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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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

And it's now, they characterize the lives of most people on Earth.

So it's kind of very interesting how fast this happened.

And so, again, when we go back to those very first cities in pre-industrial societies, including Romans, really up to the Industrial Revolution, most countries about up to 20% urbanized, which means obviously most people didn't live in cities, even small cities.

But then ever since, partly because sort of...

of the ability to produce more food and energy and materials and so on, we now have countries like the United States, which is almost 85% urbanized by the definitions we were talking about before.

So that means basically that

Almost everybody lives in cities, and we see this happening now everywhere.

The big transition in sort of the last two decades was China and East Asia, but the same thing is happening now maybe faster in India and most of Africa.

Yes.

So, you know, in your show, we talk a lot about complex systems, right?

And so it is a complex system in the sense that it is a bunch of people.

It's denser.

But, you know, even from beginning of the social sciences, one characteristic that's obvious, it's obvious in complex systems that the agents become different from each other.

They're heterogeneous.

And this is in itself kind of magical, something that happens only in complex systems, not in physical systems.

And so that's, you know, traditionally we talk about that in terms of division of labor, goes back to Adam Smith and so on as a mechanism in this view of the wealth of nations.

But it's really, I think, more fundamentally when we think in more modern terms and with better theory, it's really a division of knowledge.

It's just that the information each one of us has, as well as our behavior and our jobs and so on, become differentiated and interdependent.

And this is a magical thing is that latent in being a human that was there all along.

Right.

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