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

by Geoffrey West

as the organism increases in size, demand eventually outstrips supply because linear scaling grows faster than sublinear, with the consequence that the amount of energy available for growth continuously decreases, eve...

cities are comprised of two generic components: their physical infrastructure, manifested as buildings, roads, et cetera, and their socioeconomic dynamics, manifested as ideas, innovation, wealth creation, and social capital.

Both are networked systems, and their tight interconnectivity and interdependence result in the approximate complementarity between the corresponding sub- and superlinear scaling laws, namely, that the 15 percent savings with every doubling of size in the former are approximately equal to the 15 percent gain in the latter.

In contrast to the situation in biology, the supply of metabolic energy generated by cities as they grow increases faster than the needs and demands for its maintenance.

between its social metabolic rate and the requirements for maintenance, continues to increase as the city gets larger.

The bigger the city gets, the faster it grows—a classic signal of open-en...

growth driven by superlinear scaling is actually faster than exponential: in fact...

sublinear scaling and economies of scale that dominate biology lead to stable bounded growth and the slowing down of the pace of life, whereas superlinear scaling and increasing returns to scale that dominate socioeconomic activity lead to unbounded growth and to an accelerating pace of life.

Innovation, wealth generation, entrepreneurship, and job creation are all manifested through the formation and growth of businesses, firms, and corporations, all of which I shall refer to generically as companies.

The mechanisms that have traditionally been suggested for understanding companies can be divided into three broad categories: transaction costs, organizational structure, and competition in the marketplace.

Minimizing transaction costs reflects economies of scale driven by an optimization principle, such as maximizing profits. (2) Organizational structure is the network system within a company that conveys information, resources, and capital to support, sustain, and grow the enterprise. (3) Competition results in the evolutionary pressures and selection processes inherent in the ecology of the marketplace.

this necessitates the integration of energy, resources, and capital—the metabolism of the company—with the exchange of information in order to fuel innovation and creativity.

The gradual buildup of unrepaired damage resulting from the wear and tear inherent in the process of living makes us less resilient and increasingly vulnerable to fluctuations and perturbations as we age.

To achieve greater efficiency in the pursuit of greater market share and increased profits, companies stereotypically add more rules, regulations, protocols, and procedures at increasingly finer levels of organization, resulting in the increased bureaucratic control that is typically needed to administer, manage, and oversee their execution.

Continuing to pursue limited and single-system approaches to the many problems we face without developing a unifying framework risks the possibility that we will squander huge financial and social capital and fail miserably in addressing the really big question, resulting in dire consequences.

the network principles underlying economies of scale and sublinear scaling have two profound consequences. They constrain the pace of life—big animals live longer, evolve more slowly, and have slower heart rates, all to the same degree—and limit growth. In contrast, cities and economies are driven by social interactions whose feedback mechanisms lead to the opposite behavior.

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,

avoid collapse a new innovation must be initiated that resets the clock, allowing growth to continue and the impending singularity to be avoided.

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

The theory dictates that to sustain continuous growth the time between successive innovations has to get shorter and shorter.

Thus paradigm-shifting discoveries, adaptations, and innovations must occur at an increasingly accelerated pace.

addition to the pace of life accelerating as we climb up each growth curve, we have to make major innovations and transition to a new state at an increasingly accelerated rate.

Kurzweil proposed that we are approaching a singularity in which our bodies and brains will be augmented by genetic alterations, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to become hybrid cyborgs no longer bound by the constraints of biology.

classic grand syntheses in modern science are Newton’s laws, which taught us that heavenly laws are no different from those on Earth; Maxwell’s unification of electricity and magnetism, which brought the ephemeral ether into our lives and gave us electromagnetic waves; Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which reminded us that we’re just animals and plants after all; and the laws of thermodynamics, which suggest that we can’t go on forever.

Two excellent books that provide detailed background are G. Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and I. Morris, The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).