The Freaking Point

Speeches by two of my favorite authors, Malcom Gladwell (author of "The Tipping Point" and "Blink") and Steven Levitt (author of "Freakonomics") have been released today in video on TEDtalks. Gladwell (see / download) explains why every business can learn from spaghetti sauce; Levitt  (see / download) studies an inner-city gang to illustrate economic principles at work in real life.

I've seen Gladwell and Levitt cross swords last year at a private gathering in New York, where they debated the real reason crime dropped in the 1990s in the city - a topic they address in "Tipping Point" and "Freakonomics" Gladwell credited mainly the policing approach of Mayor Rudi Giuliani (the "broken windows" theory etc), while Levitt explained it with the legalization of abortion two decades earlier "which had prevented thousand of unwanted children from being born". It was an amazingly frank discussion, which unfortunately was not captured in video. Months later, Gladwell wrote a tribute to Levitt for Time magazine and, remembering that gathering, he said:

Levitt got up and made his case. I got up and made mine. But halfway through, I glanced over at Levitt and had a realization that I'm not sure I've ever had before with an intellectual opponent—that if I made my case persuasively and cogently enough, he would change his mind. He was, in other words, listening.