A Brief Book Review of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West
“I consumed fiction as if it were breakfast cereal.” — Don DeLillo (2010)
The best reading seems to encourage us to do more reading. It does not claim to be the final word on any topic of human interest, no matter whether that topic is as large and heavy as a blue whale or as small and light as a shrew. It is as though within the DNA of a good book were genetic strands interested in their own reproduction and the rise of young seedling offspring that grow into new, differentiated, and individual books. Well, of course there are. We have met those genetic strands, and they are us.
Praise be to the authors but also to the readers; were it not for the latter, the process of production and consumption and reproduction would stop, and the world would be the lesser. For what are the best authors if not the best and most voracious readers? It is they, the hungry readers, and their insatiable consumption of the best of that brood of sapling books and their metabolism of the generous fruit of the ideas, data, formulas, analyses, analogies, lyrics, and narratives those books bear, that arise again new readings. These readings in turn trouble the comfortable laze of their established forebears, applying and updating ancient wisdom to and for modern problems and shining new light on the dimmer areas of our mental wisdom maps. The process of literary energy and entropy continues on, and on, and on.
I say this all perhaps as an excuse for why after finishing Geoffrey West’s wonderful book Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (2017), I ordered six other books. Some are very old (what up, Galileo), while others are relatively new and familiar (how you been, Taleb). Inspiration to learn more and not grow complacent in what I know and the wisdom of the sources I value is the gift of this book and others like it.
West, a British-born theoretical physicist at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute, seems first and foremost a dedicated teacher. And he seems also a broad thinker, a ravenous reader, and a witty writer; and thankfully, these traits make his lessons that much better. This book contains volumes. It contains personal memoir, business theory, urban planning and design, cartography, architectural criticism, science history, and meditations on aging and the seductive dangers of linear thinking. (And if you read the afterword you might be surprised to learn it was also edited by the novelist Cormac McCarthy.) Most abundantly, it contains entertaining and accessible lectures on the surprising regularities and connections between topics in biology, mathematics, and physics, such as self-similarity, network geometry, nonlinearity, quarter-power scaling laws, and invariant terminal units.
Self-similarity? Invariant terminal units? These concepts are deftly explained in service of answering some big questions. West wants to find out if there are some simple, regular laws that all complex systems must obey, whether those systems be organisms such as plants and animals or social networks such as cities and companies. His hope is that this will lead to a quantitative, predictive framework for addressing many of the issues that humanity has grappled with its entire existence. He’s off to an excellent and enlightening start.
Over the course of almost 500 pages, West teaches us plenty. For example, he teaches us that the same reasons dictate that a faucet in a small Berkshire cabin is the same size and shape as a faucet in a significantly larger man-made structure, such as the Empire State Building, as dictate that the smallest blood vessels in mammals, the capillaries, are the same size in mice as they are in whales. Moreover, for similar reasons, mice have the same blood pressure and total number of heart beats in their relatively shorter, faster-beating lives as humans do and, astonishingly, as whales do in their longer, slower-beating lives. West extends his explanation of the sublinear scaling (i.e., economies of scale) of mammalian metabolism with respect to size to help us understand the very mortal lives of companies and how the superlinear scaling (i.e., increasing returns to scale) of socioeconomic forces explains the almost immortal lives of cities. All this he does better than I could summarize here. But he does not pretend that his is the final word.
The history of science—if not everything—seems to teach us that we present folk and those before us do not know everything that has come before us or is yet to come. For example, it is only within the last 60 years did we come to understand that the length of an object is not objective but is highly subject to the resolution of the device being used to measure it. It is only in the last 40 years that emerged the now commonly accepted theory that a large asteroid hitting the Yucatán peninsula caused the mass-extinction of dinosaurs. It is only in the last 15 years that the medical profession embraced the idea that simple to-do lists could significantly reduce the risk of infecting patients in the course of treatment and save thousands of lives. And it is only every couple years it seems that many learn (or relearn) that asset prices can and do fluctuate and crash with great indifference to our best laid plans.
Clearly, ideas we might take for granted today did not always spread easily. Many were widely mocked or ridiculed before they were widely accepted. (See also marriage equality, desegregation, climate change, etc.) Right now, there are most likely new notions scientific and social flowering that seem unimportant or perplexing but will become ideas that powerfully shape our futures and be accepted as gospel. This history of almost everything also seems to teach us that learning and collaborating across disciplines, cultures, and borders will probably yield some of our greatest and most remarkable future challenges, pleasures, and achievements. If you want a taste of what those interdisciplinary, international, and intercultural achievements might be, West seems one of the most capable tutors. But I, for one, am hungry for more.