An assignment index for Professor Frazier's DATA 100 class
Provide three examples from Geoff West’s reading that illustrate how scale can be used to more fully understand human development as a complex and adapting social and economic system. Additionally, what did Geoff West have to say about the use of theory and big data? According to West, can a theory be relevant in the face of big data? Please provide an example.
What governs the apparent randomness of complex life on earth? In his book Scale, physicist Geoff West attempts to answer this question through the application of exponential functions to tenets of biological and social life, such as the metabolic rates of animals, the relative size of infrastructure in cities, and the lifespans of both natural and man-made entities alike. Through a series of astounding mathematic calculations, detailed explanations, and in-depth analyses, West allows his readers to tag along as he comes to the conclusion that scaling laws – expressions of how various quantities scale in relation to size – hold sway over almost every aspect of observed existence. From comparisons of mammalian lifespan to the number of heartbeats in one animal’s life, to the physical area of a city in ratio to its socioeconomic characteristics, West’s examples of scaling draw clear lines between longevity and size that hold true in real life. Scale provides an important close-reading of the statistics and quantitative facts surrounding the past product, the current home, and potential gravesite of all human innovation and development: the proverbial city.
Before diving into the impacts of West’s work on human development, readers must understand the definition of scaling on a higher level. Scaling, as mentioned before, details how a system responds when its size is manipulated or changed. However, this relationship between size and system rarely behaves linearly; although systematic and predictable increases in the quantifiable characteristics of an organism or social construct, such as a city, occur alongside increases in its size, these increases are not proportional, as one might expect. Instead, they occur sub- or superlinearly, creating phenomena known as increasing returns to scale in the case of superlinear relationships and economies of scale in the case of sublinear relationships. For example, the untrained layman might expect that multiplying the size of Oklahoma City in terms of its population, which is 1.2 million, by ten would also result in an increase in its current gross domestic product of $60 billion by a factor of ten. In reality, this prediction does not hold up. Taking Los Angeles, home to 12 million and possessing a GDP of $700 billion, as the product of Oklahoma City’s populace multiplied by ten reveals a distinctly superlinear, not proportional, relationship between population growth and socioeconomic activity.
Applying West’s theory of allometric scale in this circumstance, and in fact, in all circumstances of city growth almost perfectly explains this culminating aspect of human development as a complex social and economic system. In this development-minded context, the notion of cities of superlinearly scaled institutions that produce increasing returns to scale should both hearten and terrify readers, proving as it does that it remains possible to quantify “urban science,” but that society may not like the numbers that result from such calculations. If cities are truly superlinear, as West’s careful analysis suggests, it means that the average wages of a worker, literacy levels, scientific patents, and other general markers of social stability and welfare will increase at the same exponential rate as crime rates, cases of life-threatening diseases, and wealth disparity. This situation has resulted in a systematically increasing pace of life in growing urban areas, which contrasts the natural scaling law of biological network dynamics identified by West that demand a decreasing pace of life in accordance with an increasing size (or number of cells) and explains why larger animals like blue whales live longer, have slower heart rates, longer maturation rates, and cells that do not work as hard or as fast in comparison to smaller animals like mice. West predicts that continuing this trend of haphazard, cancer-like growth will result in an event known as a finite-time singularity, in which the superlinearly scaled growth of cities and their wealth will lead to open-ended economies that cannot be sustained without having either “infinite resources” or “inducing major paradigm shifts… before potential collapse occurs” (31).
In this sense, scaling forces the blinders of optimism to be lifted when considering the future of urban growth. At the same time, it also reveals some of the most unique attributes of human development as a complex and adaptive system. Utilizing the city as a minute model, development can be observed as an “emergent self-organizing phenomenon that [results] from the interaction and communication between human beings exchanging energy, resources, and information” (280). Here, the term “emergent” refers to the collective behavior of individual components working together to express the shared outcome of their efforts as the product of a complex system that differs from the mere sum of its parts, while “self-organizing” describes the ability of these components to adapt and evolve in response to changing external conditions. From this assertion, West goes on to name infrastructure and socioeconomic quantities as the two dominant individual components involved in the scalable behavior of cities across a range of sizes, specifically noting that beyond the superlinear link between socioeconomic quantities and population that he previously identified, there also exists a sublinear relationship between infrastructure and population which scales to the same degree that socioeconomic quantities scale superlinearly. Put simply, the sublinear physical manifestation of the city acts as an inverse, nonlinear representation of the superlinear socioeconomic city, both of which comprise the complex adaptive system that is the city and, on a broader scale, human development.
By precisely defining the behavior of the city, and thus, development on a quantitative scale through the application of ecological scaling theory, West has accomplished in only a short time what many urban scientists have failed to over the course of many years. In the afterword of his book, however, West notes that the usefulness of the observations put forth by Scale will boil down to how development experts choose to utilize scaling in the context of theory, or the lack of it. As pointed out by other scholars like Rob Kitchen and Chris Anderson, data science has experienced a meteoric rise in recent years, with some even going so far as to dub “big data” the “fourth paradigm” of science. With increased access to data on a global level and the development of incredibly accurate advanced processing techniques, framework seems less and less necessary for the analysis of information. West argues that big data can never replace the meritocratic nature of science designed by theory, which shapes both the path of research as well as the story that raw data can tell. Without a frame to hold things in place, data alone cannot overcome the limitations of its makeup. Human-to-human contact provide new insights through interdisciplinary analyses, thorough discussion, and the judging of data, which prevents outliers and correlation from dictating the trends of human behavior. Take the strange link between variations in the United States’ “total spending on space, science, and technology” and the changing rates of suicide by “hanging, strangulation, and suffocation” (441), which matched each other almost exactly over the course of eleven years from 1999 to 2010. This correlation may seem meaningful, but it possesses no applicable framework or actual usefulness that verifies causation. Although West’s theory of scale has made quantifying development possible, it remains difficult and, in West’s point of view, unwise to reduce the complete dynamics of complex systems to simple numbers. Instead, big data should remain as a tool to analyze the data handpicked by theories, so that multifaceted queries can continue to guide innovation and research for years to come.
West, Geoffrey. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. Penguin Press, New York, 2016.