Why do cities survive atom bombs, while companies routinely go belly up?
Geoffrey West on The Surprising Math of Cities and Corporations:
There’s another interesting video with West in the conversations at Edge.
West looks at the metabolism of cities, and observes scale-free behavior of good stuff (income, innovation, input efficiency) as well as bad stuff (crime, disease – products of entropy). The destiny of cities, like companies, is collapse, except to the extent that they can innovate at an accelerating rate. Better hope the Singularity is on schedule.
Thanks to whoever it was at the SD conference who pointed this out!