Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

by Geoffrey West

Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that whenever energy is transformed into a useful form, it also produces “useless” energy as a degraded by-product:

Failure and catastrophe can provide a huge impetus and opportunity in stimulating innovation, new ideas, and inventions

To varying degrees, fractality, scale invariance, and self-similarity are ubiquitous across nature from galaxies and clouds to your cells, your brain, the Internet, companies, and cities.

As Mandelbrot succinctly put it: “Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.”

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

We are surprisingly tolerant of death and destruction arising from “unnatural, man-made” causes when they occur on a continual and regular basis, but are extremely intolerant when they occur suddenly as discrete events even though the numbers involved are much smaller.

the solar option has the critical capacity for potentially returning us to a truly sustainable paradigm of an open system.

“What is the city but the people?” to which the citizens (the plebs) emphatically respond, “True, the people are the city.”

The great metropolises of the world facilitate human interaction, creating that indefinable buzz and soul that is the well-spring of its innovation and excitement and a major contributor to its resilience and success, economically and socially.

cities are an emergent self-organizing phenomenon that has resulted from the interaction and communication between human beings exchanging energy, resources, and information.

Human beings are pretty good at “accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative,” especially when it comes to money and material well-being.

“The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”

The struggle and tension between unbridled individual self-enhancement and the care and concern for the less fortunate has been a major thread running throughout human history, especially over the past two hundred years.

He who does not increase his knowledge decreases it.

companies are more like organisms than cities and are dominated by a version of economies of scale rather than by increasing returns and innovation.

to sustain open-ended growth in light of resource limitation requires continuous cycles of paradigm-shifting innovations

to sustain continuous growth the time between successive innovations has to get shorter and shorter.

A major innovation that might have taken hundreds of years to evolve a thousand or more years ago may now take only thirty years.

find the best people, trust them, give them support, and don’t hamper them with bullshit . . . and good things will happen.

Data are good and more data are even better—this is the creed that most of us take for granted, especially those of us who are scientists.

Although many believe that ‘more is better,’ history tells us that ‘least is best.’

If we are not to “drown in a sea of data” we need a “theoretical framework with which to understand it . . . and a firm grasp on the nature of the objects we study to predict the rest.”