Luís M. A. Bettencourt

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816 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Luís M. A. Bettencourt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

They're doing this for anyone who loves their history and so on, because if you don't do that, cities will explode.

Right.

But the fact that you're doing that means that the money inequality that you see is somewhat mitigated by social.

social interventions, social services, political interventions, and so on, that tend to force the system to equilibrate itself more.

And so this is the origin of social democracies, of social programs, and so on.

There are always things that people in cities understand and support, going back to politics.

But that people in other environments think you don't need or it can be done through personal charity or something.

But in cities, they become institutionalized.

They're necessary.

And not to say that these solve the problem of poverty, but they change a little bit its character.

And when these things work well in the countries where they have worked well, you find reductions in poverty and social mobility.

So I think this is a complicated answer, but it's just to show you that if you think about it as a dynamical mechanism, I think the picture is a little bit different.

And he starts giving you access to how poverty can be mitigated and perhaps ultimately maybe eliminated.

Yeah, we don't have comprehensive hard data on this.

We have a lot of surveys and a lot of ethnography.

So that's the kind of evidence one gets.

And there's also, while we have hard data, is what's the profile of the migrant?

So there's almost a universal law of demography that the migrant is a young person.

is somebody between 18 and 30.

And again, people move for various reasons, but that's the age at which you're building your adult life.

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