Scaling in Human Societies

“Polycentricity” refers to an urban design pattern in which there are several separate centers of employment and commerce, and not a single dominant center. The monocentric standard urban model, also known as the Alonso-Muth-Mills model, holds that cities development around a single core, known as the central business district. Although... [Read More]

How does the functioning of a business change as it grows? What factors determine the sizes of businesses that we see today? There are two theoretical extremes for the distribution of business sizes. One is that all businesses are sole proprietorships, which might arise if there were no advantage to... [Read More]

This article is Version 2. Version 1 can be found here. [Read More]

A growing societal scale–rising population and increasing technological prowess–raises the question of what severe risks that scale may pose. [Read More]

Dunbar’s number, first proposed by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar (1992), proposes to explain the size of human social groups in terms of brain size. A common rule of thumb is that stable human social groups, based on mutual interpersonal knowledge, have a maximum size of around 150 people. Dunbar’s number... [Read More]