
A Physicist Solves the City  - yarapavan
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all
======
mseebach
If you analyse reams of statistical data for patterns, it's really
unsurprising that, after the fact, a few patterns (sewer system, traffic,
crime rates and AIDS cases) cherry picked for the fact that they match well ..
well, matches very well. In other words, it's not surprising that large data
sets have patterns. What would be surprising would be if a very large number
of variables were predictable, but that does not seem to be the case.

There's a section in The Black Swan devoted to the fallacy that we tend to
project the fact that we understand the rather narrow field of physics very
well - to the extend where we can predict things in that domain reliably - to
an expectation that we can do the same for other fields, when in fact, it's
physics that's the outlier in our ability to understand it so well.

In the end all his efforts seems to come down to the conclusion that cities
exists because they provide economies of scale. I couldn't provide statistical
proof for that fact to save my life, but still .. well, duh?

~~~
dnautics
I'm surprised he used a biological explanation, which I find to be faulty. I
would have guessed that the growth and evolution of a city is more like that
of a star. Every city lies somewhere along a "hertszprung-russell" diagram of
urbanity.

~~~
Kaizyn
He works with the Santa Fe Institute that specializes in studying complex
adaptive systems. What all CAS have in common is the organic growth patterns
that seem endemic to biological organisms. Also, if you consider the
fundamental building block of the city to be its people rather than the
physical infrastructure, then you are dealing with a biological system. This
is no different than looking at an ant colony as a superorganism - yeah they
have some dirt and tunnels and some rocks, but for the most part the important
factor in the colony is the mass of individual ants.

~~~
elblanco
Interesting point, which brings up a pseudo-philosophical question, should we
consider humans living in large cities a kind of super-organism in a similar
manner?

------
Anon84
And a little take home message for start-ups (and companies in general):

    
    
        The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which efficiencies 
        of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of bureaucracy. “When a 
        company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West says. “And then, if the 
        company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is happy and rich. But then 
        management starts worrying about the bottom line, and so all these people are 
        hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the beginning of the end.”

~~~
pak
This is not a revolutionary idea. Economists have studied the productivity
curves of businesses for decades. "Diminishing marginal returns" is part of
most basic microeconomics courses. Here's the page where Mankiw describes it
using the enthralling example of "Caroline's Cookie Factory":

[http://books.google.com/books?id=oRgQ2goeFzwC&lpg=PP1...](http://books.google.com/books?id=oRgQ2goeFzwC&lpg=PP1&dq=mankiw&pg=PA272#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Apparently, though, this "discovery" made a real impression on this NY Times
writer. I don't like it when people take well-established ideas from another
field, dress it up in new lingo and statistics ("corporate productivity,
unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear") and try to market it as
new research.

That was the impression I got from a lot the results claimed by this guy; I
think he's wrong to pass off gross oversimplifications as scientific progress.
I can see why he gets cited, and it's part of the mistake with correlating
citations with influence: they were probably mostly negative mentions. To be
honest this behavior is a little trollish. As we can see here, he gets his
publicity for it.

Somebody said below "Title should be 'A Physicist Plays Economist'"--yes,
indeed.

------
csmeder
I like that he is using his physics background to find equations for cities,
however, is it really a big surprise that if you know a cities area, country
and population you can guess the average income to 85% accuracy? To me that
seems rather obvious.

(population * (personal space)) / area = average income

solve for personal space:

((average income) * area) / population = personal space

..............

 _SF_

Using wikipedia we can find the population of San Francisco and the area. We
can now solve for how much personal space people like in the USA.

((average income) * area) / population = personal space

I can only find per capita income for counties...

City and County of San Francisco:

average per capita income: $34,556

area: 600.7 km²

population: 776,773

($34,556 * 600.7) / 776,773 = 26.7

So USA's personal space is 26.7 $km² per person

...............

 _LA_

Lets try Los Angeles County:

average per capita income: $20,683

area: 10 517.9 km²

population: 9,802,800

remember our original equation:

(population * (personal space)) / area = average income

(9,802,800 * 26.7) / 10 517.9 = $24,884

$24,884 / $20,683 = 83%

Not the 85% goal we wanted but Im working with counties and not actual cities.

sources:

[http://www.wordiq.com/definition/San_Francisco_County,_Calif...](http://www.wordiq.com/definition/San_Francisco_County,_California)

[http://www.wordiq.com/definition/California_locations_by_per...](http://www.wordiq.com/definition/California_locations_by_per_capita_income)

[http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Los_Angeles_County,_Califor...](http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Los_Angeles_County,_California)

------
davidmathers
"Every fundamental law has exceptions."

That's not my understanding of the word "law". Have I been mistaken all this
time?

~~~
dadkins
Even Newton's laws had exceptions, i.e. general relativity. No theory in
physics is perfect, and neither are the theories in this article (they're just
a lot less perfect). The usefulness of laws is in their simplicity and their
predictive power.

~~~
davidmathers
Theories aren't laws. Laws are observations. Gravity is a theory: why do balls
fall to the ground when you throw them? Gravitation is a law: balls fall to
the ground when you throw them.

Relativity isn't an exception to Newton's law, it's just more accurate. An
exception would be a ball not falling to ground after you threw it in the air.

~~~
tel
There are precious few Laws like that. Gravity, Constant Proportions,
Thermodynamics, etc. While they're taught as a separate, somehow more powerful
thing than theory, really they cannot exist without a theoretical framework.
Entropy and enthalpy don't exist outside of theory, gravity "always follows
the inverse square law" under current beliefs about gravity and theoretical
assumptions (when are there ever truly only two interacting bodies?)

I prefer to think of laws as statistical correlations that are so repeatable
that their variance has gone to zero. These are words that only have meaning
in context of a model though. They're embedded in theory, necessarily wrong
theory.

------
jsm386
Jonah Lerer, the author of the article is a brilliant guy, but a lot of his
writing makes interesting claims that don't really hold up when you get into
the details. In Geoffrey West he seems to have found his perfect subject:
"While listening to West talk about cities, it’s easy to forget that his
confident pronouncements are mere correlations, and that his statistics can
only hint at possible explanations."

And as davidmathers pointed out: "Every fundamental law has exceptions."

Lehrer finds a really interesting angle to explain something, tries to apply
that to a lot of things, and that's when it falls apart. See
[http://www.amazon.com/Proust-Was-Neuroscientist-Jonah-
Lehrer...](http://www.amazon.com/Proust-Was-Neuroscientist-Jonah-
Lehrer/dp/0618620109)

------
pjscott
About half-way down the page, the article said this:

 _Small communities might look green, but they consume a disproportionate
amount of everything. As a result, West argues, creating a more sustainable
society will require our big cities to get even bigger. We need more
megalopolises._

That's what they call "burying the lead". Or "lede", depending on what country
you're in. It should have been in the very first sentence of the article:
_holy crap, big cities are green._ It's a counterintuitive assertion, and sure
to draw in readers. Instead, the whole first paragraph is a bunch of human-
interest waffle that has nothing to do with anything. I almost stopped reading
right there.

~~~
gabrielroth
The idea that increasing density is good for the environment has been
conventional wisdom among environmentalists and planners for decades.
(Synonyms that are often used for popular appeal include 'transit-friendly,'
'smart growth,' and 'anti-sprawl.') If West has made progress in quantifying
this effect, that's great, but the conclusion alone would be much too banal to
be the lede of an article in 2010.

~~~
pjscott
I think you underestimate how banal people in 2010 are willing to make a lede.
As evidence for this, I offer the first paragraph of the article in question.

------
csomar
The other day I have been looking at some of the large cities and countries.
I'm a medicine student and if you have had the change for a deep study of the
human body, you'll notice that humans and cities are quite similar.

A Country is the human body. Cities are like organs. They have similarities,
but each one has got a special function/strength (industrial, financial,
agricultural). Houses and building are like cells. Roads are like vessels.
People and different products are like proteins, electrolytes, and chemical
components. People channel in roads, they go by foot but also by car
(different chemical components has car-like proteins to drive them in blood).

Let's get into a cell. It has different components: Wall, Mitochondria,
kernel, ribosome... A house has similar things. It has a wall like the cell
has, with openings which aren't just holes (doors in the house and special
kind of proteins in the cell).

I really can't describe that clearly, due to my poor English and also to the
complexity of the idea. I hope you get the idea and you try to expand it.

Another interesting point is how they both started. The city (in the dark
ages) was very simple, and now has progressed. The same way for the human
which started from a cell that has multiplied and become a fully functioning
animal.

Now cities don't start from 0, just like human. It doesn't need another
billion year for a human to be created, but only 9 months, which is the same
in the city.

I hope you get the idea, sorry for the bad release.

~~~
falsestprophet
It is important avoid confusing metaphors for scientific theories.

~~~
msg
Don't harsh on this. Analogical reasoning is where scientific theories come
from. Well, perhaps from there and from elegant math.

I thought it was a very interesting metaphor, and you can start thinking of
diseases of the national infrastructure, or the infrastructure of the body.

Science shouldn't stop at metaphor, sure. But it often starts there! Think
about concepts from fluid dynamics that leaked into electromagnetism.

------
templaedhel
This struck me an interesting, and very pertinent.

 _Why are corporations so fleeting? ... Bettencourt and West discovered that
corporate productivity, unlike urban productivity, was entirely sublinear. As
the number of employees grows, the amount of profit per employee shrinks
...The graph reflects the bleak reality of corporate growth, in which
efficiencies of scale are almost always outweighed by the burdens of
bureaucracy. “When a company starts out, it’s all about the new idea,” West
says. “And then, if the company gets lucky, the idea takes off. Everybody is
happy and rich. But then management starts worrying about the bottom line, and
so all these people are hired to keep track of the paper clips. This is the
beginning of the end._

~~~
wallflower
I assume this is why revenue per employee is an important measure of company
productivity/health?

NASDAQ 100 Revenue per Employee

[http://www.jbryanscott.com/2009/02/07/nasdaq-100-revenue-
per...](http://www.jbryanscott.com/2009/02/07/nasdaq-100-revenue-per-
employee/)

~~~
templaedhel
Its important because the more employees a companies has, the more overhead it
has, in the form of salaries, and in the services to support the employees,
healthcare, etc. The company also loses its ability to iterate quickly, to
rapidly respond to change etc. This would be fine, if revenue was to increase
proportionally, but if this does not occur (as the article found) then
companies are more susceptible to market changes, and its easier to lose more
faster. Its the " _beginning of the end_ " as the article put it.

------
stcredzero
_This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on
growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big
animals do._

Perhaps a better analogy: large corporations exist because they can lower the
cost of transactions to produce certain products. Cities exist because
conditions and spatial concentration can also reduce the cost of transactions.

------
endtime
>According to the data, whenever a city doubles in size, every measure of
economic activity, from construction spending to the amount of bank deposits,
increases by approximately 15 percent per capita. It doesn't matter how big
the city is; the law remains the same. "This remarkable equation is why people
move to the big city," West says. "Because you can take the same person, and
if you just move them to a city that’s twice as big, then all of a sudden
they’ll do 15 percent more of everything that we can measure."

Am I missing something or is this reasoning fallacious? Correlation is not
causation, and here it kind of looks like selection bias. I very much suspect
that more productive people are more likely to move to bigger cities in the
first place.

(That's all on the assumption that the first half of the paragraph is from
data and the second half is a conclusion he's drawing from those data, which
is how it reads to me.)

~~~
enko
It would be interesting to know if those numbers apply in examples overseas,
eg in Korea or Japan, where you have a single dominant mega-city in which
basically 30% or 40% of the country live. Far too many for a strong selection
bias to be at work.

------
henryl
Title should be "A Physicist Plays Economist"

------
dominostars
In general, it was an interesting read even though there wasn't that much
substance to it. This bit frustrated me:

“We broke away from the equations of biology, all of which are sublinear.
Every other creature gets slower as it gets bigger. That’s why the elephant
plods along. But in cities, the opposite happens. As cities get bigger,
everything starts accelerating. There is no equivalent for this in nature.”

It's inaccurate to compare the growth of human society to the physical growth
of creatures. Primates aren't the first species to benefit from society; What
about ants, or bees, or even hyenas?

------
billybob
Regarding the contrast in durability between corporations and cities: I think
this mostly a matter of definition. Nearly everything about a city - who lives
there, what language is spoken, what industries it has - can change, and we'd
call it the same city. Yet a company can be bought out, and keep most of the
same staff, and we'd say the company "died."

That's because a company is defined by ephemeral things, such as what
activities it engages in and what its name is. At base, it is a collection of
people working on the same task. A company could dissolve, and all its people
could keep working in the same building, doing different things, but again,
the company would be dead.

On the other hand, the only thing that really ties a city's inhabitants
together is that they happen to be in the same place. And unless the city is
nuked, SOMEONE will probably always want to live there. So the city has a
seemingly continuous life, even though nearly everything about it changes over
time. What doesn't change is, say, the fact that it's located on a river.
Which will always be a desirable feature.

------
lindsayrgwatt
There's more Geoffrey West here: <http://www.radiolab.org/2010/oct/08/>

------
jfb
This is a great article, but I prefer this solution:

[http://www.viceland.com/blogs/uk-games/2010/05/10/the-
totali...](http://www.viceland.com/blogs/uk-games/2010/05/10/the-totalitarian-
buddhist-who-beat-sim-city/)

~~~
davidmathers
Video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTJQTc-TqpU>

------
jtolle
I thought it was an interesting article, and the research sounds interesting
and worthwhile, but I also couldn't help thinking of this:

<http://xkcd.com/793/>

------
6ren
Wouldn't the internet enable interaction without colocation?

It might (?) explain: "in the last decade, suburbs have produced six times as
many jobs", as the home-office proliferates.

------
raphar
This is a talk West gave at Google Techtalk in 2007:

Scaling Laws In Biology And Other Complex Systems

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7108406426776765294#>

------
giardini
In addition to looking at corporations perhaps he can also study governments
and give us some insight there, where it is really very badly needed.

------
marknutter
Does anyone know what city that picture of that crazy spaghetti junction is
from?

~~~
Someone
It doesn't really exist.

[http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/hellish-road-junctions-
roa...](http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/hellish-road-junctions-roads-from-
hell-by-hubert-blanz)

------
rorrr
It strikes me how unscientific this guy is. He gets the data, finds some
correlations, implies casuations from them, and even "laws" that don't work
100% of the time.

I'm sorry, it was interesting, but kind of lame.

~~~
pak
I agree with you. While other people above have bantered above about how
absolute a "law" is supposed to be, in my opinion if you are going to call
something a scientific "law" you had better be prepared to explain or at least
enumerate all the exceptions. This guy just seems to get flustered and run off
when people point out the exceptions to his oversimplified conclusions.

~~~
Helianthus16
I found the adulatory tone of the article more than a little annoying, as
well.

