How Big Ideas Spread

"In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we've become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, "turnkey" solutions to the major difficulties of the world -- hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability." What we need instead, explains Atul Gawande in his precise inquiry into the nature of changing habits at a life-saving scale, is to add a human element to any effort to change someone's behavior. A billboard and a television campaign won't add up to better hygiene or the spread of a solution to cholera but a smile and simple, hands-on instructions just might do the trick. This fascinating article from the New Yorker shares more...

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