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Scale by Geoffrey West: A brief summary
Insights into the universal scaling laws that underlie organisms, cities, economies, and companies
Why can we live for up to 120 years but not longer? Why do mice only live 2–3 years but elephants up to 75? Why do we stop growing once we reach maturity? Is there a maximum or optimum size of cities? And why do companies die but cities don’t? These are some of the mysteries that Geoffrey West elucidates in his 2017 book “Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies”.
Scaling of organisms
Scaling refers to how a system responds when its size changes. Research has abundantly demonstrated the predominance of quarter-power scaling laws in biology. For instance, when an animal doubles in size (i.e. doubles its body weight), then its number of cells also roughly doubles, but its metabolic rate only increases by about 75%, rather than 100%, as you would naively expect. This is a phenomenon known as Kleiber’s Law, after Max Kleiber who pioneered this type of work in the 1930s. It can be formally written as q₀ ~ M^(¾), whereby q₀ is the animal’s metabolic rate, and M the animal’s mass. This means that a cat that is 100 times heavier than a mouse only consumes about 100^(¾)…
