Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

by Geoffrey West

So what was irrelevant at one scale can become dominant at another. The challenge at every level of observation is to abstract the important variables that determine the dominant behavior of the system.

matched impedances

The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath Who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, Cured the Sick, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Among Other Feats of Genius.

So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite ’em; And so proceed ad infinitum.

And Mandelbrot did not get his first tenured professorial appointment until he was seventy-five years old, thereby becoming the oldest professor in Yale’s history to receive tenure. Perhaps it requires outliers and mavericks like Richardson and Mandelbrot working outside mainstream research to revolutionize our way of seeing the world.

econophysics

Recall from chapter 2 that his argument was crafted on the deceptively simple idea that the weight of an animal increases faster than the ability of its limbs to support it so that if the design, shape, and materials remain unchanged, it will collapse under its own weight as its size increases. This gave an elegant demonstration that there are limits to the sizes of animals, plants, and buildings

This strategy is called caloric restriction. It has a long, somewhat controversial, history and has been the focus of many studies across a range of animals. Many of these have shown significant benefits, but others have found little effect and the situation remains a bit murky.

The data are presented in the form of survival curves for cohorts of mice under different levels of food intake. The effects are indeed dramatic and are consistent with the prediction of a 10 percent increase in life span resulting from a 10 percent caloric restriction but actually show a smaller effect than the predicted doubling of life span resulting from a massive halving of the caloric intake—life span increased by about 75 percent rather than the predicted 100 percent.

Survival curves for mice under various degrees of caloric restriction showing a concomitant increase in life span.

Romer declares that “every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply.”

I pointed out in the opening chapter that the 2,000 food calories a day you need to stay alive is equivalent to almost 100 watts, the power of a lightbulb.

This ongoing, ever-evolving, quasi-steady state very slowly began to change with our discovery of fire, which is the chemical process that releases the sun’s energy stored in dead wood.

All of this requires huge amounts of energy: ex nihilo nihil fit—nothing comes from nothing.

So on the scale of what the Earth receives from the sun, our energy use represents only about 0.015 percent of what is in principle actually available to us. To put it another way: 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. So from this point of view, there is no energy problem—at least in principle.

Shuman was an enthusiast and advocate for solar energy and in 1916 was quoted in The New York Times as saying: We have proved the commercial profit of sun power . . . and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun.

An interesting special case of this on a large scale is Singapore. Even as the city has grown to become a major global financial center with more than five million inhabitants and has continued to build the usual ostentatious steel and glass skyscrapers, its saving grace is that it has maintained the dream of being a garden city on a grand scale.

Jane Jacobs gained her fame and notoriety during the 1950s and ’60s battling plans to run a four-lane limited-access highway through Greenwich Village in New York City, where she then lived.

If you are given the size of a city in the United States, for example, then you can predict with 80 to 90 percent accuracy what the average wage is,

An eclectic mix of interesting and even influential people are in attendance, and 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.

For instance, over the fifteen-month period in which the Portuguese data were collected, an average resident of Lisbon, with a population of 560,000, spent about twice as much time on about twice as many reciprocated calls as an average resident of Lixa, a small rural town whose population is only about 4,200.

So even in large cities we live in groups that are as tightly knit as those in small towns or villages. This is a bit like the invariance of the Dunbar numbers I talked about in the previous chapter and, like those, probably reflects something fundamental about how our neurological structure has evolved to cope with processing social

Future Cities Lab, which is based in Singapore and supported by their government.

recall Galileo’s seminal insight that the strength of the limbs of animals should scale sublinearly as the ⅔ power of their body weight.

For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.

He was expressing a spiritual version of the very essence of diligent study, knowledge accumulation, and research and education as expressed by the ancient rabbis: He who does not increase his knowledge decreases it.

An extrapolation of the theory and data predicts that the probability of a company’s lasting for one hundred years is only about forty-five in a million, and for it to last two hundred years it’s a minuscule one in a billion.

The oldest hotel in the world according to Guinness World Records is Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Hayakawa, Japan, which was founded in 705. It has been in the same family for fifty-two generations and even in its modern incarnation has only thirty-seven rooms. Its main attraction seems to be its hot springs. The world’s oldest company was purported to be Kongo Gumi, founded in Osaka, Japan, in 578. It was also a family business going back many generations, but after almost 1,500 years of continuously being in business it went into liquidation in 2006 and was purchased by the Takamatsu Corporation.

A finite time singularity simply means that the mathematical solution to the growth equation governing whatever is being considered—the population, the GDP, the number of patents, et cetera—becomes infinitely large at some finite time, as illustrated in Figure 76. This is obviously impossible, and that’s why something has to change.