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

Should I just say that?

Yeah, just say it.

What is also very interesting is because these things combine, there's an actual trade-off that I think is very intuitive, which is that when you go to a larger city from a smaller city, you have more interactions, more transactions, and so your social space has more choice.

It's bigger.

So there's an expansion of your, if you will, social freedoms, socioeconomic freedoms, choices in that sense.

But your physical space is getting smaller.

If you go in the other direction, you get more physical space in a small town, but your network has less.

So it turns out this is sort of what physicists call a bit of an adiabatic invariant, that basically you increase one thing and increase another, but this gives you something that gives you then the scale invariance that can exist in many different scales, but there's a trade-off.

Yeah.

And what is interesting, so why does it happen?

You could think it's just a speed effect, as we just said.

But we already said before, before we got into the math, that something else is happening, is that people themselves are changing internally.

So if I may push, I'm going to shamelessly push this idea of the accelerator, right?

In physics, when we collide these particles, right, we get to see what's inside them, if they're not fundamental, right?

I mean, this is pushing that idea, but that's how we discovered all these other fundamental particles, that inside of the particles.

When we bring people together, you actually reveal something that's inside them that's forced to change.

And this ability to learn.

So you basically are forcing people to adapt to each other more.

And what happens is that they have to learn to be useful and to also use the skills of other people around them.

And so this is what leads to this divisional knowledge, divisional labor.

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