absolute ranking of the neighborhood doesn't matter. The truth of the neighborhood doesn't matter! What matters is the story that people tell themselves. The story is the truth.

Comments

[Tracey Bushman]

Our HOA responded to a break-in at one of the units by requiring that we all change our doors from wood to metal and, for reasons that I don't get, paint it red. Never mind there are large plate-glass windows on the front of every unit that can (and have) easily be broken. The problem is with conspicuous consumption and the motive of people buying their home, not to simply live in, but as a sort of trophy display case (plasma screens visible from the street in an otherwise un-gentrified neighborhood). And the frantic knee-jerk reaction of this door-change only makes that douchebag image more apparent to would-be intruders. I, therefore, choose not to change my door, and will incur and not pay the fine they're imposing on me for non-compliance.