Thoughts on Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth

The full name of the book is:

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

Didn’t want to put that in the title.

This book was awesome.

I’ve formed the belief that society doesn’t place as much value in understanding the physical world in the same way that our parents and grandparents had when growing up. I don’t know how to change a tire, do plumbing, or do work on the roof of a house.

From an incentive point of view there are reasons behind that that I won’t get into, but I bring it up because Scale gives some super interesting insight into understanding the physical world in a (subjectively) non-boring way.

Laws of scaling

One thing that fascinated me in this book is that there are these universal laws of scaling that basically say that as certain things in the environment increase in size, various factors tend to increase in a non-linear, but consistent rate.

So, for example, as the mass of a living organism doubles, the metabolic rate (amount of energy i.e. Calories) that the organism needs only increases by 75%. Therefore, let’s say that I weight 100x more than a rabbit. I don’t need 100x more input (food, energy, Calories, whatever you want to call it) than the rabbit. I would only need 100^(3/4) = 32x more food. This law scales across 27 orders of magnitude, meaning it holds for ants all the way up to wales (which is crazy!).

When looking at living species and society, there are all these similar scaling laws that tend to scale at -1/4, 1/4 or 3/4. There was a reason for these increments in quarters that is related to this idea of ‘fractals’ that I didn’t understand super well but seemed interesting.

Then there are facts that are constant across all living things, like that all living animals (including people) have roughly the same # of heart beats over the course of a lifetime, regardless of size. Even though we live longer, the animals that have naturally shorter lifespans have hearts that beat a lot faster.

Cities & companies

The book also dove into scaling laws within cities and companies. For cities it how things like # of gas stations, amount of connection between people, traveling time, environmental waste and so on tend to increase/decrease as population size goes up.

For companies, it looked at what happens as size, revenue and profits increase. One fun fact: about 500 documented companies have been around for the past 200 years and over half of them have come from Japan.

In general

This book got me excited about cities and the way that the physical world works. There are all of these consistencies that justify my growing belief that started when I read Einstein saying something along the lines of “if I were God, I would have created the world in the exact way that it was created.”

It’s like the way that the world is put together and the way that organisms are composed is literally the best way to have done it. Of course there are ideas of evolution and I’m sure plenty of counter arguments to things working efficiently, but still an interesting perspective.

Thoughts on this review/the book in general? Comment or send me a note :)

Full reading list here