Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations Die, and Life Gets Faster

Kevin Kelly and Bruce Sterling have taken their whacks at the latest from the Long Now foundation. Now only a few days late is my commentary.

There's an old adage that if you can describe a problem mathematically, it's 80% solved, and if you can't describe it mathematically, you're never going to get it right. The second modern risks that the world faces today, climate change, political paralysis, financial collapse, obesity, and anomie all are closely tied together by industrialization and urbanization. At the same time, the creative and innovative solutions that might help solve these problems also originate in cities and corporations. In an increasingly urban world, cities and corporations are the keys to the future, and Geoffrey West believes that he has the mathematical tools to understand them.

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