Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread-The Lessons from a New Science by Pentland Alex

Author:Pentland, Alex [Pentland, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Social Physics of Cities

As I have discussed in earlier chapters of this book, social network interactions and idea flow are major drivers of creative output and productivity in groups and companies. These social physics concepts are almost uniquely scalable within the social sciences, and as I will show in this chapter, they extend beyond small group and corporate dynamics to work at the scale of cities, promoting greater productivity and creativity throughout these much larger social networks. Cities are idea machines in the same way that companies are idea machines.

Together with students and colleagues Wei Pan, Gourab Ghoshal, Coco Krumme, and Manuel Cebrian, I have developed a mathematical model for how social ties drive idea flow within cities based on the number of people within face-to-face meeting distance. As we described in Nature Communications, this model gives us a simple, bottom-up, robust model that quantitatively predicts GDP and creative output.7 We have also been able to show that idea flow along social ties accurately reproduces urban features, such as the rates of HIV/AIDS infections, telephone communication patterns, crime and patenting rates, and more. It also gives us insights about how to engineer cities to be both more creative and productive while at the same time minimizing crime and other negatives.

It is important to note that this social physics view of cities is different from the classic models of class and specialization in that it focuses on idea flows rather than static divisions in society. In this way, social physics is similar to models that explain the manufacturing efficiency of cities in terms of the proximity of factories and the costs of transporting goods.8 The difference, however, is that social physics conceptualizes cities and companies as idea factories, so the focus is on the flow of ideas rather than the flow of goods.

In taking this perspective, social physics is part of a long line of thought in sociology, geography, and economics that explores the relationship between population density and innovation, as well as diffusion along social ties and creativity.9 The new and important contribution that social physics brings is the integration of these ideas into a single mathematical model that can be tested against dense, continuous behavior data and available economic and social outcome data. Social tie density and idea flow offer simple, generative links among human interaction patterns and mobility patterns and the characteristics of urban economies without the need to appeal to hierarchy, specialization, or similar social constructs. As the remainder of this chapter will explain, what really matters is the flow of ideas, not classes or markets.

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