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

by Geoffrey West

Knowing the inverse linkage between these two different kinds of networks, it should come as no great surprise that precisely the opposite behavior arises in social networks. Rather than the pace of life systematically decreasing with size, the superlinear dynamics of social networks leads to a systematic increase in the pace of life: diseases spread faster, businesses are born and die more often, commerce is transacted more rapidly, and people even walk faster, all following the 15 percent rule. This is the underlying scientific reason why we all sense that life is faster in a New York City than in a Santa Fe and that it has ubiquitously accelerated during our lifetimes as cities and their economies grew.