His writing is in contrast to todays blog post style writing.
Today it is a catchy intro graphic, a low-information intro paragraph, a barely relevant graphic separates every two paragraphs, a gigantic quote in bold letters separates every four paragraphs, and the entire essay can be digested by rapidly scrolling down website without reading any content.
Hence people write differently now
OR
And so I thusly declare that is a most elegant explanation, without possible rebuttal, for why this most elegant authoritative style is so rarely seen in these times.
The fact this essay continues to be shared 100 years later suggests that this excellent essay could simply be a result of selection: bad essays don’t get shared and they quickly fade into obscurity.
And WOW what writing was this (unlike mine just now). I am looking forward to read this, and it's a pitty it's only 8 pages long.
The basic argument is "I, a biologist, know a lot about how animals need to be different sizes, therefore I also know about whether socialism or democracy or whatever is a good idea now." When you write it out like that, it's very clearly a bullshit argument that relies on appeal to authority, but because the essay is well written, it just comes across as logical and commonsense when you read it.
Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on....
Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work on cities and biological life to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored.
<https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=0899C2F4CD20BF73FC1E150...>
He said human institutions have an optimum size. An institution or system that works at small scale is not guaranteed to work at large.
That is not common sense, and in fact many contemporary people believe in scale-free properties of institutions, which have led to catastrophic failures (eg large interconnected banks that all fail together).
Really the thing his argument gets wrong is that he says Socialism where I think what he actually means is Anarchy.