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in complete contradiction to Malthus’s expectations, agricultural productivity did not increase linearly with time but instead tracked population growth and increased exponentially.
maverick economist Kenneth Boulding perhaps best summed it up when testifying before the U.S. Congress, declaring that “anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”
not much more than 1 percent of the U.S. population now works in agriculture compared with about a quarter of the population in the 1930s, when on average each farm worker supplied food to about eleven consumers. Today that number is closer to one hundred.
Thinking of us as an animal using thirty times more energy than we “should” given our physical size, the effective human population of the planet accordingly operates as if it were much larger than the 7.3 billion people who actually inhabit it. In a very real sense, we are operating as if our population were at least thirty times larger, equivalent to a global population in excess of 200 billion people. If the most optimistic of cornucopian thinkers are correct and the world’s population reaches 10 billion by the end of the century, all living at a standard comparable to that of the United
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Of the annual world energy consumption, which is up by a factor of almost two from its value in 1980, roughly one third goes to waste. For example, only about 20 percent of the energy in gasoline is actually used to keep a car moving.
Industrial Revolution was the dramatic change from an open system where energy is supplied externally by the sun to a closed system where energy is supplied internally by fossil fuel. This is a fundamental systemic change with huge thermodynamic consequences, because in a closed system the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its requirement that entropy always increases strictly applies.
We “progressed” from an external, reliable, and constant source of energy to one that is internal, unreliable, and variable.
Smart and ambitious people are drawn to cities, and this is where our new ideas are incubated, where entrepreneurship flourishes, and where wealth is created. Supporting all of this is extremely expensive, so it is naive to dissociate ideas from energy—one
more energy is delivered by the sun in just one hour than is used by the entire world in a single year. Indeed, the scale of solar energy is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth’s nonrenewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium combined.
Jane Jacobs. Her defining book, The Death and Life of Great American
urban economists Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida, but none has been as forthright and bold as Benjamin Barber in his book with the provocative title If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities.
the truth is that it was dirty, unhealthy, rough, and tough, with its own version of architectural dreariness and the potential for loneliness and alienation. However, these were mightily compensated for by action, diversity, and a pulsating sense of people participating in life with ready access to museums, concerts, theaters, cinemas, sports events, gatherings, protest meetings, and all of the marvelous amenities a traditional city has to offer.
2004 Dirk recruited one of his students, Christian Kuhnert, to investigate how various characteristics of cities scale with city size across European nations. Some of the results of that early investigation are shown in Figure 33, where you can readily see that the data manifest a surprising simplicity and regularity across cities and countries.
as far as their overall infrastructure is concerned, cities behave just like organisms—they scale sublinearly following simple power-law behavior, thereby exhibiting a systematic economy of scale, albeit to a lesser degree as represented by the different values of their exponents (0.75 for organisms vs. 0.85 for cities).
the greater efficiency that comes with size has the nonintuitive but very important consequence that on average the bigger the city, the greener it is and the smaller its per capita carbon footprint.
Putting all of this together we are led to the outrageous speculation that cities are effectively a scaled representation of the structure of the human brain.
law says that the frequency of occurrence of any word in a corpus of written text such as all of Shakespeare’s plays, the Bible, or even this book is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table.
canonical Gaussian bell curve is so pervasive and so taken for granted that it is generally assumed without much thought that that’s how “everything” is distributed. Consequently, power law distributions like those of Zipf and Pareto barely saw the light of day. It was natural to assume that cities, incomes, and words would be randomly distributed following the classic bell curve.
Clearly, words in a book are correlated and not random because they have to form meaningful sentences, as are cities, because they are part of a unified urban system. It’s therefore not so surprising that these distributions are not Gaussian.
she is reluctant to participate in dinner parties larger than six. With six people there are 6 × 5 ÷ 2 = 15 possible pair-wise independent conversations that have to be “suppressed” for a single collective one to emerge and be maintained.
Just as raising the temperature of a gas or liquid increases the rate in the number of collisions between molecules, so increasing the size of a city increases the rate and number of interactions between its citizens.
the sublinearity of infrastructure and energy use is the exact inverse of the superlinearity of socioeconomic activity. Consequently, to the same 15 percent degree, the bigger the city the more each person earns, creates, innovates, and interacts—and the more each person experiences crime, disease, entertainment, and opportunity—and all of this at a cost that requires less infrastructure and energy for each of them.
Rather than being bored to death, our actual challenge is to avoid anxiety attacks, psychotic breakdowns, heart attacks, and strokes resulting from being accelerated to death.
Zahavi discovered the surprising result that the total amount of time an average individual spends on travel each day is approximately the same regardless of the city size or the mode of transportation.
the average commute time from home to work is about half an hour each way independent of the city or means of transportation.
the increase in transportation speed resulting from the marvelous innovations of the past couple of hundred years has not been used to reduce commuting time but instead has been used to increase commuting distances.
Like geology and for that matter the social sciences, astronomy is a historical science in that we can test our theories only by making postdictions for what should have happened according to the equations and narratives of our theories, and then searching in the appropriate place for their verification.
there are occasional glimpses of substance and brilliant insight in the presentations, though these are modulated with a heavy dose of flaky, somewhat superficial bullshit wrapped up in superb PowerPoint presentations.
Acronyms are also the way of the world and represent yet another subtle manifestation of the accelerating pace of life. 2M2H. LOL.
In a real village we are limited to a community that is imposed on us by sheer proximity resulting from its small size, whereas in a city we are freer to choose our own “village” by taking advantage of the much greater opportunity and diversity afforded by a greater population and to seek out people whose interests, profession, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on are similar to our own.
And in much the same way that bulk properties of gases or liquids, such as their temperature, pressure, color, and smell, result from molecular collisions and chemical reactions, so the properties of cities emerge from social collisions and the chemistry of and between people. Metaphors can be useful
amazing general symmetry of mobility: if the distance traveled multiplied by the frequency of visits to any specific location is kept the same, then the number of people visiting also remains the same.
presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions.
either for good or for bad, cities are remarkably robust and resilient—they are hard to change and almost impossible to kill.
there is approximately one establishment for about every 22 people in a city, regardless of the city size.
on average a new workplace is created each time the population of a city increases by just 22 people, whether in a small town or a large metropolis.
an increase of the population by a factor of one hundred from, say, 100,000 to 10 million results in the addition of one hundred times as many businesses but an increase of only a factor of two in their diversity.
doubling the size of a city results in doubling the total number of establishments, but only a meager 5 percent increase in new kinds of businesses.
social metabolism of a city,
crucial aspect of the scaling of companies is that many of their key metrics scale sublinearly like organisms rather than superlinearly like cities. This suggests that companies are more like organisms than cities and are dominated by a version of economies of scale rather than by increasing returns and innovation.
sublinear scaling in biology leads to bounded growth and a finite life span, whereas in chapter 8 we saw that the superlinear scaling of cities (and of economies) leads to open-ended growth.
the percentage of five-year-old companies that die before they reach six years old is the same as the percentage of fifty-year-old companies that die before they reach fifty-one. In other words: the risk of a company’s dying does not depend on its age or size.
The half-life of U.S. publicly traded companies was found to be close to 10.5 years, meaning that half of all companies that began trading in any given year have disappeared in 10.5 years.
From this point of view we should not lament the passing of any company—it’s an essential component of economic life—we should only mourn and be concerned about the fate of the people who often suffer when companies disappear, whether they are the workers, management, or even the owners.
According to the Bank of Korea, of the 5,586 companies that were more than two hundred years old in 2008, over half (3,146 to be precise) were Japanese, 837 German, 222 Dutch, and 196 French.
Furthermore, 90 percent of those that were more than one hundred years old had fewer than three hundred employees.
after almost 1,500 years of continuously being in business it went into liquidation in 2006 and was purchased by the Takamatsu Corporation. And what was the niche market that Kongo Gumi cornered for 1,429 years? Building beautiful Buddhist temples.
relative amount allocated to R&D systematically decreases as company size increases, suggesting that support for innovation does not keep up with bureaucratic and administrative expenses as companies expand.
the dimensionality of cities is continually expanding, the dimensionality of companies typically contracts
As it grows, the feedback mechanisms inherent in the market lead to a narrowing of its product space and inevitably to greater specialization.
