LAUSR

LET'S ENVISION A DISCUSSION among engineers. We won't have to stretch our imaginations far: One engineer has proposed a new idea, and the others, typically, are finding faults with it. The engineer with the idea has rebuffed all the criticisms, until one of the critics plays her last card. "Yes-but does it scale?" she asks. There is an ensuing silence. . Systems are usually complex, nonlinear, and adaptive. And as they change in size, their behavior, as well as their economics, can change disproportionately. Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, has recently published a book, titled Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (Penguin Random House). This book engagingly describes West's search for an underlying general mathematical description of why systems scale the way they do. He asks a number of fascinating questions along the way. For example, why do we keep eating, but stop growing? Why do almost all companies live for only a few years, while cities continue to grow and thrive? Why does the rate of innovation have to accelerate to sustain socioeconomic life?