> The picture emerges. Companies are more like organisms. They grow and asymptote. Cities are open ended.
Geoffrey West's point about growth doesn't seem to mention the competition for resources. That's one of the reasons why corporations and organisms slow down. Companies evolve to gain market share, but so are their competitors. In addition, we have anti-trust laws that do limit these companies. And what is his definition of a corporation? Where do holding companies and conglomerates fit into this model?
With regards to cities, they also deal with constrained resources, both financial and natural. At some point, the megalopolis of LA won't be able get enough water or power to it. We haven't felt it yet due to engineering and the Water Wars, but I question whether sprawl of that scale is sustainable.
And its easy to make this assumption of cities with unlimited growth if you happen to live in a thriving one, but let's not forget White Flight and dystopias of the 80s. Cities grow because people need/want to live in them, so they can easily die when they become inhospitable. As San Francisco becomes more like Manhattan, would people want to stay?
> As San Francisco becomes more like Manhattan, would people want to stay?
i don't know if the existing residents will want to stay, but i think many more people overall would want to live in a manhattan of the west coast, as evidenced by the manhattan of the east coast which people keep moving to.
Good point. As much as we romanticise that we're no longer economic migrants, most people probably still are. In which case, as long as there is money to be made in city, people will go irregardless of its aesthetics. They may complain with tweets and Medium rants, but they'll still come and stay.
I'm laughing at your NIMBYism, but some big city along the northern California or southern Oregon coast would make the corridor from Vancouver to San Francisco more contiguous, which could help to justify a high-speed rail line.
> some big city along the northern California or southern Oregon coast would make the corridor from Vancouver to San Francisco more contiguous, which could help to justify a high-speed rail line.
AFAIK, the geography of the Northen California to Southern Oregon coast isn't real conducive either to a high-speed rail line or a big city.
(If you want a Manhattan of the West Coast, it probably would make more sense to try to build it in the LA area, where an extra couple million people packed in a tight area would still obviously require radical new local infrastructure where it came together, but wouldn't be as significant of a relative increase in demand on regional infrastructure.)
Given that the probability of a new big city on the West Coast is effectively zero, I felt comfortable ignoring real limitations of that plan. In reality, of course, water, seismicity, and erosion put a damper on any attractive hypothetical options.
It just doesn't make sense to transform a city to something its residents don't want because someone else has an aesthetic preference for it to exist somewhere.
And I'm sure many complained when the buildings and prices of Manhattan kept climbing. The transplants to a city sooner or later become its natives, with their own desires and aesthetic preferences.
Yes it does. It's current residents transformed it into what it is now from what it was before they arrived...why wouldn't we expect that to continue happening? Just cause some of them don't want it to happen?
Standard physicist bullshit, wandering over to "fix" another field. "Oh, we can just treat any complex system as a parametric model. These idiots don't know how to do parametric modeling like we do!" Noodles around a bit, encounters insurmountable complexity of system, grows bored and wanders off...
At the end of the day this is someone forcing his bad analogy down our throats while wearing a cloak made of mathematics.
Wait. Don't tell me. You're an anthropologist, and your significant other eloped with a physicist. Otherwise how do we explain your hissy fit?
> grows bored and wanders off...
Before even 30 SECONDS of the video is up West says he's been doing this for 10 to 15 YEARS. And there's a team of EIGHT of them (at least) http://www.santafe.edu/research/cities-scaling-and-sustainab... and if you had listened to the video you would have heard him say that one of them is an urban economist which last time I checked tend to work on complex adaptive systems.
This was interesting. I'm glad someone is applying some rigorous thought to an observation many of us have made, namely that organizations (broadly defined, civilizations to companies to ideas) appear to have similar lifecycles to organisms.
I think there's a lot of gold to be mined in the seams between disciplines.
I think first of all we need to make a catalogue of the organisations and systems that surround us. Then we can start measuring.
For instance, I would not have thought of a city as a social system. It is clear that a city is a very different beast to a corporation though both are types of social systems. What other types of social systems are there? And how do they behave? Do they all exhibit such stark universality when you look at them as space-filling fractal networks of social communication?
What about the military? Does it behave like a city or a corporation? What about the civil service? What about universities? And so on, and so on.
What about the internet? Is that one giant social system? If so, what type? Or does it just count as infrastructure?
Even though the video was fascinating and thought provoking I feel I have many more questions now than I did beforehand.
> I think there's a lot of gold to be mined in the seams between disciplines.
Brings to mind Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place and their idea of the "Growth Machine", from my public policy and planning classes in college:
I don't think the example of metabolic rate changing with scale is as interesting as Geoffrey apparently thinks it is. Natural selection doesn't produce organisms that are "all over the map"-- for example, the mitochondria of a human are not that different from those of a rat, or even an earthworm. Natural selection keeps tweaking the same designs. Often this results in solutions that aren't optimal. For example, maybe a cheetah would be a better animal if it had wheels. But they don't, because evoluation is a kind of hill climbing and You Can't Get From Here to There (tm).
Larger organisms don't need to generate as much heat as smaller ones, because heat dissipation occurs across surface area, which increases as the square of mass, whereas heat generation increases as the cube (assuming a spherical cow, but close enough.) This isn't particularly deep or profound, just basic physics.
New York isn't a whale, and Microsoft isn't an elephant. This whole thing just reminds me of the endless, pointless debates comparing Linux to a truck, and Windows to a car, that people used ot have on Slashdot years ago.
>Larger organisms don't need to generate as much heat as smaller ones, because heat dissipation occurs across surface area, which increases as the square of mass, whereas heat generation increases as the cube (assuming a spherical cow, but close enough.)
Except that hypothesis doesn't predict the correct exponent. If that were the reason metabolic power would scale as mass^(2/3), but it actually scales as mass^(3/4).
>the mitochondria of a human are not that different from those of a rat, or even an earthworm.
West is acutely aware of this. In the talk I linked above he describes biological lifespans in terms of the relationship between the energy required to synthesize ATP and kT (ie the Boltzmann constant times ambient temperature, being the average energy of a particle due to random thermal motion).
The trick is in explaining quantitatively why those universal biological facts scale over size and time with the sometimes bizarre scaling factors observed. It does boil down to physics of course, but there's a lot more to it than just heat dissipation.
That's a fair point-- a naive hypothesis based only on heat dissipation won't predict the correct exponent. My criticism was basically mostly about the lack of citations in the article to all the earlier people who have thought about these problems, as well as the idea that finding patterns in biological or anthropological data was somehow new and revolutionary. Maybe the article snipped a lot of the context of Dr. West's own writings-- that would be typical for science journalism.
By the way, there is a well-written and thought-provoking essay by Steven Jay Gould about the relationship between the size of animals and their shape. http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/size_and_shape.html . He mentions Galileo as the first one to comment on this!
While the read started off in a very interesting manner, it got too general for my taste quite quickly. You can only brush away so many details before I start to question where your facts are coming from.
I wish there was more content here than a few mentions of different scaling laws. It's interesting that cities and organisms have similar infrastructure scaling, while corporations and cities are different. However, I think there are some real outliers... SiliValley is an outlier as low density, high growth, high invention. If you asked me why, I'd say the tech focus: Moore's Law, Nielsons's Law, and Social Networks.
In particular, what I found missing and he doesn't talk about is the Internet and what it means for the effective distance between, people, companies, employees, etc. Because that is overlaid on our physical structure (like phone lines for pizza delivery), it will change the power laws. Depending on the uptake, it may change them more locally than the global average.
> Well, how have we avoided it? We've avoided it by innovation
Depends what period you look at and what extent of collapse you're looking at.
Look at the history of civilization and it seems to be a series of growths and collapses. After a collapse a formerly backward region will spring ahead.
So have we avoided it, or are we just delaying it? We seem to be generating some global scale problems from that industrialisation and innovation (plastics, oil, environment and so on). Can we innovate our way out of those fast enough and on a large enough scale? Perhaps the next crash just gets to be harder as a result.
>So have we avoided it, or are we just delaying it? ... Perhaps the next crash just gets to be harder as a result.
In fact, this is exactly what West suggests (just not in this relatively puffy treatment of his ideas).
He's compared societal progress to a series of treadmills. In order to keep up with the necessary economic growth rate the treadmills are constantly getting faster (evolutionary progress) and we periodically have to jump from one treadmill to another (revolutionary innovation) and we must switch treadmills at an ever-increasing pace (shortening technology cycles). The problem of course being that you eventually have a heart attack.
It's interesting to find larger underlying principles of these systems.
I wonder if anything could be said about leadership... I don't want to delve too deep into politics, but there are many people who think running a country/city is like running a company and that electing a leader with business skills would be a boon for the country. However if these systems have fundamentally different underlying behaviors, maybe it wouldn't necessarily work the same...
These kinds of analysis tend not to work because GDP is really not a very objective measure or anything. Value is very relative. It's entirely possible that 100% of those people are sad living in the city and would rather live elsewhere, but due to economic issues, cannot. They continue to 'consume'. Were they to live in the country, maybe their 'consumption' would be less, but the real value they ascribe to 'peace of mind' and 'clean air' is much higher. Since there is no 'cost' and no 'exchange of currency' - there is no measure of value created.
GDP is barely mentioned, as one of many metrics they look at. And he acknowledges many issues entailed in urban living. You seem to be pushing against a point the article isn't making.
Whenever he talked about 'wages' or anything like that, it's de-facto talking about GDP. All economic value in an economic zone = GDP. (roughly).
i.e. 'Cities have higher wages' etc. Well, the statement is false depending on how you value wages via their purchasing power of things like 'silence' and 'clean air'.
I only listened to half the interview, but my impression is that this guy is basically reinventing the wheel, all those theories already exist in various fields of social science.
> The U.S. government lost $11.2 billion on its bailout of General Motors Co (GM.N), more than the $10.3 billion the Treasury Department estimated when it sold its remaining GM shares in December, according to a government report released on Wednesday.
"Physics, properly understood, is not a subject taught at schools and university departments; it is a certain way of understanding how processes happen in the world."
Why should I care what wcummings reckons about what physicists think about cities?
Because smart people with different backgrounds talking together provide interesting insights, unless you simply dismiss them immediately with out listening.
To be fair to parent, after reading the submission title, I expected content a bit richer in facts, figures, and examples, not some smart dude's essay. Or if it were some smart person's essay, lacking those things, I'd expect that person to be something of a specialist in the field.
Geoffrey West's point about growth doesn't seem to mention the competition for resources. That's one of the reasons why corporations and organisms slow down. Companies evolve to gain market share, but so are their competitors. In addition, we have anti-trust laws that do limit these companies. And what is his definition of a corporation? Where do holding companies and conglomerates fit into this model?
With regards to cities, they also deal with constrained resources, both financial and natural. At some point, the megalopolis of LA won't be able get enough water or power to it. We haven't felt it yet due to engineering and the Water Wars, but I question whether sprawl of that scale is sustainable.
And its easy to make this assumption of cities with unlimited growth if you happen to live in a thriving one, but let's not forget White Flight and dystopias of the 80s. Cities grow because people need/want to live in them, so they can easily die when they become inhospitable. As San Francisco becomes more like Manhattan, would people want to stay?