4th book of 2019. Scale: a superlinear hot mess with some great ideas
Scale taught me that I need to pay much closer attention to subtitles of books. Scale’s is “The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies.” That should have raised some yellow flags right there, the author couldn’t help but put 8 separate topics in the subtitle.
The book is no less scattershot. Starting from power-law scaling and whizzing through fractals, allometric scaling, cities as organisms etc. the author covers much interesting ground but also embarks on strange tangents.
The premise is great: can we find mathematical principles that help us understand cities, corporations, organisms with some of the same precision that we can understand physics? Some laws can help us: superlinear scaling, and how the 3/2 power-law (volume to surface area) has a substantial impact on how animals can be configured. Or how certain principles based on human population density and movement can explain crime and innovation in cities based on similar geometric principles.
I wished there was more science in this book. The author tried studiously to keep formulas out of the book, but that meant I had to resort to wikipedia to understand the scaling law relating metabolism to body size, the focus of the first 1/3 of the book. I also wish there was a more detailed investigation of ideas like ‘social metabolism’ and how / whether that is analogous to energy consumption in organisms. Maybe Vaclav Smil (i.e. Energy and Civilization) has spoiled me.
Finally, tangents riddle the book like a brain full of amyloid plaques. The author calls for a grand unified theory of sustainability, discusses funding models for his previous research, how great the Sante Fe institute is, or inevitable discussions of global warming. There was a great book 1/2 the size hiding in here, but you’ll have to slog through a lot to read it.
Notes: +superlinear scaling and unbounded growth +mumford social metabolism
—grand unified theory of sustainability +^3/2 law (geometry) +allometric scaling -global warming seems loosely put together