Quotes from Geoffrey West

We need to understand how the dynamics of innovation, technological advances, urbanization, financial markets, social networks, and population dynamics are interconnected and how their evolving interrelationships fuel growth and societal change—and, as manifestations of human endeavors, how they are all integrated into a holistic interacting systemic framework . . . and whether such a dynamically evolving system is ultimately sustainable.

The late maverick economist Kenneth Boulding perhaps best summed it up when testifying before the U.S. Congress, declaring that "anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

The two dominant components that constitute a city, its physical infrastructure and its socioeconomic activity, can both be conceptualized as approximately self-similar fractal-like network structures.

Many of the most interesting phenomena that we have touched upon fall into this category, including the occurrence of disasters such as earthquakes, financial market crashes, and forest fires. All of these have fat-tail distributions with many more rare events, such as enormous earthquakes, large market crashes, and raging forest fires, than would have been predicted by assuming that they were random events following a classic Gaussian distribution.

Thus, to avoid collapse a new innovation must be initiated that resets the clock, allowing growth to continue and the impending singularity to be avoided.

The lesson is clear: neither science nor data are democratic. Science is meritocratic and not all data are equal.

But like all excellent, fulfilling and meaningful relationships, it has also occasionally been frustrating and challenging.

Data for data's sake, or the mindless gathering of big data, without any conceptual framework for organizing and understanding it, may actually be bad or even dangerous.

From a scientific perspective the truly revolutionary character of the Industrial Revolution was the dramatic change from an open system where energy is supplied externally by the sun to a closed system where energy is supplied internally by fossil fuel.

So in marked contrast to infrastructure, which scales sublinearly with population size, socioeconomic quantities—the very essence of a city—scale superlinearly, thereby manifesting systematic increasing returns to scale.

Cities are sustained by similar network systems such as roads, railways, and electrical lines that transport people, energy, and resources and whose flow is therefore a manifestation of the metabolism of the city.

In 2006 the planet crossed a remarkable historical threshold, with more than half of the world's population residing in urban centers, compared with just 15 percent a hundred years ago and still only 30 percent by 1950.

bring in the big bucks or perish.

the fantastic power and ultimate absurdity of unchecked exponential growth.

I don't need three cars and a great big fucking house [for two people]. But I do and I want it. This is the issue.

Consequently, there has been much less time for the market forces that act on companies to reach the kind of meta-stable configuration manifested in the systematic scaling laws obeyed by cities and organisms. As explained

lawyers' offices. This scales superlinearly with an exponent close to the canonical 1.15, meaning that there are systematically more lawyers per capita in larger cities.

sublinear scaling and the associated economies of scale arising from optimizing network performance lead to bounded growth and the systematic slowing of the pace of life.

Even more challenging and of perhaps greater urgency is the need to understand how to scale organizational structures of increasingly large and complex social organizations such as companies, corporations, cities, and governments, where the underlying principles are typically not well understood because these are continuously evolving complex adaptive systems.

The city as the engine for social change and increasing well-being is one of the truly great triumphs of our amazing ability to form social groups and collectively take advantage of economies of scale.

If you tell me the size of a mammal, I can use the scaling laws to tell you almost everything about the average values of its measurable characteristics: how much food it needs to eat each day, what its heart rate is, how long it will take to mature, the length and radius of its aorta, its life span, how many offspring it will have, and so on. Given the extraordinary complexity and diversity of life, this is pretty amazing.

Julian Huxley brought several other new words and concepts into biology, including replacing the much-maligned term race with the phrase ethnic group.

In general, then, a universal characteristic of a complex system is that the whole is greater than, and often significantly different from, the simple linear sum of its parts.

The point is that the overwhelming energy cost associated with food is not in the food itself (the 2,000 food calories a day per person) but in its production, transportation, distribution, and marketing through the supply chain from farms to stores to your house and ultimately to your mouth.