Thread by @nateliason

Really enjoyed "Scale" by Geoffrey West, @TheRealNeilS will be releasing a Made You Think episode on it soon.

In the meantime, here are a few of my favorite ideas from it 👇

We somewhat naively assume that all aspects of complex systems scale linearly, but there's usually a "scaling exponent."

As the size of something changes, other parts of the system change in a non-linear way.

"if the size of a mammal is doubled, its heart rate decreases by about 25 percent"

"with each doubling of population size, a city needs only about 85 percent more gas stations-and not twice as many"

"like organisms and cities, companies also scale as simple power laws"

Each of these things has a "scaling exponent" that's remarkably consistent across all sizes:

"The scaling exponent for companies is around 0.9, to be compared with 0.85 for the infrastructure of cities and 0.75 for organisms."

But cities also have superlinear scaling for their socioeconomic factors:

"Socioeconomic quantities such as wages, wealth, patents, AIDS cases, crime, and educational institutions... also scale with population size but with a superlinear exponent of approximately 1.15"

Another strange observation:

"we tend to spend about an hour each day traveling, whoever and wherever we are. Roughly speaking, the average commute time from home to work is about half an hour each way independent of the city or means of transportation."

This has historical consequences for city size:

"Because walking speed is about 5 kilometers an hour, the typical extent of a 'walking city' is about 5 kilometers across... There are no city walls of large, ancient cities... which have a diameter greater than 5km."

Another surprising observation on company age:

"the % of five-year-old companies that die before they reach six years old is the same as the % of fifty-year-old companies that die before they reach fifty-one... the risk of a company's dying does not depend on its age or size."

Finally, our exponential societal growth may hit a disastrous wall at some point:

"unbounded growth cannot be sustained without having either infinite resources or inducing major paradigm shifts that "reset" the clock before potential collapse occurs."

"A major innovation that might have taken hundreds of years to evolve a thousand or more years ago may now take only thirty years. Soon it will have to take twenty-five, then twenty, then seventeen, and so on, and like Sisyphus we are destined to go on doing it..."

Until it all collapses:

"The resulting sequence of singularities, each of which threatens stagnation and collapse, will continue to pile up, leading to what mathematicians call an essential singularity-a sort of mother of all singularities."

Anyway, really interesting book, and you can see all my highlights here:

nateliason.com/notes/scale