Assorted Topics for January 18, 2025
This week, I would like to take a look at Geoffrey West’s 2017 book Scale, as well as some thoughts about the ongoing and incoming presidential administrations.
Scale
Geoffrey West’s 2017 book Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies is one that I am rather chagrined to admit that I had not read until recently. From 2005 to 2009, West was the president of the Santa Fe Institute, a transdisciplinary research center that focuses on complexity science, and a place where I had the privilege of spending a few weeks in 2019. West is also a coauthor on “Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities” (Bettencourt et al. (2007)), which developed principles of urban scaling that greatly influenced my thoughts about urbanism. Only now that I am doing a project entitled Scaling in Human Societies did I feel compelled to read the book.
Some of this will be review if you read my earlier post on urban scaling. A scaling law, in West’s usage, is a mathematical formulation of how properties of a system vary with scale. For example, wages per capita exhibit superlinear scaling in cities; if the size of a city increases by a factor of n, then total wages should increase by a factor of the 7/6 power of n. Equivalently, per capita wages should increase by the 1/6 power. Conversely, he observes sublinear scaling for some infrastructural needs, such as the number of gas stations and road surface. In other words, fewer gas stations are needed per capita in large cities.
In the first part of the book, West focuses on scaling in organisms. The hierarchical nature of an organism’s circulatory system is quite interesting. It starts with aorta, then arteries, and all the way down to capillaries to serve individual cells. It is analogous to infrastructure networks in cities. A city’s road hierarchy might start with highways, then major arterials (the usage of the same word is not a coincidence), down to alleys and hallways in individual buildings. An organism’s circulatory system, like a city’s road system, must service every individual unit and should be as efficient as possible. Nature and planners, respectively, have found similar hierarchical structures to satisfy this optimization problem.
The latter portion of the book addresses companies, and while West suggests the possibility of a science of companies, analogous to the science of cities, data limitations prevent such a science from being as well developed. West discusses Daepp et al. (2015), on which West is a coauthor, which finds that the half life of companies is about a decade. In other words, a given company today has a 50% of still existing in 10 years. I found this to be surprisingly fast, though note that “death” of a company might entail a merger or acquisition and not strictly going out of business.
West discusses the methodology of each paper in good detail, giving the reader a sense of how the results were derived and not simply what the results are. He also gives some biographical details and anecdotes about many of the researchers involved.
Throughout the book, and especially in the last chapter, West deals with issues of sustainability. While he clearly regards this subject as important, his treatment is rather conventional and does not show much sign of deep original thought. There are also several questionable assertions. He makes several references to “unrestrained capitalism” without further elaboration, as though this was a proper description of the economic system that prevails in the world today.
In the last chapter, West refers to Johansen and Sornette (2001), which observes that world population and world economic activity has, over thousands of years, grown at a superexponential rate. Not only has the rate been superexponential, but it is approaching a singularity, at point at which the growth rates are infinite. This is analogous to Vernor Vinge’s technological singularity, which envisions that advancing computational technology will culminate in a singularity, beyond which nothing intelligible can be said. I have not reviewed the paper in detail, but the premise sounds rather difficult to accept prima facie.
In a way that West had not intended, his treatment of issues of sustainability made me aware of a common pattern of thought around growth among many thinkers, especially those like Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich, whose The Population Bomb I plan to discuss next week. It is obvious that growth, especially exponential growth, cannot continue indefinitely and must therefore come to an end, somehow and eventually. Many thinkers then make the leap of logic that the mechanism by which growth will end is an ecological catastrophe, characterized by massive suffering and death, perhaps unless a conscious growth-limiting policy is put into place. West himself makes some milquetoast statements about degrowth (without using the word), but a comprehensive discussion of the issue would have been beyond the scope of the book. However, it does not appear that ecological catastrophe is a logical culmination of growth.
The publication date of Scale, 2017, is a difficult time for a book and makes me wish I had read it sooner. The date is long enough ago that much of the content, such as the gushing treatment of “big data”, feels dated, yet it is too recent to be of much historical interest.
Overall, despite some flaws, Scale is a good book. I found it to be an easy and engaging read, yet dense in useful information. It is one that I expect to make use of many times in the future.
Looking Back on the Biden Administration
This is my last post of the Biden administration, and so I would like to offer a few parting thoughts. I had planned on a full post on this subject for today, but coming so soon after the Jimmy Carter post, I decided against it.
The question of what the Biden presidency will most be remembered for is impossible to answer, because this requires us to know as much about the future as we know about the last four years. It would be equally difficult to write a coherent history of the John Adams or Thomas Jefferson administrations without discussing the War of 1812, or the Harding and Coolidge administrations without discussing the Great Depression. But we can try.
The 117th Congress, which operated from 2021-2023, Biden’s first two years, was a highly prolific Congresses, and the theme was massive federal spending on various domestic priorities. One such bill was the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022, which with a variety of rationales created large subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. I might be able to credit my current job to this bill. Also in 2022 was the Inflation Reduction Act, a complex bill that included massive subsidies for various clean energy priorities.
Overall, I am not too enthusiastic about the embrace of industrial policy inherent in these and other major bills of the last four years. We should not expect that in general, the federal government will make better investments than the private sector would if corporate taxes were reduced instead. Many of the justifications for the propriety of a government role in these investments, such as competition with China and rebuilding the manufacturing base, come across as post hoc rationalizations rather than genuine reasons.
On foreign policy, two things stand out. First was the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. I have not disguised my view that the decision to withdraw was a mistake. The war in Afghanistan had grown unpopular, and it must have looked like this would be a major boost. But the hasty withdrawal brought back bad memories about the American evacuation from Saigon in 1975, and the event brought Biden’s early honeymoon in the polls to an end. His approval would never recover.
The Taliban quickly took over the country and reimposed draconian Islamic law. Meanwhile, much as was the case in the late 1990s, a vile terrorist group, ISIS-K, has taken root and threatens the rest of the world. In 2024, they conducted an attack in Russia that killed 130 people and have threatened many more. The next president is clearly not enthusiastic about returning American soldiers to Afghanistan, but like George W. Bush, he may be forced to.
The second event that stands out is the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Biden has made good speeches about the subject, but they are not backed by adequate substantive actions. The administration has repeatedly been slow to provide military aid to Ukraine, and they inexplicably did not allow Ukraine to use ATACMS to target inside Russia until last November. In 2022, I predicted, wrongly as it turns out, that the recognition of the return of great power geopolitical competition would lead the Biden administration to propose increased military spending, which as a share of GDP is near post-World War II lows.
If I write a similar post in four years, I am sure that I will have just as much to complain about. But despite all that, I’ve had a soft spot for Joe Biden since he was vice president under Barack Obama. Although I understand why it happened, the way he was forced out of the nomination after the poor first debate performance sits badly with me.
Perhaps Biden will go down in history like Benjamin Harrison, a relatively forgettable president who is best known for presiding over the profligate “billion dollar Congress” and serving between the two non-consecutive Grover Cleveland terms. And speaking of which…
Looking Forward to the Trump Administration
If in 2021, 2017, 2009, or 2001, I had written posts predicting how the incoming administration would unfold, in no case would I have been even close to being right, and so I will not attempt to do such a thing now. Nevertheless, I’ll mention a few things that I will be watching for.
As with any presidential administration, Trump’s electoral coalition consists of multiple factions with different, often competing, interests and ideologies. All administrations struggle to navigate these differences. In the present case, the main fault line is between those with a more pro-growth, pro-business ideology and those with a more populist, bunker mentality. It is clear that the electoral base is more with the latter group, but Trump’s decision to support the H-1B visa program, for instance, shows that the latter group is not automatically going to win the ideological conflicts.
Likewise, despite the protectionist rhetoric of the last two administrations, American imports did just fine under the first Trump term until 2020. How much Trump actually intends to impose massive tariffs, causing substantial economic damage, and how much he intends to use the threat of tariffs at the bargaining table, is yet to be seen, but I suspect that the latter is more true.
Another major fault line is the degree to which isolationism, as opposed to the historical pattern of American intervention, is preferred. In confirmation hearings for his nomination as Secretary of State, Marco Rubio has expressed support for NATO, and he has expressed more support for Ukraine than, say, vice president-elect J.D. Vance.
How all this will play out is impossible to predict, and it will surely depend on events that are not now foreseen.
One positive thing about the recent election is that this was the first presidential election in 20 years in which the losing side made no serious allegations that the election was somehow fraudulent. There was no equivalent of “His Fraudulency” (an insult for Rutherford B. Hayes after the disputed 1876 election) or a “corrupt bargain” (the belief that Henry Clay unfairly threw the election of 1824 to John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson) or J6.
My hope for the next four years is that the Trump administration will pursue some badly needed regulatory reform—see John Cochrane’s policy wishlist for example—side with the more interventionist elements of the party, and go easy on tariffs and immigration restriction.
There is a phenomenon in American history known as the second term curse, which is the tendency for the second term to be less successful than the first for two+ term presidents. This is probably more a result of regression to the mean, survivorship bias, and pareidolia, rather than a tangible phenomenon. Still, most signs point to this being a difficult term.
Quick Hits
I concluded last week’s post on Thomas Malthus by noting that Malthus saw struggle, arising from competition from population pressure, as necessary for spiritual growth. It is not hard to see how this might have influenced Charles Darwin. However, as Vorzimmer (1969) discusses, the extent of Malthus’ influence over Darwin is unclear. It might be fair to say that in the late 18th century and mid-19th century, ideas of population pressure and natural selection were “in the air”.
Bradd Libby’s piece at RethinkX on bona fide versus band aid solutions, is very much worth reading. He frames the issue as follows:
Band-aid products:
Only address a single aspect of the problem
Achieve only partial improvement
Leave the fundamental system unchanged
Require additional solutions to achieve complete resolution.
Disruptive solutions:
Address multiple aspects of the problem simultaneously
Completely solve (even “dissolve”) the original problem
Transform the underlying system
Make previous solutions obsolete.
CaspianReport discusses Iran’s severe economic problems. Part of the problem, as he diagnoses it, is that Iran squandered its oil surplus of the last few years on foreign misadventures, in particular investing heavily in supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Iraqi militias, and the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Those investments have obviously not done very well.