Networks, Cities and Coronavirus; theoretical physicist Geoffrey West describes how viruses scale

About this episode

Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist and Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, joins Vance Crowe five weeks into the COVID-19 lockdown to explain why cities and viruses obey the same mathematical scaling laws. West lays out his core finding that biological organisms scale sublinearly (bigger animals need proportionally less energy and live slower) while cities and social networks scale superlinearly (bigger cities produce more wages, patents, and crime per capita, and life moves faster) and that this same superlinear densification is why disease spreads faster in dense cities like New York than in St. Louis or Santa Fe. The conversation moves through why the coronavirus response required "pruning" the social network to stop transmission, why humans (unlike companies, which have a roughly ten-year expected lifespan) can reinvent themselves and keep growing because they are diverse and non-hierarchical, and a lengthy, almost elegiac digression on exponential growth, using Angela Merkel's widely-shared explainer video as the gold standard for a scientifically literate leader communicating existential math to the public. Vance steers West into speculative territory on rural-to-urban migration trends, Silicon Valley's absorption of San Francisco, and whether remote life over video calls can substitute for embodied social contact, and West closes with a memorable riff comparing internet-only living to sleep deprivation: survivable in the short term, but eventually corrosive to something essential in human connection.

“So it's not only that if you're in a big city like New York, you have more more cases of flu influenza or COVID-19, but you're gonna get them faster. It's gonna happen much faster.”

“As someone that has studied cities, if a city wanted to become a gravity well to attract this diversity, to attract these numbers and grow powerfully, what, what are the things they should look for? How could they change?”

“One of the reasons I started this podcast is because I've noticed there's an incredible amount of anti-science and anti-intellectualism among people that are farming, that I really respect and think a lot of, and one of the reasons is that they've watched Monsanto and other large agricultural companies claim to be representing science, be believed by regulators, and then have to recall products or settle lawsuits.”

Key moments

• West's central scaling contrast between organisms (sublinear, economy of scale, slows down as they grow) and cities/social networks (superlinear, more per capita, speeds up as they grow), the conceptual spine of the whole episode. (institutions)
• West explains that his team predicted, a decade before COVID-19, that influenza would spread faster in larger cities because of network density, and that the early 2020 case data bore this out before intervention. (institutions)
• The exponential-growth digression, including West's account of how "20 cases becomes 40 becomes 80" feels harmless until it suddenly covers an entire population, and his praise for Angela Merkel's viral explainer video as a model of scientifically literate leadership.
• West's aside that Isaac Newton did much of his greatest work (gravitation, laws of motion) while Cambridge was shut down for the plague and he retreated to rural England, a direct historical parallel to 2020 lockdown life.
• The companies-versus-cities argument: the average US publicly traded company has roughly a ten-year expected lifespan and effectively dies once it stops reinventing itself (Monsanto and TWA both cited), while cities almost never die because they stay diverse and non-hierarchical.