On The Edge #032 Geoffrey West - The Universal Laws of Scaling
In this conversation I connected with Geoffrey West who is a British theoretical physicist and former president and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute the Santa Fe Institute is the world's leading research center for complex systems science.
He is one of the leading scientists working on a scientific model of cities. Among other things, his work states that with the doubling of a city's size, salaries per capita will generally increase by 15%. West became a Stanford faculty member before he joined the particle theory group at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. After Los Alamos, he became president of the Santa Fe Institute.
He is author of a fantastic book called Scale - The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies which formed the basis of this conversation and is highly recommended. West has since been honoured as one of Time magazine's Time 100.
A more accurate title for this episode should be something like 'The Emergent Universal Laws and Economies of Scale, of Organisms, Cities, Companies, Countries and Communities - but that isn’t quite as catchy.'
“There is regularity and that we are all part of it, in a beautiful and highly interconnected way, to the same sets of laws and principles, it does give a sense of purpose.” Geoffrey West
We talked about:
1. How are organisms, cities and companies similar and why are they subject to the same principles as they scale?
2. Why do organisms and companies die but cities don’t?
3. Are social networks the new cities? And what about countries?
4. We also discussed the limits of his model of scaling and how it has affected his world view? We I started out by asking him How and why are all organisms similar in the way that they grow and scale? Enjoy.
https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations/transcript
https://medium.com/swlh/scale-a-book-summary-3d39d16321ef
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JUAx445ReU
https://www.santafe.edu/people/profile/geoffrey-west
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