Scaling in Human Societies


How and Why Size Matters
  • Zipf's Law

    By Michael Goff
    Zipf’s law, developed by the linguist George Kingsley Zipf in 1932 (Zipf (1932) and also presented in Zipf (1949)), is an observation of word frequency, and how the most common words in a language appear more often than others. It has been applied to many other contexts, especially to the... [Read More]
  • Population and Economic Growth

    By Michael Goff
    There are, broadly speaking, two hypotheses on the relationship between population and economic growth, as explained in Sibe, Chiatchoua, and Megna (2016). The Malthusian view, named for Thomas Malthus and his famous essay on population (Malthus (1798)), holds that population growth tends to depress per-capita GDP. The Kremerian view, named... [Read More]