Fabulous book. I cannot recommend it strongly enough. It's impossible to unsee the two scaling laws he lays out for cities once you know about them:

Infrastructure scales with 0.85: "It may not come as such a big surprise to learn that larger cities require fewer gas stations per capita than smaller ones, but what is surprising is that this economy of scale is so systematic: it is approximately the same across all of these countries, obeying the same mathematical scaling law with a similar exponent of around 0.85. What is even more surprising is that other infrastructural quantities associated with transport and supply networks, such as the total length of electrical lines, roads, water and gas lines, all scale in much the same way with approximately the same value of the exponent, namely about 0.85." - West, Geoffrey. Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies (pp. 272-273).

Social effects scale with 1.15: "However, of even greater significance was the surprising discovery that the data also reveal that socioeconomic quantities with no analog in biology such as average wages, the number of professional people, the number of patents produced, the amount of crime, the number of restaurants, and the gross urban domestic product (GDP) also scale in a surprisingly regular and systematic fashion, as illustrated in Figures 34–38. Also clearly manifested in these graphs is the equally surprising result that all of the slopes of these various quantities have approximately the same value, clustering around 1.15. Thus these metrics not only scale in an extremely simple fashion following classic power law behavior, but they all do it in approximately the same way with a similar exponent of approximately 1.15 regardless of the urban system." - (p. 275).

Is there any insight into why it's 0.85 or 1.15, specifically?