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

by Geoffrey West

The time between the “Computer Age” and the “Information and Digital Age” was no more than about thirty years—to be compared with the thousands of years between the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages. The clock by which we measure time on our watches and digital devices is very misleading; it is determined by the daily rotation of the Earth around its axis and its annual rotation around the sun. This astronomical time is linear and regular. But the actual clock by which we live our socioeconomic lives is an emergent phenomenon determined by the collective forces of social interaction: it is continually and systematically speeding up relative to objective astronomical time. We live our lives on the metaphorical accelerating socioeconomic treadmill. A major innovation that might have taken hundreds of years to evolve a thousand or more years ago may now take only thirty years. Soon it will have to take twenty-five, then twenty, then seventeen, and so on, and like Sisyphus we are destined to go on doing it, if we insist on continually growing and expanding. The resulting sequence of singularities, each of which threatens stagnation and collapse, will continue to pile up, leading to what mathematicians call an essential singularity—a sort of mother of all singularities.