Scale

✍️ Geoffrey West

A fascinating subject but a very poor execution

This book shows how pervasive is exponential scaling. From humans to cities/companies. It is a very dense book. The author, a very accomplished researcher in physiscs, tells the reader about his incursion in social sciences to analyse how cities, companies, economic growth, and sustainability are linked through this scaling framework. Here is where the problems begin. The author writing style is not straight to ‘to the point’ and very often I got annoyed with all the digressions and tangents as well as all the repetitions throughout the chapters about the ‘central topic’ of the book. It is 150-200 pages longer than it needed to be.