Geoffrey West on How Higher Scales Lead to Less Energy Per Capita Usage
Ted Video presentation via https://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations#t-481425
Description
"Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities -- that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city's population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations.:
Commentary
Michel Bauwens:
West claims that scaling leads to less energy use per capita. This could be seen as a challenge to the localist versions of the p2p/commons approach, but potentially strengthens the arguments of the P2P Foundation, that the deep social innovation of P2P is that it allows scaling without hierarchy, and hence our insistence to the translocal and trans-national scaling of commons-based initiatives.
More information
- see his book: Scale