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The passage around this formula

where $\beta$ $\approx$ 1.15 for the socioeconomic quantities and $\beta$ $\approx$ 0.85 for the infrastructural ones. A city twice the size of another does not simply have twice the patents and twice the roads; it tends to have somewhat more than twice the patents and somewhat less than twice the road surface. The paper’s own framing is worth stating precisely, because it is often flattened into a slogan: doubling a city’s population is associated with roughly a fifteen percent bonus in per-capita innovation and wealth, and a corresponding roughly fifteen percent saving in per-capita infrastructure, at the same time. This is the opposite of how biological organisms scale — an elephant’s metabolism…

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