Mauboussin: Cities scale sublinearly in infrastructure, but superlinearly in patents and crime
Michael Mauboussin · #28 Michael Mauboussin: A Decision Making Jedi · Jan 23, 2018 · at 48:37
Michael Mauboussin describes research by Jeffrey West on scaling laws governing urban systems.
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“If you look at cities of different sizes, as they get larger, they tend to use the physical infrastructure more efficiently. So you need fewer, you know, miles per road per person or Distance of pipes and electric wires and so forth, right? So cities like larger beings tend to be more efficient as they get larger. So that's the sub linear scaling economies of scale. What they also found was super linear scaling, which is some things grow faster than linear scaling. And those are things that are good. For example, patents. So larger cities tend to be more productive from an intellectual capital point of view than smaller cities. But it also applies to things that are negative, for example crime and things like that.”
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