Scale (by Geoffrey West) - Part 25

Communication increases super linearly with city size:

Although in a city the number of contacts increase - it’s a different kind of network (single hop kind of networks). All said and done - the “extended family” is usually limited to 150 people:

The city provides a better opportunity to create a “village” of our own as we want:

People’s movements in cities are highly regulated; they have set places they usually goto, and try to take the shortest and fastest paths. And - number of visitors per place is inversely proportional to distance traveled and frequency of visitation:

We tend to use per capita measures to compare economic and social metrics - but these are linear scales:

Linear comparisons are bound to be misleading - without a baseline/null hypothesis for the city:

We need the underlying scaling laws to do sensible comparisons where sublinear/superlinear scalings:

Conventional per capita indicators cannot give us the truth; superlinear scale adjusted graphs tell a totally different story:

Despite the glitz and common belief - New York is quite an average city from a scale-adjusted point of view:

Once a city is established - they’re extremely resilient; consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki - cities that survived despite getting atom bombs dropped on them:

The seeds of San Jose’s (Silicon Valley) glory were set up long before it was materially recognized; it has been punching above its weight for a long time - if we take a scale adjusted point of view:

Safe water is a privilege and has been a major source for increasing longevity:

Prices work in really idiosyncratic ways and properties of a particular location - an example of safe water prices in various US cities:

Just like in Bangalore - water tends to be transported across long distances to supply these cities/settlements:

In New York City - you can use tap water for drinking - and it’s often better than bottled water:

New York has a gravity flow powered, 100-mile distance water shed sourced water system: