Thursday, June 27, 2019

Population size and human culture, some quick and dirty reflections

Economist Tyler Cowen has jones for size. He’s just published a book in praise of big business and he believes that the best way to bring prosperity to all is to encourage economic growth. Color me skeptical, but note as well that I check his website daily because, often enough, there is good stuff there.

Anyhow, one day I asked myself whether or not there was one thing that requires a large population. I suppose you can think of lots of things. But I quickly thought of cultural diversity. Culture lives in human populations. Any given cultural practice (of whatever kind) is going to require a population to practice and sustain it. If you want to listen lots of different kinds of music, you need populations of musicians to create it. Any given musician is going to be able to play different kinds of music with some degree of proficiency. But no musician can play them all.

I then asked: What’s the minimal population the world needs to sustain all existing bodies of cultural practice? How do you even begin to think about that one? For example, there are people worried about the demise of languages. Now, it’s one thing to document a language so that we can continue to study it when there’s no one left to speak it. But how many people are required to sustain a language as a living thing. And what’s the cost of maintaining that minimal population? And you can ask that question for every kind of cultural practice: clothing, cuisine, poetry, transportation, housing, and so forth. Of course, there are complex networks of interdependencies among cultural practices.

One might also ask just which practices are worth maintaining? A whole different kettle of fish. Many practices have been lost. The pyramids of Egypt remain, but their methods of construction are matters of conjecture. But then whole civilizations have been lost, some leaving artifacts and some, perhaps, leaving none.

One can go through a similar exercise for biological species, as some are. I hear that species are going extinct at an alarming rate, pushed out of existence by the expansion of humankind. But extinctions of course are not new. It’s the way of the biosphere, always has been. And then a big asteroid hits. Boom! 100s of 1000s of species obliterated.

And so it goes.

Let’s go about this a different way. Imagine that a mysterious virus wipes out all but a million people. What would those million people be capable of sustaining? Obviously a lot depends on the capability of those people. Do they all have one language in common? Does it make any different what language it is, say Mandarin, English, or Farsi? Note that language capability determines access to libraries. If they don’t have at least one language in common, what then?

Would a population of a million be able to support the use of smart phones? Note that this is very different from asking how many people, in the current world, are devoted to manufacturing and maintaining smart phones. We’re talking about a world where there are only a million people. Would smart phones be one of the many things those people keep up and running? If I had to guess, I’d guess they couldn’t. What about automobiles? Electric lighting?

It’s a strange question.

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