Comment by cgearhart

I read this book awhile back, and I wasn’t really impressed. There was a pervasive emphasis on the superiority of cities, but it was a highly superficial analysis of largely cherry-picked statistics; for example, using patents as a proxy for economic productivity. I also read a quote (on HN, in fact) that resonated with my skepticism in the context of Scale, (paraphrasing) “like a vacuum, Nature abhors a bare exponential; it’s usually a sigmoid in disguise.” Maybe there is a universal power law relationship in complex systems, but that seems like only part of the story.