Scaling in Human Societies

As societies grow, they may run a risk of depleting critical resources. Here we review some general concepts in assessing natural resource availability and consider a few specific cases. [Read More]

IPAT, I=PAT, or Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology, is a simple framework that allows us to understand how much various factors contribute to an overall impact. Here we consider the development of IPAT and variations. [Read More]

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

As we discuss scaling in human societies, the question naturally arises of what factors will eventually limit growth. [Read More]

In another post, we consider the theoretical causes for agglomeration economies in cities, which are the tendency for some per-capita socioeconomic quantities, such as wages and output per capita, to increase with city size. In this post, we will consider empirically results on how socioeconomic quantities scale with city size.... [Read More]