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

by Geoffrey West

When systems fail or designs don’t meet their expectations there are usually a plethora of reasons that could be the problem. These include poor planning and execution, faulty workmanship or materials, poor management, and even a lack of conceptual understanding.

Of greater significance is that he was the first scientist to calculate how changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could alter the surface temperature of the Earth through the greenhouse effect, predicting that the burning of fossil fuels was large enough to cause significant global warming. Most remarkably he did all of this before 1900, which is pretty depressing because it shows that we already were beginning to understand scientifically some of the deleterious consequences of burning fossil fuels well over a hundred years ago and we did almost nothing about it.

It is in the very nature of an exponential that the future becomes the present at an increasingly more rapid pace, so much so that by the time a problem has arisen it’s often too late

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.”

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.