Why cities keep growing, corporations and people die, and life gets faster
edge.org
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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?
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.
So go build "Manhattan of the West Coast" somewhere else on the coast, and leave San Francisco alone.
San Francisco ain't my backyard, by a long shot.
> 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.
At the end of the day this is someone forcing his bad analogy down our throats while wearing a cloak made of mathematics.
> 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.
> forcing his bad analogy down our throats
How do I say this? What are you smoking?
I think there's a lot of gold to be mined in the seams between disciplines.
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.
I think you're absolutely correct.
Absolutely, Cybernetics and Systems Theory for instance are founded exactly on that premise. You might enjoy http://www.art-sciencefactory.com/complexity-map_feb09.html
https://books.google.com/books?id=XtIMclQwMY4C&printsec=fron...
https://www.amazon.com/Urban-Fortunes-Political-Economy-Plac...
Would recommend to anyone remotely interested in the growth, creation, and destruction of cities.
http://www.santafe.edu/research/cities-scaling-and-sustainab...
Also look at the "Key Papers" section.
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.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber's_law
West's space filling fractal hypothesis predicts dozens of non-obvious scaling laws, not just metabolic power. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc
>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.
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.
One of the bad things about open-ended growth, growing faster than exponentially, is that open-ended growth eventually leads to collapse.
How do you avoid that? Well, how have we avoided it? We've avoided it by innovation.
There's a theorem you can prove that says that if you demand continuous open growth, you have to have continuous cycles of innovation.
Theory says, sure, you can get out of collapse by innovating, but you have to innovate faster and faster.
The question then is, is this sustainable?
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.
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.
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...
The GDP is a very crude thing.
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 wonder, do we call it a city that kept growing?
> 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.
Because it's all discourse, and it's sometimes interesting to read other people's thoughts, or view something through a different lens.
http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/why-physics-is-not-a-di...
Because smart people with different backgrounds talking together provide interesting insights, unless you simply dismiss them immediately with out listening.