
Why cities keep growing, corporations and people die, and life gets faster - triplesec
https://www.edge.org/conversation/geoffrey_west-why-cities-keep-growing-corporations-and-people-always-die-and-life-gets
======
et-al
> _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?

~~~
lg
> 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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 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

So go build "Manhattan of the West Coast" somewhere else on the coast, and
leave San Francisco alone.

~~~
__derek__
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I'm laughing at your NIMBYism

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.)

~~~
__derek__
Just protective of San Francisco, then?

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.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Just protective of San Francisco, then?

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.

~~~
swampthinker
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.

------
astazangasta
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.

~~~
igravious
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...](http://www.santafe.edu/research/cities-scaling-and-
sustainability/) 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?

------
scrumper
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.

~~~
igravious
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.

I think you're absolutely correct.

------
macandcheese
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:

[https://books.google.com/books?id=XtIMclQwMY4C&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=XtIMclQwMY4C&printsec=frontcover)

[https://www.amazon.com/Urban-Fortunes-Political-Economy-
Plac...](https://www.amazon.com/Urban-Fortunes-Political-Economy-
Place/dp/0520254287)

Would recommend to anyone remotely interested in the growth, creation, and
destruction of cities.

------
makmanalp
Those looking for meatier content should check this out:

[http://www.santafe.edu/research/cities-scaling-and-
sustainab...](http://www.santafe.edu/research/cities-scaling-and-
sustainability/)

Also look at the "Key Papers" section.

------
reality_czech
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.

~~~
schiffern
>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).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber's_law](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](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.

~~~
reality_czech
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.

------
Etheryte
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.

------
kurthr
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.

------
rer
From the article:

 _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?_

~~~
anexprogrammer
> 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.

~~~
schiffern
>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.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFFVSvAr7Wc)

------
mpolichette
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...

------
jomamaxx
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.

The GDP is a very crude thing.

~~~
andrewflnr
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.

~~~
jomamaxx
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'.

------
tmptmp
Let's not forget: Mohenjo-Daro [1]

I wonder, do we call it a city that kept growing?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohenjo-
Daro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohenjo-Daro)

------
damptowel
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.

------
orf
So why is GM still dominating the market?

~~~
kgwgk
For the same reason that Detroit keeps growing.

~~~
orf
Outdated anti competitive car dealership laws?

------
thomasmarriott
Scale is underrated.

------
wcummings
Why should I care what a physicist reckons about cities?

~~~
nck4222
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.

~~~
thesmallestcat
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.

