Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Scale > Status Update

"...I suspect that life will continue to speed up and urbanization remains the dominant force as we head toward an impending singularity." - my suspicion is that covid has taken us over that singularity, showing us that social and cultural interaction no longer requires a city.

"...in parallel with the quest for the Theory of Everything, we need to embark on a similar quest for a grand unified theory of complexity" - oxymoron?

"Unfortunately, for cities and socioeconomic systems the phase transition stimulated by the finite time singularity is from superexponential growth to stagnation and collapse" - this would have been a more interesting book, do socioeconomic systems like cities, and corporations exhibit phase transitions in a law like manner?

"We need a broad and more integrated scientific framework that encompasses a quantative, predictive, MECHANISTIC theory for understanding the relationship between human-engineered systems, both social and physical, and the "natural" environment..." - my caps: there aren't any in this book.

"By the time a company realises its condition it is often too late. Reconfiguring and reinventing become increasingly difficult and expensive...the company becomes seriously at risk and ripe for a takeover, buyout, or simply going belly-up." - invest in cities, or industries, not companies?

"As such, [cities] exude an almost laissez-faire, free wheeling ambience relative to companies, taking advantage of the innovative benefits of social interactions whether good, bad or ugly. Despite their bumbling efficiencies, cities are places of action and agents of change relative to companies, which by and large usually project an image of stasis unless they are young" - the role of companies relative to cities?

"Clearly, both approaches are needed...In the scaling laws revealed that 80-90% of their measurable characteristics are determined by their population size...the remaing 10-20% being a measure of their individuality and uniqueness, which can only be understood from detailed studies that incorporate historical, geographical, and cultural characteristics." - bring on the detailed studies!

"...the total market worth of all publically traded companies in the US...is 15% larger than the entire GDP" - GDP is a measure of activity, the market worth however is a measure of value. Governments do not have market valuations, but in most developed countries they not corporations are the dominant economic player, spending over 50% of gdp.

"sublinear scaling and economies of scale that dominate biology lead to stable bounded growth and 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 accelerated pace of life." - on one hand a powerful argument that humanity has stepped beyond its biological constraints, on the other history.

"A critical aspect of this approach is that cities and businesses are complex adaptive systems and should consequently be viewed as an integrated system and not as isolated individual agents" - another dig at classical microeconomic analysis, if only he offered a worked example to show a systems approach out-predicting an agency approach.