Cow’s Blog

May 5th, 2008

photo: dlemieux

New Scientist (subscription required) had a really interesting article this week about how crime in cities can be modelled and predicted through some parameters such as how “connected” a road is and it’s proximity to bars and fast food restaurants.

There was also an aside about some economies of scale and increasing returns to scale found in cities.

Quantities related to physical infrastructure, such as the total length of pipes carrying water, seem to grow in proportion to the city population N raised to the power , with equal to 0.8. This implies that these quantities grow less quickly than the population, as cities benefit from certain economies of scale. Meanwhile, quantities related to social or economic development, such as the number of investors, total economic output or overall crime, all grow slightly faster than population, with equal to 1.15, suggesting that cities also realise certain increasing returns associated with social interaction.

You can read the full paper at the PNAS website. It’s interesting to look at the full table of exponents. Things such as R&D and patents increasing faster than population are economies of scale and reasons why it’s great to live in a city. They also save on some resources as we see that the number of roads and gas stations increase slower than population. But it’s worth highlighting that crime and AIDS cases increase faster than population - obviously negative side-effects of living in cities. I don’t know why I find this stuff interesting. Perhaps it really is interesting, or it’s just the economist in me.

• Economics
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