Scaling in Human Societies

It is well-known that larger cities produce wealth through mechanisms known as agglomeration economies, which can be regarded as mechanisms by which large collections of people, who can easily travel and trade amongst each other, provide economic advantages over small collections. In this post, we will focus on the theoretical... [Read More]

Marchetti’s constant, discussed in greater detail on another page, indicates that the average person spends about an hour per day travelling. If this figure is taken precisely, it indicates that all improvements in transportation speed should manifest themselves as greater amounts of travel rather than saved time. [Read More]

There are thousands of cities in the world, each with its unique history. There are, nevertheless, regularities in how cities grow, which can be captured in the monocentric standard urban model (SUM). The SUM is also known as the Alonso-Muth-Mills model, named after a trio of works from the 1960s:... [Read More]

One of our main goals is to understand how socioeconomic quantities, such as gross domestic product, traffic congestion, patenting, crime, and others, scale with the size of the city. To do so, we need to understand what a “city” is, and this is much less straightforward than one might think.... [Read More]