The Tasmania Effect

Well that can happen in a pre-literate society. But we have a highly literate society and pretty much all relevant knowledge is available in written form.

I find it pretty hard to see the relevance of the analogy. The number of people required to sustain an industrialized society is arguably falling. Provided that you can maintain access to your information store (kind of a necessity if your spaceship is going to continue to work) you can re-establish any necessary skill.

Some skills would not be necessary at all. Medicine would not need to deal with any bacteria or virus not present on the ship at launch. So that leaves cancer and broken bones. It would not be necessary to have the full US legal code.

This was the thesis of Piers Anthony’s 1976 novel “But What of Earth”

I try to imagine a small population on a secluded island maintaining our current material culture by building everything from scratch – cars, telephones, computers, telecommunication infrastructure. Oh and of course they’d also have to build and maintain all the machines and production facilities, mining equipment (assuming the raw materials can be found on the island), refineries, waste disposal facilities, waste water treatment plants, etc. etc. They can’t import even a screw. Sounds like a tough challenge to me. Yes, it may be possible to figure out how to build each of these items from manuals alone but how many lifetimes would be spent even reading all the required manuals???

@F

Well I do have machine tools for metal working. So in theory I could make the tools myself. This should be rather easier once I have the lathe and mill converted to CNC and tool production essentially becomes a turnkey operation.

I do produce my own models in SolidWorks. But these could be supplied as a library.

If your society can start off with a set of tools capable of building themselves, the prospects for survival become quite good. For example, say you start with a 3D printer. First you print out copies of the mechanism, then you have to construct the motors.

Sure there are limits here, but they are in the number of tasks, rather than the skills required for the tasks. You are going to need people to mine raw materials, smelt ores to make metal. You are going to need people to plant and harvest the crops. You are going to need people to perform childcare and so on. At some point you have to build a silicon fab and start making microprocessors so that you can continue to support a Hi Tech civilization.

There would be huge challenges, but the lack of skills would not be a limiting factor. That is the sort of thing that someone who is not an engineer is going to think is a real obstacle because they haven’t really attempted anything of that sort themselves.

There’s a fair amount of discussion of that issue in Stross’s comments, most of it arguing that the documentary record for anything technical is going to be insufficient to preserve skills unless there are live experts to convey the subtleties. That seemed overstated to me—anything technical got built for the first time at least once by someone who’d never done it before and didn’t have a manual, so duplicating that achievement with a manual shouldn’t be impossible. But it’s an interesting question.

IMHO, it seems virtually certain that someone could “duplicate” any reasonable task from records. Going to straight physical skills, kids learn how to do really complicated moves from watching “and 1” videos. You’d think it’d be impossible to learn a reverse crossover off your knee without some sort of teacher, but no. Just watch a video, practice, and do it. My dad learned how to rebuild all of his model trains watching videos and practicing, and he’s not a technical guy. I think it’d be relatively easy to learn most modern skills from records.

I have read Stross’s considerations. When he speaks about 100 million people on Mars, to get started, he is wrong. As a commenter pointed out above (PHB), numbers are falling to maintain high tech (computerized nanotech will make it ever more so). If we had the means to create a lot of energy with the vacuum, or simply the sun, or thermonuclear fusion, we could start to do geoengineering cheaply.

Athens maintained the highest high tech with 80,000 citizens max, whereas Persia failed to do it with 100 million (or something of this order).

The Tasmanian Effect is similar to the American Effect. Americans do not mind devolving into an inert, plutocratically manipulated blob. Because, like the proverbial frog, the simmering is done just so.

So it was in Tasmania. It’s not a question of small population. The polynesians had much smaller populations, but their more advanced philosophy and more ferocious motivations kept them searching for more progress and technological solutions.
PA

The entire Internet was assembled from first principles in my lifetime. Nobody knew how to build an Internet in 1970, twenty five years later it was a solved problem. When I came it the Internet it was already built. I immediately started re-working the parts I thought crap.

I can’t see how a pioneer society could survive if it didn’t have a huge amount of inbuilt innovative capability. But that does not mean they have to work out everything from first principles. For any given technology they are going to have to be constantly bridging the gap between what the documents describe and what the existing resources can provide.

It all depends on what your assumptions are for the preparation work. One assumes that these colonists are being sent off to a location that is known to be habitable and that there has been advance surveying and terraforming. So you pretty much have to assume that there is already a population of self-replicating robots at work on the planet. And given the distances involved you probably have to have had them there for a millennia or so.

So basically by the time the human colonists arrive there has to be a pretty large infrastructure waiting for them. And their job is pretty much going to be to procreate as quickly as possible.

In fact the way that you would probably work it is to send out your terraforming self-replicating robots and the DNA code to clone up your set of target organisms. In fact that is likely what you are going to be using to do the terraforming.

Heck, all you need to do is to hide a few dinosaur bones and the colonists don’t even need to know where they came from.

Someone had to be the first person to fly a plane, weld a piece of metal, program a computer and everything else. It really is not as big a deal as is being made out.

Simply having books available, or even a small smattering of talented people isn’t enough. If it were, the Third World would be economically developed to a much greater extent than it is today.

There are choke points. One of the choke points in the Middle Ages in Europe was the loss of a critical mass of literate people; the church developed a core of monks living in privation to preserve what it could, but was straining to preserve written knowledge, much of which was made available via the Middle East afterwords but lost in Europe.

Before that developing mining and metallurgy was a major choke point. Developing the excess resources in society to locate resources that have to be mined, operate mines to get the metals, and maintain facilities to refine it and process take a certain scale, and even after mining was established, villages rose and fall based on whether they could find a competent smith before larger scale metal production was developed.

Similarly, energy is a choke point. The industrial revolution was largely a product of a post-metallurgical discovery of efficient ways to exploit coal and later oil, with steam and internal combustion gasoline/diesel engines respectively. The fuels aren’t the only options, but you need fuel, and exploiting it takes large scale enterprises.

Manufacturing and medical specialties are two of the most scale dependent technologies in our tool kit, and the most scale dependent technologies drive the whole. If one has access to a top rate hospital and medical complex, and can import manufactured goods and non-locally available raw materials, one can probably replicate our society’s way of life in a sustainable way with a few hundred thousand people. Moreover, if one deliberately sets out to have more generalization in key professions, one can downscale further with only modest compromises in quality. But, a manufacturing base (even with patents in hand, a la Stross’s books), requires a very large scale. It takes a modern society of at least tens of millions and probably hundreds of millions of people to support a half decent automobile industry, for example.

Interplanetary colonization is still a far way off, but the big problem is more lack of motive than societal scale. Simply put, lots of virtually uninhabited places on Earth, like Antarctica, Siberia, the Canadian Tundra, Northern Alaska, Nebraska, the Sahara, the surface of the oceans, the ocean depths, and floating in the atmosphere perpetually, are all much cheaper, easier places to colonize than the Moon, Mars, or any planetary satellite in the solar system. In all of those places getting their is relatively cheap, atmospheric pressure and breathable air aren’t nearly as serious problems (if they don’t have it, it can be imported cheaply from nearby), gravity is normal, and existing technologies can show us how to do it. Overcrowding or economics doesn’t make space colonization attractive until some point in the hundreds of billions or more of population, unless space has things that we don’t have on Earth, which modern chemistry and physics have pretty definitively ruled out. There is no Unobtainium out there to making mining it on another planet worth the trouble. Tourism, scientific experimentation, freedom to be socially deviant, and perhaps very small scale mining of very pure lodes of very high value materials (e.g. gem quality diamonds) are the only reasons to be in space for the foreseeable future and permanent sustainable colonization isn’t a sensible business model in three out of four of those situations. Unless you are the man-boy love association or Earth is nuked out of habitability, it doesn’t make much sense to develop a sustainable space colony.

“IMHO, it seems virtually certain that someone could “duplicate” any reasonable task from records.”

A surprisingly important and large chunk of our society isn’t well documented. There are, for example, cases of factories being built with precisely the same equipment and plans in two different places that are not in contact with each other having dramatically different productivity and quality control.

The R&D cost of restarting a major weapons system from plans and exemplars and available records is only marginally less than reinventing one from scratch. The problem comes up quite a bit in areas like fighter aircraft and nuclear submarine production. Similarly, the software that administers the United States Tax Code for the IRS is so ill documented and esoteric that the only way to efficiently maintain it is to hire the people who did it originally as consultants to revise it for tax law changes each year. There are problem a dozen people in the world with a good grasp of the software code. Simply knowing that an outcome is possible is helpful, and more documentation certainly helps, and it is possible to learn a lot from books (I taught myself two years of high school mathematics and five semesters of college mathematics entirely from books, but not many people do that), but it is a very costly and inefficient way of getting something done and in a largely isolated community, cost constraints matter a lot.

“I try to imagine a small population on a secluded island maintaining our current material culture by building everything from scratch”

Starting civilization from scratch on another planet is impossible, we’d die before we got our first harvest in and breathable air. You need the right initial tool kit and it is going to have to last you a while until you can reproduce it.

You also need to be able to prioritize what you develop so that you don’t hit bottlenecks and can meet your needs without interruption, which usually requires redundancy. You can’t afford to have just one person know how to keep the air supply system running; what if he or she gets hit by boulder and dies. Sustainable air, water and food production need to be early on. The bulkier it is to bring in the initial tool kit the faster you need to be able to make it yourself. You need sustainable energy production before you run out of whatever form of fuel you brought with you. You need a mining industry before you build things with metal beyond your initial supply. You need graduate schools a couple of decades after you start having children. You need something for your specialists in things you can’t do yet to do until it is possible for them to use their skills. What will professors do until they have students? What will metalworkers do until you have metal? What will miners do until you find deposits?

You also need to be very efficient very fast. For example, our society’s economic and technological culture is very sensitive to the percentage of the population needed for agriculture and raw material production; if you don’t get your base industries not just up and running, but up and running very efficiently, you stall.

The sensitivity of all of this to careful management also means that you need some combination of very good leaders and slack in the goals you must meet to survive. One mediocre leader early on means that your society will probably die out, if not during that administration, then while trying to recover from it. Yet, picking good leaders in advance is a notoriously hard thing to do, and picking them in an acceptable way in a small closed society is even harder.

“Heck, all you need to do is to hide a few dinosaur bones and the colonists don’t even need to know where they came from.”

Yes, I get the joke. But, no dinosaurs (and more generally, no history of flora and fauna prior to colonization) means no fossil fuels of any kind. You need renewables and nuclear power and perhaps imports of methane from Jupiter or something, or you bust. This also means that a huge piece of the tool kit needs to be redesigned for a fossil fuel free economy; since it didn’t arise under those constraints.

For example, plastic becomes far more precious in a fossil fuel free economy, so substitute materials may be needed for things built with plastics on Earth. Ditto petroleum based fertilizers. Ditto natural gas based home heating. Ditto internal combustion engine transportation and industrial machinery. Eventually, you can make renewable biofuels, but that means you need a much larger ag sector than the one on Earth with a different mix of crops (more saw weed, less tobacco). Not innovating is not an option. The “by the book approach” simply won’t work.

Moby,

Modern medicine only got to the point where it cured more people than it killed sometime in the 19th century. And much of that progress was the result of improvements in hygiene. Sure the efficiency of various surgical procedures are going to be lower, but how much disease are the colonists going to be taking with them? One would imagine that they would have pre-screened to avoid genetic diseases and avoided bringing bacteria or viruses.

It seems more likely than not that surgery is going to be performed by robots long before we have technology capable of sustaining inter-stellar travel.

Stross’s claim is based on the number of people you allegedly need to carry in the spacecraft to establish a self-sustaining technological society capable of maintaining itself. My argument is based on the considerably smaller number of people that are sufficient to create a society capable of progress.

It really does not matter if the society cannot perform heart transplants on day one. The question is whether the society established can re-create that capability from books without having to re-discover it from scratch.

It took Abraham Derby and his sons half a century to work up to modern iron production. If they had started with modern high school chemistry they could have worked out the process in a few years.

When I taught myself assembly language programming at 14, I did not know anyone with formal training, let alone receive any. The same is true of pretty much all Victorian science and engineering. There are very few self taught mechanical engineers in developed countries today because pretty much anyone who shows some aptitude can find some degree of formal education in the field if they choose. That is not the case in other parts of the world where learning from a book is still a pretty common way to learn.

Oh and Davros uses Dalekanium, not plastic.

@PHP:
1. The Internet was not built from first principles in your lifetime; there is a direct connection stretching back at least to the Pony Express. It has its roots in 19th century technology and institutions.
2. A university doesn’t need the arts faculty at all? or languages other than English? Even in terms of a hypothetical university on a recently colonized Mars, that doesn’t seem feasible for more than the time it takes to get the most basic survival structures up and running.

Stross is one of my favourite SciFi authors, his book Glasshouse is majestic.

In a way, we see material culture go backwards in Europe, as people get older and children get fewer. A lot of European industries are just the evolution of pre-industrial techniques handed over from father to son, one century after the next.
Think of cuisine, textiles, pottery, agriculture, small shops, artisan crafts.
When industrialization came along, it was easy to let machines do what families had been producing until then.

Now, with less and less European children (and immigrants creating their own parallel societies) it is just not possible for only children to learn everything their parents and grandparents could teach them.

So once-productive industrial clusters in Southern and Central Europe are dying, their production gets outsourced to Asia, the social, tacit knowledge which made them possible has all but disappeared, and new generations lead their lonely existance surrounded by products made somewhere else.

Provided that you can maintain access to your information store (kind of a necessity if your spaceship is going to continue to work) you can re-establish any necessary skill.

BWAHAHAHA

Your information store will have at most ninety percent of the knowledge you need to do your work, (if and only if the work you do is a desk job) but the most crucial ten percent will be scattered around the heads of twelve different people, half of which are unreachable at any given time.

Talk physical skills and it gets worse: look at how much of the old traditional professions can be learned from books and how much you have to learn it while working at it, how many simple tricks were lost as the last practitioners died and had to be relearned undsoweiter. It’s no different with modern professions.

Doesn’t mean these things can’t be learned of course, but to conclude from a bit of diy welding, how quickly kids pick up dance routines from video and an overinflated faith in IT that you don’t really need real people to instruct you? Somebody has been reading too much Heinlein…

Sweet jesus indeed.

Some of you people are freakin’ scary to me in the same way that people who advocate reducing population are freakin’ scary.

Okay, something is pretty evident to anyone’s who’s read a bunch of decent science history books…say, right now I’m reading Green Imperialism by Richard H Grove. Cool book. However, the thesis pretty much contradicts what so many of you all up above thinks. That something is that technical knowledge changes. Our interface with technology changes. There is no *static* society that does not rely on *dynamic* approaches to technology (at least recognizably capitalist static societies). A calculus book is fine for knowing calculus. The technical books for *coal mining* will easily be out of context of local situation in many if not most circumstances. Most of what we’d say is high utility knowledge is *collected*, from a wider base than the local society. In fact, monetising the collection of talent and knowlege is kind of what capitalism *does*. A self-contained society with a limited number of cultural stories has too few reference frames to actually take advantage of static technical knowlege. A rather recent and big pet peeve of mine is really realizing just how little people understand Huckleberry Finn. It’s not hard to read, the moral isn’t hard to grasp, and most teens *do* get it on a shallow level. It doesn’t stick though, and the deeper awareness is always overwashed by the dominant media themes that contradict that story. Same failure of process happens for *all* knowlege, which is why real knowledge and talent has to be collected from diverse groups and situations.

The number of people required to sustain an industrialized society is arguably falling. Provided that you can maintain access to your information store (kind of a necessity if your spaceship is going to continue to work) you can re-establish any necessary skill.

I’m pretty confident this opinion is held only people who don’t possess any necessary skill, by even a generous definition of necessary. The map is not the territory.

It seems we get the same “I believe in the tooth fairy” people here as we do on Charlie’s blog :)

The original challenge from Mr Stross was to keep a society working at a functional and economical level of a 2010 western society; meaning you get to keep your standard of living. You have fast travel anywhere on the planet, instant com, tracking of everything, etc, etc.

Once you accept that you don’t have GPS anymore, or you can’t take a plane to the other side of the world without bankrupting yourself, then the numbers required start falling. The example given there was the neurosurgery team. If, like PHB thinks, you have 1000 people around, then if you have a problem requiring intervention… why, you die. With 1000 people around, there’s no neurosurgery specialist : you’re going to be operated by your general MD. Going from manuals. We all can guess how it’s going to end.

The other argument is economical. Most of our production/occupational niches in a modern society require a lot of customers to exist. In the 70s, an estimate was made that you needed over 150k people to justify the existence of ONE microchip designer. Less than 150k? It’s not economical to have a full-time designer, so instead of a professional, you get an amateur chip designer, who does other things inbetween designing new chips, and thus has less experience (and, of course, no peers – he has to be able to design the chip on his own).

At 1000 people, you have a pre-industrial society (with post-industrial knowledge lying around). There are no factories around: each item you use has to be crafted individually or in small batches, which means it costs a lot more than the chinese mass-produced items we’re now used to have. Your cell phone will probably cost more than your monthly wage, so you’ll do without probably. And so on…

You probably could recreate the modern 2010 society starting from 1000 people. If you’re willing to wait a thousand year or so while they grow back to multi-million population.

Boldface in blog conversations = spittle-in-face in offline conversations.

I don’t know. I read it as some kind of secret code:

static dynamic coal mining collected does do all

??

Also (since it seems to have caught a lot of imaginations) is Charlie’s question the right one to ask in terms of space colonisation? Do we need a maintain our current level of civilisation while colonising space?

Traditionally, colonists have had to put up with much more risky conditions than they would have had to suffer back home, which makes me wonder about the medical specialist argument. As a volunteer in an extreme environment, is it reasonable to accept that there are a greater number of otherwise treatable injuries that can kill you? (e.g. mountaineers, or soldiers in warzones)

And a final, possibly irrelevant and certainly poorly-thought-through point: Charlie notes that “Cars are no longer user-serviceable because they’re nearly as complex as 1960s airliners” but 1960s airliners could still fly between continents… and the Apollo guidance computer, which got us to the moon, had 2k of memory. In some respects we might have more complex technology than we need for certain tasks.

‘Sure the efficiency of various surgical procedures are going to be lower, but how much disease are the colonists going to be taking with them?’

Well, without effective surgery, about 15% are going to die of appendicitis. And a significant number of women and babies will die in childbirth. That’s not nothing, and that’s without infectious diseases.

“Yes, Pacific islanders were pretty isolated, and they did indeed lose quite a bit of useful technology (bow and arrow, pottery) because of it.”

…um. Some Pacific groups lost the bow and pottery; some groups kept them. Polynesians lost both, it’s true. On the other hand, Polynesians made a huge number of other advances, in everything from shipbuilding to agriculture. Hawaiians c. 1700 AD were overall quite a bit more advanced than their Lapita Culture ancestors back on New Caledonia had been c. 1700 BC.

“although I first learned it from Jared Diamond (like so much else).”

OK, wince. Jared Diamond is sloppy at best, riddled with errors at worst. The nicest thing you can say about him is that he’s a good gateway drug for a lot of interesting topics. But you really don’t want to use him as a primary authority.

Doug M.

Clearly, there is a continuum, from knowing how to do something immediately by just looking at the problem, to being able to figure it out if you thrash around enough, discuss it with colleagues, etc., and it’s true that this is probably related to the distinction between having access to the written information and not having the information written yet, but that this has little to do with how large a number of people you have to have to get something done.

That said, I hope by this, I immediately started re-working the parts I thought crap., PHB means something different from what was meant the last time I heard someone say that.

“I could see some skills getting lost through chance (the one glassblower and both his apprentices are killed in a fire)”

Yes….

“On one hand, the Guamanians were only imperfectly isolated for about 150 years, not completely isolated for 13,000 years.”

And there will be an awful lot of accidents over 13,000 years.

“On the other, Tasmania is almost 200 times bigger than Guam, with a correspondingly larger and more diverse resource base.”

I think this works the other way around. 5,000 people over 200 times the area isn’t “a society” in quite the same way. The Tasmans were more likely to have been in groups of what, 30-50 as hunter gatherers all over Tasmania rather than mostly urban in Spanish Guam? So many societies rather than one?

But then what do I know about it, I’m relying upon Diamond…..

How many colonies are self-sufficient, at their original level of technology, from Day One? Most of the colonies set up by European powers weren’t even self-sufficient in food (many of them starved) in their early years. But they established a beach-head, scouted the area, and cleared some land. Then, over time, the specialists arrived. On Day One, all you need is survival skills.

I love Jane Jacobs’s example of a colony that imports bicycles, and then learns bicycle-repair, and then starts to make some bicycle-parts locally, and in time it makes its own bicycles and even exports them.

Also, if we put a colony on Mars, does it need to be able to build a spaceship to Mars? At that point, Mars is already occupied. They won’t worry much about moving off Mars until many generations have passed.

Third, colonists have a large head start that comes from just knowing a technology is possible. Several non-literate societies got a mere glimpse of literacy (seeing a European writing in a journal) and, without further instruction, invented their own systems of writing. Or– Knowing the general shape of the Internet, colonists could really focus their R&D along the direct path to success, rather than stumbling along. Finding something the first time is agonizingly hard; finding it a second time is, well, less hard.

I think social institutions are probably more crucial than the simple number of people involved. Ultimately they determine what’s feasible in terms of tasks that require more than one person, or involve economies of scale, or affect collective survival or public health. This can be seen in the spread and decline of the Roman empire: most places the Romans weren’t overrun or driven out, they became less Roman and more local, giving up the habits of public buildings and legal institutions.

This isn’t a well-developed idea, but I’d be interested to see CT’s thoughts on it.

“The Tasmans were more likely to have been in groups of what, 30-50 as hunter gatherers all over Tasmania rather than mostly urban in Spanish Guam? So many societies rather than one?”

The best evidence we have is that the Tasmanians were in nine fairly distinct geographical groups — you could call them “tribes” — each of which, in turn was divided into a number of bands. If you think of 10,000 people divided into groups of ~1,000 each, divided in turn into bands of 50-100 people each, you probably wouldn’t be far wrong.

OTOH, there seems to have been a high degree of linguistic and cultural unity. AFAWCT, all the groups spoke mutually intelligible dialects of the same language, performed similar or identical dances, songs and rituals, and had exactly the same technological toolkit.

So, not exactly “many societies”. One culture, just spread out rather sparsely across the landscape.

Spanish Guam was a collection of villages plus one small town — I’m not sure you could call it “mostly urban”. The largest community was Aganya, the capital, with 1,000 – 2,000 people.

Incidentally, the exact number of Tasmanians remains a hotly disputed topic; that figure of “10,000” is probably close to the current median guess, but there is definitely not a clear consensus. Archeological evidence plus the few records of contact point towards a somewhat lower number; what little genetic evidence we have, towards a higher one. It’s still very much a live and open debate.

“But then what do I know about it, I’m relying upon Diamond…”

In all seriousness, quoting Diamond as an authoritative source will make you look stupid. Don’t take my word for it! Start a discussion with someone who knows his/her stuff in one of the relevant fields, then throw in ‘well I learned from reading Diamond that’ and watch the reaction.

Alternately, two minutes with google will reveal the existence of a fairly large corpus of literature critiquing Diamond. (Also a rather hair-raising lawsuit against him personally for just making stuff up out of whole cloth, though that’s perhaps only marginally relevant.)

Doug M.

Lemuel Pitkin, I did not intentionally bold the words. I put * on each side.

AAAAAaaanyways…trade maintains knowlege by reinforcing support structure for knowledge.

“In all seriousness, quoting Diamond as an authoritative source will make you look stupid. ”

As I gathered from your earlier comment which is why I mentioned it. Reinforcing my usual positioning around here…..

Isn’t the problem the rate of production even more than the rate of learning? One of the reasons we have high living standards is not just because of the new ideas, but because of how many things we have. For example, we can use a needle once for a medical injection and then chuck it away, lowering the risk of spreading infection by sharing needles, because needles are really cheap to make. Why are needles really cheap to make? Because we use a lot of them, so it’s worthwhile specialising in the skills and machinery to be really good at making needles. We could make needles with more generic machinery and skills, but then they would take up more of people’s resources, so we would have to economise more on needles, so at some point, as the population size falls, people would start reusing needles or having to go without. Or we could have specialised equipment and skills for making needles, but the time spent making and maintaining that would mean less time for making and maintaining something else.

“Is the raw material for pottery (clay) available on a coral island?”

It’s an excellent question. The answer is, yes and no. Yes if you’re on a “high” island, like Guam, Samoa or Hawaii. (Anyone who’s spent time on Guam will tell you that the southern half of the island is all red clay soil, which turns into astonishingly slick red mud when wet.) No if you’re on a “low” island, a coral atoll — you get coral and maybe limestone and the sands they produce, and that’s it.

So maybe the Polynesians lost pottery because they bottlenecked through coral atolls for a while at some point? Well, maybe, but there are problems with that. OTOH, there are problems with the other proposed explanations too. It’s tricky.

Doug M.

alex@48,

I think you missed the point. Brains plural. Just in case I get shot in the head or something, I don’t hoard information. I pass it around, you know like in human society?

Sorry, but when you say things like “if civilization falls tomorrow, I on my own could get us back to 1830 pretty damn quick – with no tools, and no books”, really what do you expect?

So maybe the Polynesians lost pottery because they bottlenecked through coral atolls for a while at some point? Well, maybe, but there are problems with that.

The sort of thing that could happen, but given that there was pottery in Samoa, and there’s clay in Samoa, and pottery wasn’t being produced at contact with Europeans, it can’t have been lost there by bottlenecking through a coral island.

I don’t like Stross’ chain of reasoning: given the population needed to maintain current living standards, space colonization is impossible.

First, I will tell you right now that cell phone technology would be developing at a vastly slower pace with 100M people. The industry sells 1B phones a year and that funds an enormous R&D effort. With a base of 100M people, you would get cell phones, but they would suck more and also be more expensive. I don’t think this is really the right question anyhow (why would it be?). The question is probably one of simply maintaining technical knowledge or capability. And right away you realize the Tasmania example is not very relevant for many reasons. First data storage and secondly, is this space-going civilization really isolated or not? Postulating a interstellar colonization effort with slower than light travel just seems really odd. There are some extremely light high value items and expertise that could be imported more cheaply than locally constructed if you are only talking about Mars. So while the 100M number sounds about right to me for the definition Stross proposes (though I could be talked down a bit, probably), I don’t think it’s at all the right number for inter-system space colonization. Interstellar, perhaps.

mpowell, Charlie Stross’s case is argued against a very specific science fiction wet dream, where the high and mighty spacers live their advanced free lives on the frontier while the commoners deservedly toil away at earth. I am afraid the L-word is involved.

It’s one thing to have space colonies the way Spain had Guam. But it’s quite another to have the US-in-space, complete with Even More Freedom, which is what he is arguing against.

Also, a particular brand of space fans like to talk about the need for a “backup” in case earth get wiped out like the dinosaurs. Combined with the Advanced Spacers vs lowly Earthers idea, people thinking about such wipeout scenarios look a bit, well let’s stay polite.

There are some extremely light high value items and expertise that could be imported more cheaply than locally constructed if you are only talking about Mars.

And the same argument holds even more strongly for information, including education carried on partly or entirely by telecommunications. If you can e-mail complete specs of your prototype and video of what it’s doing that wasn’t what you expected back to Earth for consultants to mull over, the fact that the man on the spot on Mars may be a semi-amateur is far less important.

Of course, for that to be viable in the long term, Mars has to be providing something of value that Earth wants. The market for information about Mars is probably rather limited, so if you assume tourism is impractical, what else do you do when that runs out? (This is, of course, tied into the bigger question of *why* colonize Mars in the first place?)

Doug M or anybody else, could you cite some good critiques of Jared Diamond?

When I read Diamond, I was impressed but also suspicious – it normally doesn’t happen that somebody with really good and innovative ideas becomes famous and widely read and gets so much praise from the mainstream media. So I was looking for critical reviews from experts but found very little. Almost all reviews I found were positive if not glowing and had at most minor criticisms. If anybody has references that are really critical and point to major errors, those will be highly appreciated.

A lot of interesting discussions. I have a related (but actually very important to the future) question. “Given the gradual -or perhaps not so gradual depletion of a lot of material resources, what level of civilization is sustainable over the long haul?” And recycling of used materials is rarely 100%, so scarce materials are gradually dispersed into a form that makes them uneconomical to maintain. And going to ever decreasing quality of Ore has its limitations. Add in Landrau’s correct (but depressing) observation and it is an open question whether a high level of technology is sustainable over thousands of years. Perhaps the answer to the Fremi paradox (very roughly:If there are so many planets and the universe is so old, why hasn’t ET visited us?)is that perhaps high tech is only sustainable for a few hundred years, and decays long before ET can travel through space.

Zamfir,

I suppose that’s fine and all, it just becomes very vague when you are looking at those types of scenarios since they are so far divorced from the current state of technology. Space travel will be far too expensive for the foreseeable future to have any economic rationale, so it’s hard to say what we’re talking about. But I could imagine a couple possibilities that might make a libertarian giddy. One simple example would be a society where independent space-travelers run about mining minerals or performing some other useful economic activity which they use to trade with an earth or planet bound portion of the population for the few things they need to maintain their existence. In that case, the technological infrastructure is being maintained planet-side, but it is not limiting the activity of spacefarers. And if multiple planets are populated it becomes increasingly less likely that political organizations could constrain the activities of these individuals. This seems plausible in a future with very few resource constraints (there is plenty of energy out there after all).

I think Stross is correct that maintaining an advanced civilization would require a substantial population base. But the connections between the separate elements of this society required to maintain the technology may be more tenuous than what is required for political elements to use them for coercive purposes. So drawing any further conclusion is problematic.

Re Diamond: I am honestly suspicious of the criticisms of his work that I typically see, largely because they tend to reflect generic weaknesses of professional critiques of science popularizers. One very typical line of criticism is pedantry: e.g. in a good popular account one wants to highlight the essential elements of complex issues, and this always requires some degree of simplification. Those buried in the details frequently get upset. There is also professional jealousy (“why is Carl Sagan so famous when I think my science is better”) and what I’d classify as boundary maintenance. The latter is especially relevant for someone like Diamond. Diamond also seems to attract ideologically charged opposition from anthropologists; see the Savage Minds blogs for examples which I thought went away with the academic PC fights of the 1980s.

Doug M, lizardbreath, whoever: Can you point me to a good & accessible source that summarizes current thinking about how, when & by whom the various Pacific archipelagos came to be populated? Evidently a fascinating topic & one I know little or nothing about.

Well, I didn’t mean to brag, but I think that my example refutes some of Henry’s argument. I can identify the ore, smelt the copper, cupola the iron, wootz the steel, hammer out the boilers, grind the machine tools, machine the cylinders, and stoke the furnace using flint and coal. And all these skills which get you from paleolithic to a locomotive are – through trial and error – from people who have been dead for hundreds of years and have imprecisely transmitted their knowledge. The important parts which I gratefully store in my head and all too willingly parcel out when the need arrives. Which is all to say, yes, this is all good fun, doesn’t prove anything, but I’ll bet some of you will want to hang with me in the post apocalypse.

As to tool kits, you know, speaking of context and contingency, there is alos a holism involved in our toolkits. You might want to look at the colonial American tool kit. The tool kit brought over from Europe (hammers, chisels, adzes, axes, etc.) changed little from the Middle Ages, and why should it? Any modification or addition inconventiently upset the entire repertoire of tool usage. Easier to lose a tool from the kit (as there is redundancy) than to add a new one. It is only when circumstances change that you see tool changes. Look at the axe. An American axe has a heftier head, a borader bit, and a curved blade on it, compare to the sturdy English axe. Amateurs needed to cut down lots of trees in America, not bash heads in when called to arms. And so the axe changes.

Yes to most, and yes to the rest because I know people who can, and I’ll bet you do to, without knowing it.

Doug M @ 54 “The net lifetime risk of appendicitis would seem to be around 7.5%—half what the original commenter gave, but still rather high. Interesting.”

Sorry, I made the mistake of going on what a doctor told me after he removed my ruptured appendix and treated the incipient peritonitis, which was ‘roughly 1 in 7’. But even at 7.5%, given that it is more common in younger people and is always life-threatening without surgery, it would be quite an issue. It takes out young, useful, otherwise healthy people, in a way that is, as I can attest, agonising.

There’s little likelihood that it would have been learned about and guarded against in traditional societies, as even now, we don’t know what causes it, as there’s no pattern to it. Some people just got very sick and died.

Irrelephant @ 46: How many people are needed in a robot farm world?

NONE, PUNY HUMAN!

Bwahahahaha!

.

Doug M @ 40:

Spanish colonial Guam? The local craftsmen could work iron, but not mine it or smelt it: that’s King Tut tech. Local textile and clothing technology was such that imported cloth could be marked up 800% and still sell.

If a fleet of ships arrives every year, and can import tools and cloth and soap and iron at a profit, that’s not truly isolated.

And those are the basic, essential goods. You can live without wine or chocolate, but I’d rather not.

Oh, and they could bring in schoolteachers and skilled craftsmen as needed.

18th century technology? Where are the lens grinders for the telescopes? The antimony smelters? The type founders? The craftsmen in the gunpowder mill? The shipwrights?

As a related data point, the local population arrived with the ability to do deepwater ocean voyages using neolithic technology. And once truly isolated, they lost it.

I have long held that technological sophistication is driven primarily by population size. I realize that this is an eccentric belief, but the controlling factor, I believe, is the ability of workers to specialize. You really can’t have an iron industry until you have gotten a sufficient number of workers who can devote all their energies to mining the ore, transporting it to the smelter, gathering the wood for fuel, making the charcoal, and so on. Every technology we use is based on an ever-increasing number of support technologies. Your mobile phone is a wonder: it contains plastics that were machined in one factory, manufactured elsewhere from petroleum imported from elsewhere and so on. The electronics involves programmers, hardware designers, wafer fab plants, e-beam mask machines, silicon purifiers, and so on and on. I wouldn’t be surprised if the total number of people whose efforts contributed to getting that mobile phone into your hands would run into the tens of thousands. But then we must also consider all the people working on the stuff that makes it useful: the programmers, engineers, electricians, cable layers, antenna designers, HR people… again, the list gets longer and longer.

What we’re seeing is a system in which each person does a smaller and smaller portion of a task that is applied to a larger and larger number of instances. It’s just economies of scale at the macroeconomic level.

My conclusion: the number of people you need to sustain industrialized society at any designated level is probably close to the number of people participating in industrialized society at the point in history matching the level you designate.

“Spanish colonial Guam? The local craftsmen could work iron, but not mine it or smelt it: that’s King Tut tech.”

…quick: what metal ores are available on Guam?

“Local textile and clothing technology was such that imported cloth could be marked up 800% and still sell.”

I’d like to see a cite for that. Imported clothing was expensive. Wool and cotton cloth they could make themselves, and — towards the end of the colonial period — small amounts of linen.

“If a fleet of ships arrives every year, and can import tools and cloth and soap and iron at a profit, that’s not truly isolated.”

…I already said that, yes.

I note in passing that the galleons were frequently disrupted by war; it was not unusual for them to skip a year, and on at least one occasion they skipped three years in a row.

“Oh, and they could bring in schoolteachers and skilled craftsmen as needed.”

The total number of “schoolteachers and skilled craftsmen” imported to Guam after the first two generations of colonization could probably be counted the fingers of one hand. For roughly a century there were almost no permanent immigrants whatsoever except for (1) the very occasional sailor jumping ship from a galleon, and (2) priests sent out from Spain. I suppose you could count the priests as “schoolteachers”, since they did serve that function sometimes, but it was mostly teaching basic literacy and religion to a small group — the children of what passed for Guam’s upper class.

(Incidentally, the first couple of waves of colonizing immigrants? Mostly from the Philippines, not Spain.)

“As a related data point, the local population arrived with the ability to do deepwater ocean voyages using neolithic technology. And once truly isolated, they lost it.”

…the Chamorros arrived on Guam around 2,000 BC, and kept the ability to make bluewater ocean voyages for the next 3,000 years or so. They seem to have kept it until at least 1200 AD, and may still have had the knowledge (without making regular use of it) when Magellan arrived. (This was much more common in the Pacific than people realize; see the example of the Carolinians, given at 38 above.) The high latte stone culture (c. 900 – 1300 AD) certainly had regular contact with the Carolines and Yap, and probably with the Philippines as well; as has been noted many times, when Magellan arrived, he met natives who knew perfectly well what iron was, even if they didn’t have any.

“18th century technology? Where are the lens grinders for the telescopes? The antimony smelters? The type founders? The craftsmen in the gunpowder mill? The shipwrights?”

…I specifically said Guam was comparable to a similarly sized European town around 1700. You seem to want to compare them to _ancien regime_ Paris.

Doug M.

With the appropriate food stores and survival equipment, I’m sure a group of 100 could survive on the moon for a few years. One the other hand, it is unlikely that the same number of people would be around 50 years later without an incredible amount of luck. In fact, if the population were unlucky a random storm, earthquake, or roving band of Cylons could wipe them out immediately.

It would indeed be unlucky to be wiped out by a storm or an earthquake on an airless, seismically inactive world… the Cylons, however, are a constant threat.

roac@85, not offhand! Sorry. I used to read a lot of papers, back when I had academic access, but that hasn’t been for a while now.

Emma @91, no worries. Although I suspect that ~7.5% figure for late 20th century Americans might not be the same as the figure for other groups.

Doug M.

Geezer – the contention was not just to survive, but to survive at current living standards.

There seems to be some bait-and-switch going on here. The current living standards of a group that can colonise another planet implicitly includes the ability to travel to another planet. Even given out-of-context (magic, aliens) transportation, current capabilities include radio and (I think) internet communications to anywhere in the inner solar system.

The word ‘colony’ not only implies such contact, it carries the strong indication that it is economically significant, maybe dominant.

Saying ‘colonisation is impossible, because if you do it, then what you get is a colony’ is a rather weak argument, no matter how many annoying people it annoys.

The lower bound might still – for all practical purposes – be in the 100s of millions/billions range.

Absent some kind of massive social engineering, you still need all sorts of things to serve as motivators for different types of people.

Soru – Stross specifies that he’s talking about an autonomous colony. Which is a common enough idea in SF – eg the inter-generational space ship needed to colonise the stars if FTL travel is impossible, or the space colonies rebel against Earth story.
Incidentally, Internet communications are a protocol, called the Internet Protocol and can be implemented over radio or any other communications device. IP has been implemented by carrier pigeon. If you have radio, you can have the Internet. However the bandwidth of the communications device might well make the Internet more frustrating to use than it is in 2010.

Omega Centauri – why do you neglect economics-in-scale from production? If a process has fixed costs, then everything else being equal the more you produce of it the cheaper each unit is. And production is as vital as innovation for living standards.

One thing I forgot when I really shouldn’t have, given my present obsession with the topic.

Insurance.

You need lots and lots of insurance to do even basic agriculture (graineries, sometime reservoirs in the ancient days). Insurance is a phenomenon that is ultimately dependent on many unrelated people doing unrelated things, doing well. So for things like refineries of all stripes, decent power plants, and many other rather dangerous (to itself or to the workers or to the populace at large or all three) but capital intensive physical implements, there is a de facto bottom population floor to provide the needed insurance, formed however the local society and governance chooses. Not only is a huge and diverse population base needed for customers to drive plant utilization, but also to contribute resources anticipating or remediating failure of said plant without a whole lot of political grief.

I obsess about insurance, because I am tending to believe that lots of micro insurance disasters leading to core financial meltdown is the primary threat that global climate change poses. Lots of localized flooding events like the ones in NE, Atlanta, and Nashville wear down the interrelated insurance structure, formal and informal.

“You need lots and lots of insurance to do even basic agriculture (graineries, sometime reservoirs in the ancient days). ”

Um, no, actually. You don’t.

You really /want/ to have insurance. But need it? No.

I do development work, mostly in Africa these days. Trust me when I say that the average Ugandan farmer has neither reservoirs, nor irrigation, nor access to warehouses, nor crop insurance (or any other sort of insurance), nor hybrid seed, nor credit.

And yet Uganda manages to feed its people, most of the time, and even produce a modest surplus for export.

Doug M.

The average Ugandan farmer, over the course of his life, must have insurance, and when I’m talking about insurance, I’m talking about all forms of it, like family members who are well off and can help if said farmer gets in trouble. Of course, when disaster strikes, it’s actually pretty hard to kill people via hard times. That does not mean it is not extraordinarily unpleasant.

On the more general frame, Uganda manages to feed its people because Uganda is part of the world trade system, one that *does* insure. If the world trade system fails because it loses the ability to insure, many people in Uganda would very much feel the strain.

Narrow thinking will get you in trouble…but hey, read stuff Ward-Perkins writes about the archeological reconstruction of the period immediately after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and hey, incidentially, grab a book or two about modern Ugandan history, and maybe one might grab a clue that just because that Ugandan farmer doesn’t use insurance products we middle class American might percieve doesn’t mean that said farmer does not benefit from insurance.

Piglet – how many people are doing menial unskilled work nowadays? And how many of those jobs’ productivity aren’t dependent on a lot of specialised capital? I worked as a nurses’ aid one summer during uni – it’s a lot faster to bathe someone when you have hot water on tap, and an automated machine to lift them into the bath, oh and every bath has an automated attachment so you don’t need to wait around for the only one in the facility to be free, and a wheely bin to take the dirty laundry down to the laundry room rather than lugging it by brute strength, and the wheely bin is made of plastic so it can be cleaned easily, and etc.

Omega Centauri – why would the discount rate in a steady state economy be much lower than in an expanding economy? My memory of Econ 101 is that this is one of those topics we know theory can’t answer one way or another. If interest rates fall, then the return from lending money is lower, so according to the substitution effect people will want to lend less money (because they get less back), according to the income effect, people will want to lend more money (because they get less back), and there’s no theroetical reason to assume that one effect will dominate over the other. To put it in more concrete terms – say you’re considering investing in a production facility. This is a risky investment. The facility could get wiped out by an accident (eg a fire, or meteor strike, it could break down, it could be wrecked by a dishonest manager, or people could decide that they don’t want whatever you’re selling, or another company could turn out to be a bit better at marketing and grab all your potential customers. You can buy insurance against some of these events, but this reduces your rate of return even further. You can take steps to reduce the odds of some of these other events happening, but like buying insurance that reduces your pay-back. If you’re only going to get a low pay-back on it, why not just stash your money under your mattress, or whatever the low-risk option is in this steady-state world?

And your argument only applies to long-term capital investments. Fixed costs include everything that isn’t totally changeable in the short-term (what is short and long term varies depending on what level of analysis we want to look at). If Irrelephant is churning out the same thing every day with his/her tools, he/she can set up the workplace so as to optimise the speed of switching between tasks for that job. If it’s a different thing to make every day then more time is needed to switch between tasks, which means less time actually producing the goods.

Doug M @99:

Destiny’s landfall: a history of Guam, By Robert F. Rogers, quotes William Haswell, who visited Guam in 1802. He says that the inland inhabitants usually went naked. They owned clothes, and put them on when a European appeared, but didn’t wear them most of the time because they were so dear, “as the governor gains 8 hundred per Cent on all he sells them”. That hardly sounds like there’s a lot of local homespun being produced.

Like a small European town of around 1700, Guam presumably had a lot of technology that couldn’t be produced locally. For example, the governor probably had printed books that would be uneconomic to print for only the tiny local market. He or his subordinates probably had a telescope that could not be replace locally, and so on.

Even a small number of specialists from outside would have made a big difference: a doctor from someplace big enough to support a medical school, an engineer, etc.

Yes, no local metals. That means that the local economy lacked a whole subset of specialists that knew how to extract and refine them.

Tracey; my argument for alower disount rate in steady state, versus technologically advancing society is based upon two things.
First, a component of the discount rate is prevailing interest rates. These are competitively set against alternative investments. Since there is only a limited amount of capital of be rebuilt there will be a lot of capital chasing this investment, and the real rate of interest should decline.

The second component, is the risk factor, say accidents plus market risk. In a steady state economy market risk is near zero (tommorrow will be like today, no new disruptive technology is likely to obsolete my widgets). I claim accidental risk is likely to be lowered too, as the industry has had a long history with the technology and has them both well categorized and minimized. In the rapidly advancing technology case, we haven’t had the time to optimize and evaluate the risks (we just haven’t had enough data yet).

Alternatively one should expect that investment returns look something like the rate of economic growth, plus a bit more. So when growth stops overall investment returns should go down (which implies low interest rates).

Omega Centauri, I’d like to offer another argument in favor of your thesis, if I may; I’m curious to learn if you think it makes sense. If an economy is stable, neither growing nor shrinking, then we should have a perfect match between production and consumption. Moreover, stability implies that equilibrium between prices and costs of manufacturing has been achieved. Which in turn means that, if you expend capital to reduce the cost of manufacturing an item, you should be able to obtain only a small increment in efficiency, which in turn implies a small reduction in manufacturing cost, a small reduction in price, a small increment in sales, and therefore a very small profit. If capital can’t earn much profit, then the ROI is small, and interest rates must be correspondingly small.

Does that work for you?

ajay, it was a descriptive statement.

Doug M., at this point I don’t actually care about your quals. You can miss the point all you want, but insurance, a means of redirecting resources and activity when neededn (or the prospect of such), is pretty much mandatory. Across all kinds of services, from health to water access. Without such, most if not all activities withers. Again, insurance activities can be pretty diverse, from state schemes to private/communitarian themes.

I notice that people here seem to be concentrating on “know how” as the controlling factor in abruptly changing society sizes. I don’t think that’s the crucial factor; I think that population size is the key, because that’s what enables specialization. Technological civilization relies on having more and more people to do tinier and tinier parts of the task, permitting economies of scale that enable growth. It’s true that, if you erased the knowledge of a billion people, they wouldn’t be able to re-create their civilization. But in that case, they wouldn’t be able to support such a large population and their numbers would decrease until they reached a supportable level — and then they’d start growing from there by population growth.

Here’s another way to put it: suppose I had a time machine that could send books back in time. So I send a book on modern integrated circuit manufacturing back to, say, 1850. Do you think that the residents of that year would be able to make any use of their new book? Of course not! Indeed, we can extend this thought-experiment further: what if we sent it to 1900? 1950? 1970? I claim that, even if we sent it back just ten years, they wouldn’t be able to derive much benefit from it because none of the attendant technologies exist. This is what the knowledgable recipient of our book would say:

“You want water purified to THAT level?!?! That’s impossible! And where am I going to get electromagnetic coils tiny enough to control a beam that small? Besides, the facility I’d have to build would cost at least a billion bucks, and the market for these chips just isn’t large enough to justify that kind of capital expenditure!”

Chris Crawford your argument works for me. But I’m not an economist. I’ve done a few thought experiments about the steady state economy, but that doesn’t make me a bona fide economist. Of course if we reached a true steady state -and it might take generations to reach the asymptotic form where change is minimized. But, in any case at quasi-steady state investment would be confined to rebuilding things that have worn out. The volume of this activity as a percentage of GDP would be a lot smaller than during the buildup phase. There would also be more incentive to increase the usable lifetime of infrastructure than there is today, so we could stomach longer payback periods on this “investment”.

Not so convinced about your book and time machine argument. Assuming the recipients gave credibility to the books contents, it would provide strong motivation for the pursuit of certain types of tech. Also knowing which paths led to valuable results and which ones were dead ends would avoid a lot of misdirected investment. Of course they couldn’t read the book and start constructing a fab for sub 30nanometer designs. They would still have to start out with the basics. And build up a vast support industry. Intel would be nowhere with outfits like Applied Materials etc. to create the machines they use, and Applied Materials would be nowhere without a bootload of other suppliers, and on and on. The reality is that to recreate from scratch current microelectronics probably requires decades and pehaps a trillion dollars. But knowing that there was a fabulous destination, and having some clues about how to get there should greatly accelerate the journey.

@Chris Crawford 127

But the main text on VLSI design is Mead and Conway. And that was written thirty odd years ago. The technology has certainly changed, but not in ways that are unimaginable or unpredictable. In fact the whole of the valley works to the metronome of Moore’s Law.

What Stross claims is that space travel is impossible because you need the number of people to preserve knowledge. But really, once you read about something called a transistor formed from doped silicon, you don’t need to muck about with valves. You are going to skip that generation. Equally you are going to read about the dead ends that Babbage met trying to push ahead too far with mechanical, but unlike Babbage you will know that the thing you are trying to build exists and is possible.

If someone had sent Babbage a copy of Mead and Conway he would certainly have understood the principles being described. He would also realize that the foundation technology he should be building on was electrical, not mechanical. He would not be able to construct the systems from transistors, but he could build fairly large systems with electromagnetic relays. http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/

The key concept that Babbage lacked was the idea of building a computer from one simple component that was mass produced. His machine had hundreds of different components.

When I wrote my first Web browser, I worked from only the specifications and a 30 minute presentation by Tim Berners-Lee. If I had not had the specifications, I would have written my own protocol layer. The insight in that design is not the protocol, it is that you don’t need a database to do hypertext, all you need is a common format for universal resource locators.

Start a cult…

Dan S @132: What you’d need to make it through to the end of the month would be fire (for warmth and defence against predcators) and sharp objects, preferably points and edges (for collecting and dividing food and creating shelter). If you have a source of exposed igneous rock, you could probably achieve something like an Oldowan tool kit by trial and error reasonably quickly, because you’d know what you were looking for. Fire might be harder – any ex-scouts in your group? Posit that somebody has a lighter, and the group has the ability to prevent the fire going out.

If you achieved both those before everybody starved, your group might last ten to fifteen years before succumbing to starvation in a different season, predation (the bears are not frightened of you in this world), further accidents with poisonous plants and perinatal fatalities.

Well, the rifle might come in handy getting ‘volunteers’ for the toxicology testing on the native plant life.

Tracy W: “the amount of capital is endogenous, not exogenous.”

In a steady state the capital stock is optimal. Gross investment merely covers depreciation, there is no net investment. It’s very hard to see how the IRR in such a situation can be equal to that in a growing economy, where the existing capital stock is sub-optimal. Your “Econ 101” argument, as I understand it, merely relates to the trade-off facing the individual saver, for whom the income and substitution effects of a interest rate change work in opposite directions. That’s fine as far as it goes, the textbook is properly agnostic, but it doesn’t alter the fact that when you’ve built all the property you will ever need the rents are going to be lower. You can dodge that conclusion by some far-fetched assumption (that preferences are different in the steady state for example). But it’s hard to get that result with a reasonable argument.

@Doug M 134

In the times, an outfit of clothes was a major investment. Most people would have one. So it is actually quite possible that all the cloth came in by ship.

Is there any particular reason the space colonists would need clothes on their voyage?

The basic premise is faulty for several reasons. First it is assumed that ‘maintaining 2010 living standards’ is an essential criteria for space colonization. Clearly it is not. Second it is assumed that more advanced technology would not include better learning and education methods.

The colonists are not going to be learning from books because they are already functionally obsolete. And the space ship is certainly not going to tolerate the extra mass of dead tree technology.

@135: Even though the bears are not afraid of you, they probably have no instincts particularly aimed at eating you either (although eating your stored food is another matter). The most dangerous predator you have to worry about is the 10^n-2 other humans who came with you, IMO; therefore politics is your most immediate concern.

Ideally you want to have your political situation dealt with to mutual satisfaction *before* you start deploying sharp object technology throughout the population, because otherwise, bears and even starvation are going to become the least of your worries. The winners of a civil war would be guaranteed at least one food source.

I know how to look up percentage of workforce without a formal qualification, but I don’t know of any data on the proportion of jobs that are menial and unskilled.

Zero. Anyone who describes a job as “unskilled” has never tried to do it. Otherwise they’d become aware of their own lack of skill at it compared to people with even a few weeks’ experience, and/or how they became better at it when *they* had a few weeks’ experience — which is proof that it is, in fact, a skill.

If you want to say “well, I mean low skilled”, then you have to draw a line on a continuum before you can start measuring how many jobs are on which side of it.

Anybody can deliver a pizza — you just need to be able to drive, read the receipt, communicate with the customer in a mutually intelligible language, read the map or directions that leads to the customer’s house, call them on a cell phone if you need clarification, possibly make change…

Zero. Anyone who describes a job as “unskilled” has never tried to do it

Never tried teaching English in Japan, have you?

Doug M @134:

Ok, so Guam had early Gutenberg level single sheet printing capability for a while, but eventually lost it because in the long run their economy was too small to sustain a compositor, let alone a type founder. That’s evidence that sustaining true 18th c. technology took a good deal more than 5,000 people.

Also, the schmaht people of the 1830s were very, very sophisticated. Industrial and cottage production techniques were not especially simple then, and can arguably said to be more complex in the baroque sense than the later techologies. I seriously doubt a person can know enough to make decent pottery, let alone decent ships of the styles present then. There was a tremendous amount of knowlege present then that are lost now.

Shah8, your point regarding technology transfer from Europe to Asia is excellent; I agree that social context controls technology acceptance. However, I don’t think that this point is of compelling importance to my claim that a large workforce is necessary to obtain a specified level of technological sophistication. Societies adapt to technologies as they become available. American society 100 years ago was not well-adapted to the automobile. But the automobile changed society in a manner that made it increasingly valuable. Suburbia was one social response to the automobile. An even better example is the personal computer. The personal computers of the early 1980s were quite capable of providing a lot of value, but society wasn’t quite ready. Not that many people could type, people weren’t used to word processors, the concept of a spreadsheet was still alien to a lot of people, and so forth. Americans are an amazingly adept people at embracing new technologies, and American business rapidly transformed itself to utilize the benefits of the computer. Thus, the availability of the personal computer in the early 1980s was not immediately seized upon by society — it required some adjustment of the social context.

The social context, then, is very important to the initial adaptation of the technology, but I don’t think that this constrains the equilibrium technological level achieved by a society. Perhaps you’re seeing a connection that I’ve missed?

Gross investment merely covers depreciation, there is no net investment.

The question is what interest rate would induce this needed gross investment.

It’s very hard to see how the IRR in such a situation can be equal to that in a growing economy, where the existing capital stock is sub-optimal…

Well, one way would be if the subsitution effect dominated over the income effect. So whenever the rate of return fell on investments, the marginal investors would withdraw their money and spend it on consumption now, (or some other consumption good), thus reducing the available capital stock, and thus driving up the IRR back to the original level. And of course, another option is that the IRR would be a bit lower than in a growing economy, but still high enough that the payback period on capital investment doesn’t fall enough to offset the loss from production gains of scale.

…the fact that when you’ve built all the property you will ever need the rents are going to be lower. You can dodge that conclusion …

Total rents will be lower, I agree. I’m not dodging that conclusion, and if I ever wrote something that implied I was dodging it, it was entirely by accident and only a reflection of my poor writing skills. What I don’t know is whether interest rates and thus the needed IRR would be higher or lower or the same.

Omega Centauri’s argument was that a lot of capital would be chasing this needed investment, driving down rates. But a possiblity is that as rates fall, people decide to consume now rather than save, so they’d pull out capital, keeping the needed IRR up. Or perhaps they’d save even more, trying to keep up their income in the long-term period, driving down interest rates even further (and if I remember my Keynesian theory right, and that theory is right, driving the economy into a recession and thus no longer steady-state). Higher IRR might be needed to induce lower rates of capital, as people more easily reach their desired future incomes from rents and thus need to save a lower share of their incomes. I don’t know one way or another.

Chris,
If I can recollek my history (I don’t), 1830 the canal craze is about over, the railroad craze is about to begin, they are figuring out what to do with anthracite, they are just starting to gear up the iron industry, wood working is at its craft-quality best, the inland waterways are snag-free and filled with steamboats, and the population is procreating at probably biological maximum, the South, due to chattel slavery a moribund technological backwater. For lower bound to maintain which area, the Northeast?, you have to subtract out the seed effort for the Western diaspora, or can you? Maybe the static South is a better model.

Irrelephant and Piglet, you’re both right that the 22 million figure is too high as a lower limit for the minimum population necessary to sustain a culture at the level of technology of the USA in 1830. So what say we cut it in half, and then round down, to get 10 million souls? That, I think accounts for the points you make. I think that my point remains sturdy: it takes millions of people to maintain a given level of technological development.

Let me approach this from another angle: you’re some sort of very powerful entity trying to establish the minimum sized colony capable of sustaining itself at 1830-level technology. Your goal is to keep it at one million total population. Now, I believe that the percentage of farm workers in the USA in 1830 was well over 90%, so let’s use that number. In other words, for every non-agricultural worker, you need 9 agricultural workers to grow enough food to feed all ten people. Thus, you need 900,000 of your million people just growing food for the other 100,000. To put it another way, you’ll have 100,000 people to work industry.

So you’ve got food covered. But now you need clothing. You’ll need to allot some of your surplus workers to cotton production. How much cotton do you need to grow to clothe a million people? I have little idea, but let’s make a wild guess: say, 2,000 people to grow the cotton. Then you’ll need some transport workers to move the cotton to the mill, and some mill workers; once you’ve put the cotton through the gin you’ll need a spinning mill to make thread and a cloth mill to make cloth. Finally, you’ll need seamstresses to sew the cloth into clothing. If I weren’t so lazy, I could look up productivity figures for that period, but I’ll take the easy way and just make a wild guess: one seamstress can make enough clothing to keep 200 people clothed perennially. So you’ll need 5,000 seamstresses. Guess all those other workers at a nice round 1,000, and you’ve got a grand total of 8,000 people dedicated to making clothing for the others.

Now let’s turn to housing. You’ll need woodsmen to chop the wood, teamsters to drag it to the sawmill, saw wrights to cut it into lumber, more teamsters to transport it to the housing site, carpenters to assemble the whole thing. How many carpenters do you need to provide housing for a million people? Let’s assume a depreciation rate of 1% in housing — each house must be replaced every hundred years. If each house holds a family of ten, you need 100,000 houses, of which a thousand need replacement each year. How many carpenters will you need to build a thousand houses per year? Let’s say one carpenter = one house per year (including the woodsmen, saw wrights and teamsters into the process. So we’ve expended another thousand of our excess laborers.

OK, so we’ve provided for food, clothing, and housing for the population, and we still have 91,000 workers left. Of course, we still have a ton of other tasks to deal with: miners to dig the iron ore, more teamsters to haul it, ranchers to raise the horses, farmers to grow the hay for the horses, carpenters to build the mine support structures, supervisors to keep everybody working properly, accountants to figure out everybody’s pay, workers to run the smelter, more workers to run the iron works, more teamsters to transport the iron goods out to the farms, store clerks to distribute all the consumer goods, more teamsters to distribute all those consumer goods, more horses for the teamsters, more farmers growing hay… are you starting to get an idea of just how many people are required to get this civilization functional? I still haven’t talked about shoemakers, cattle ranchers, politicians, gunsmiths, powder manufacturers, paint makers, miners to dig up all the stuff for these guys, cement makers… it’s just huge. The odds that you can get all those services taken care of with the surplus labor you’ve got are very low.

It takes a LOT of workers to make a society function.

I helped write business applications. Was any of that of any consequence for civilization?

Yes, of course it was. I don’t know what specific industry your customers were in, but it almost doesn’t matter — they bought your applications because they believed it would make their businesses more productive/efficient at whatever business they did do (compared to whatever methods they were using before), and they were probably right. (I suppose you theoretically could have had a string of customers that were changing things for foolish reasons, or went out of business before they could implement your work and derive any benefit from it, or the like, but it’s very unlikely, and the more customers you have the more likely that you improved the operation of at least *some* of their businesses.)

The fact that just such underappreciated, but in the aggregate significant, minor improvements undergird practically everything our modern civilization does is precisely Stross’s point, isn’t it? The inventory tracking system at Old Navy *is* relevant to cancer research, it’s just in such an indirect and obscure way that we normally can’t or don’t trace it. If we tried to get along without a modern garment industry (at least, short of all becoming nudists, which only works in suitable climates anyway) we’d notice the effects soon enough, and eventually have to start, and bear the costs of, a less-efficient garment industry. And since it was less efficient, it would take more resources away from something else, possibly cancer research.

chris, I think you are now making the argument that whenever there is a market demand for a product, that product is a necessary ingredient of our civilization. When you accept that, this whole discussion becomes redundant: everybody is needed.

I happen to disagree with the market argument – I do not see the market as a normative authority and I do believe that civilization could do without a large chunk of our current economy (yes, I’m probably a snob). In addition, a large part of our economy is simply scale dependent. Take teachers as an example. Ceteris paribus, a larger population needs more teachers than a smaller population. We probably agree that the teaching profession is relevant to sustain civilization. But we don’t think of a larger population as having a higher level of civilization just because there are more teachers. It is a matter of scale. To estimate “the minimum population needed to sustain an advanced industrialized civilization”, we want to identify only that part of the population that really sustains those functions that are required for “civilization”. Of course that raises the question what we mean by civilization. The whole debate so far has relied on the assumption that we differentiate between more and less advanced levels of civilization – not everybody agrees with that but again without that assumption, the discussion becomes pointless.

Thanks, Irrelephant, for correcting my population number. I downloaded the Census report from 1840 trying to get an idea of distributions of labor, but could only get state-by-state numbers, not aggregate figures, so we need to take my 90+% number with some skepticism as well.

Both you and piglet advance the argument that a civilization has a lot “fat” in it, goods and services that are frivolous or unnecessary. I would agree with you, but the problem is that when we sit down to write our lists of things to cut out, we will probably disagree with each other. I might reject nice clothes while you declare them necessary. So, who decides what’s necessary and what isn’t? Your basic argument is in favor of a command economy, and those things never work very well. I suppose that it might be workable if the shape of the economy is declared upfront and every colonist signs on to the sacrifices that are required — but then, can you really ask people to sacrifice their little pleasures indefinitely? Can you imagine forswearing for the rest of your life some stupid little pleasure that you must admit is not necessary to your survival? Chocolate ice cream? Videogames? Porn websites? SUVs? Soap operas? Guns? Let’s get real here! ;-)

Piglet, I like your point about a metric for the complexity of a civilization, and I think that I can offer one that, while not actually measurable, is theoretically conceivable. Do you know what the Gini Index is in economics? It’s a measure of the uneveness of the distribution of wealth in society. A Gini Index of 1.00 means that one person has all the wealth and nobody else has any wealth. A Gini Index of 0.00 obtains for a perfectly equal society in which each person has precisely the same amount of wealth as every other person. The Nordic countries have Gini Indexes of about 0.2, most of the OECD countries come in between 0.30 and 0.40, the USA comes in at 0.41 (if memory serves), and some of the plutocracies and kleptocracies come in around 0.5 to 0.6.

What if we applied the concept of the Gini Index separately to a) production and b) consumption? That is, we pick a person at random and trace the path of every economic contribution that person makes to society until it reaches a consumer. Then we add up all those consumers so that we can say something like: Person X’s output reaches 3,456 people. (This count should probably be weighted by value). Then we figure out the average value of every person’s figure, and divide by the total population. In some sort of “perfectly complex” economy, that average would be 1.00. In an impossibly inefficient economy, that number would add up to 0.00. The average gives us an indicator of economic integration, which in turn implies maximum specialization.

We can also do the same thing in reverse for consumption: for a given person Y, how many laborers contributed to the economic benefits that Y enjoys? This would give us another index. I’d expect that the two indexes would be concomitant, but not necessarily equal.

Chris Crawford: My argument doesn’t depend only on the notion of “fat” in the economy, “goods and services that are frivolous or unnecessary”. I’ll try to explain this by going the reverse path. Suppose there is a society of population N that maintains a civilization level X. Now that population might increase, perhaps to N1= 10*N, but still culturally stay at level X. In that case, civilization X could clearly be maintained at population N even though the population happens to be N1. This thought experiment doesn’t imply that the additional N1-N people are all superfluous and don’t do anything useful. Those N1 people are probably needed to provide for the needs of N1 people. Still, you could imagine a smaller population providing for its needs just as well.

To object to this argument, you would have to claim that an increase in population necessarily implies an increase in the civilizational level X. That would be quite a leap, though. It seems reasonable to assume that there is a weak correlation between N and X (I would guess some sort of power law) but it is clearly conceivable that a population can grow without reaching a “higher level” of civilization [assuming that we know what that means], or that it can become more culturally sophisticated without growing in population at all.

Piglet, your idea raises a fascinating question: can a society abstain from technological progress as it grows larger? I can’t think of any case of such a society in history, although I have to admit that there are a lot of societies for we lack sufficient knowledge. The Mixtec/Aztec culture didn’t seem to show much technological progress, but then its population appeared to be limited by availability of protein. Egyptian civilization might provide our best counterexample. It was certainly a static society: we have lots of artifacts from all periods that are technologically indistinguishable. The problem is, we don’t have good enough estimates of population to determine if the population really grew during the life of that civilization. Agriculture began there by 8,000 BCE at the latest, and the classic Egyptian civilization was in place by 3,000 BCE. That’s 5,000 years for the population to fill the Nile Valley. It seems unlikely to me that the population would have had much opportunity for non-technologically-driven growth after having 5,000 years to build its numbers.

The single biggest technological development of that era — and a big one it was — was the development of iron-working; perhaps this can give us a handle on the problem. Early experiments with iron go back as far as the Sixth Millennium, but we don’t see it on an industrial scale until the late Third Millennium in Anatolia. It was picked up fairly quickly (by the standards of the day) by Mesopotamians and Egyptians alike, but iron-working took more than a thousand years to penetrate Europe. I suggest that this is attributable to low population densities in Europe; there wasn’t enough surplus labor to permit iron workers.

So I’m a little queasy about considerations based on the presumption of a population-dynamic but technology-static society. That seems like an impossible situation. Can you think of any good counterexamples?

No will, because with that magic technology you have a perpetual motion machine, so you just skip all the epochs between 1830 and 25000, and turn your colony into the Culture.

Piglet, If you apply some of Malthus’s arguments, with respect to limited resources, after a certain point well being declines as population increases. So we have to play off the benefits of the networking effect against declining per capita natural resources as population increases. Even worse some of these resources aren’t supplied at a constant rate but are better modeled as a fixed size resource which once used up is gone forever. I.E. some natural resources can be modeled as flows, and some as stores. If we just have flow related resources, there will be an optimum population that maximizes per capita well being. At that point the margin harm caused by increasing resource scarcity with population just balances out the marginal increase in the networking effect. For stores, you can have greater well being as population increases, but the final depletion of the resource comes quicker.

Will, the best way to answer your question would be to get import figures as a percentage of GDP for the USA in 1830. I’m sure that they’re out there somewhere, but I’m too lazy to dig them up. Nevertheless, my own hunch is that imports did not play an important role in GDP for the USA in 1830. Remember, all imports had to come in by ship, which was pretty expensive and so worked only for products with high value to weight, like spices and manufactures. The high protectionist tariffs of the time blocked out many of the manufactures. That leaves spices and tea and some other special foodstuffs. Certainly nothing to sneer at but, I suspect, not large enough to throw off my already wild guesses.

sg, thanks for reminding me of Japan. Yes, that’s a very interesting example, because they cut themselves off from all economic intercourse with the outside world. We have no evidence suggesting that their population grew during that period, so we can’t directly test my hypothesis with Japan. Nevertheless, it’s interesting because it provides us with the good example of a truly isolated economy. What we need to reject the hypothesis is an economy with a growing population AND a dearth of technological progress.

Here’s another angle to approach the problem: population declines. I can think of two good examples of civilizations that suffered population declines: the Bronze Dark Age in the Near East of about 1200 BCE to 900 BCE, and the European Dark Ages of 400 CE to 1000 CE. In both of these cases, there were marked population declines, and there was also a decline in technological sophistication. This does provide some bass-ackwards support for the hypothesis.

As I think I’ve observed before, a society that could travel across interstellar distances wouldn’t need to settle on planets. At most, an occasional flyby of a solar system to replenish resources.

sg (and others making the same kind of points) “what about the Maori? Did they improve technologically in the 6 centuries since their arrival in NZ? I think their population did grow.”

You do realize that civilisation is not limited to technology, right?

When Irrelephant claims to get back to 1830 pretty quickly all by himself starting with no tools (a laughable claim I guess, even if one were to know a lot of skills. By the time you reach something approaching it enough for your teachings to make sense to the others so they can make the last step, you’re probably long dead), I say that’s an unfair request, 1830 is too late. So let’s prove you can get us back to 1600.

Make a violin.

(I’m not even asking for Guarneri del Gesu standards, but something making noise won’t do. It needs to be good enough to be played by a musician from the national orchestra of a major western country).

Which is not the same as being self-sufficient in all things.

“There’s a theoretical sense in which it could, but in practice it won’t.”

That’s a lot of assertions here (and in several other comments) without evidence. Do I have counter-evidence? For example, GDP per capita statistics across developed countries differ but the differences do not correspond in any meaningful difference in technological or otherwise defined cultural sophistication, if you compare, say, the US and Denmark. Your examples are red herrings. Nobody has suggested that brewing or music are not a significant civilizational achievements. But then, those have been around for millennia without a need for large populations.

Piglet, your idea raises a fascinating question: can a society abstain from technological progress as it grows larger?

Honestly, this question is neither very fascinating nor difficult to answer. There is no automatism towards “progress” however defined. Whether and how a society progresses depends on complex factors and there is no plausible reason to assume that population size must be linearly related to technological progress. Statistically there is probably a correlation between population size and technological complexity, but then there is also a very strong correlation between my shoe size and global computer power, as well as with world population. Global population has been almost monotonically increasing for thousands of years. Technology has also been almost monotonically increasing. Correlation is not causation.

Omega Centauri, you seem to be addressing a totally different question. I mentioned earlier (162) that some doubt whether our industrial society can be maintained at all at its current level of complexity given environmental constraints and the law of entropy. Maybe the answer is no but that would be hardly due to population size being too small.

Hmm, the Maori… good example, because their population definitely grew (no way that many Maori came over in those small boats). The tricky part here is the cause of population growth: they found a lot of fauna that were easy pickings. This was the pattern all over the South Pacific: a small group of people discover a new island and colonize it. The population grows very rapidly as they exploit the abundant resources. Then they get into population overshoot, exhaust the resources, fight a lot among each other, and drive the population back down to a level commensurate with the few renewable resources. (That, in microcosm, is what humanity is doing to the entire planet). The problem here is the rapid pace of population growth. I have to modify the basic hypothesis to take that into account. The modified hypothesis would state that technological progress lags population growth by several generations. Thus, an expanding population will experience technological progress several generations behind its growth curve. If the growth is very rapid, the technological progress will lag far behind the population. If the growth is not sustained, the technological progress will never arise.

This of course gets us into a new problem: what happens when technological progress completely outpaces population growth, as is happening with humanity in the 20th and 21st centuries?

Actually, I’d say North Korea supports the Stross argument: in spite of starving non-military consumption to throw resources at the problem, they can’t seem to make 1950s era missile technology work. Their society is too small.

Chris Crawford:

“Piglet, you reject entirely the hypothesis that population growth drives technological progress.”

Piglet:

“It seems reasonable to assume that there is a weak correlation between N [population size] and X [“technological progress”] (I would guess some sort of power law) but it is clearly conceivable that a population can grow without reaching a “higher level” of civilization [assuming that we know what that means], or that it can become more culturally sophisticated without growing in population at all.”

I leave it to you to figure out whether I “entirely” reject your (hitherto unspoken) hypothesis. I do reject any mechanistic interpretation of progress as a function of population growth.

chris:

“Well, you didn’t specify precisely which “large chunk of our current economy” civilization could do without (in your opinion).”

Indeed I didn’t, first because it is not vital for my argument (see 161), but also because I assumed it redundant to restate what should be a familiar observation. Few economists these days deny that GDP is not a good measure of material progress, let alone civilizational advancement. GDP measures bads as well as goods, it doesn’t adjust for depreciation of either natural or man-made capital, etc.

If you press me to give examples, ok, ever heard of mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps and the like? A financial sector out of proportion with productive economy; a prison sector that in the US has grown much faster than almost any other sector of the economy (some civilization!); ditto the health care and insurance industry; lawyering and litigation that also have grown out of proportion; the military of course; an inefficient construction industry that has in recent decades destroyed large amounts of natural capital while building little of value [call me snobbish if you wish, but consider all those cookie-cutter houses that have become practically worthless since the bubble deflated]; etc. etc. Our economy is full of inefficiencies. Your market-optimistic approach is astonishing and strikes me as anachronistic after the economic experience of at least the past decade.

The US and Denmark (as of today) are in constant trade and information exchange. IMO that makes them two parts of one civilization, not two civilizations, in the sense relevant to this thread.

Global integration has been vastly overstated by several commenters on this thread. What you refuse to see is that the vast bulk of economic activity in any economy is scale-dependent to that economy (resp. its population). Providing for the needs of any population requires an effort roughly proportional to the size of that population. You seem to argue that aggregate economic activity is an indicator of civilizational advancement [assuming we know what that is]; I say it is not. Quantity does not automatically translate into quality.

Your market-optimistic approach

My what? My position has been that activities common to all or nearly all civilizations throughout history, while they may be strictly speaking unnecessary, are not something you can count on getting rid of in order to more efficiently build your shining city on a hill, even if you wanted to. Financial shenanigans, fraud, rent-seeking, crime, dispute resolution, and fads or mass mistakes all *definitely* fall under this heading, IMO (alongside the more benign arts and recreation). If you have a plan for how to reliably eliminate any of those things, I’d like to hear it, but I don’t hold out much hope for its success (and certainly wouldn’t stake the survival of my colony on it).

That’s not only not optimistic, it’s cynical. At most, you could paraphrase Churchill and say that the market is the worst way to allocate resources, except for all the others that have been tried, but I’m not sure even that isn’t being too favorable to the market. IMO a modified or supervised market is proven superior to a laissez-faire one, so you have to be somewhat careful with what you mean by “the market”.

If you’re *really really* isolated you don’t need the military, but I suspect people would be paranoid enough to build one anyway. Or divide against each other and then militarize — if the US and Denmark are one civilization for self-sufficiency purposes, then our hypothetical colony could be politically divided while at the same time the parts rely on each other for resource sufficiency. Or be politically unstable enough that the military and law-enforcement functions aren’t clearly divided (which they often aren’t anyway).

I am optimistic enough to think that the War on Some Drugs could be eliminated for a net efficiency gain, but in the kind of rough estimates we’re talking about here, it seems more like a rounding error.

What you refuse to see is that the vast bulk of economic activity in any economy is scale-dependent to that economy (resp. its population).

Who refuses to see that? The vast bulk isn’t the whole story. Some of the small parts are really important.

If you shrink the whole society to the point that it has less than one microchip fab and the specialists that staff it, then you don’t have microchips and everything made from them. The facts that the vast bulk of the economy has nothing to do with microchips, and that with fewer people you need fewer farmers or nurses, are both irrelevant. Hyperspecialists are the focus of the argument that you need a large population; the fact that the whole population isn’t composed of hyperspecialists is beside the point. You can’t shrink the rest of the population without also shrinking the hyperspecialist segments or distorting the ratios between one and the other; the former runs into the granularity limit and the latter is not proved possible.

“I think that there is a fundamental connection between population growth and technological progress.”

So you say that the internet wouldn’t have been developed without population growth happening, and you claim that once global population stabilizes, which will probably happen by the mid 21st century, further technological progress is IMPOSSIBLE. Well these are extraordinary (and rather implausible) claims for which you haven’t provided a shred of evidence (your above arguments at best support a weak correlation, which I don’t even object to, but none of them supports a strong correlation). So at this point I’ll just rest my case. If you have evidence for your strong hypothesis, let us know.

And chris, you are saying that the market is always right. How dare I call the wisdom of the invisible hand into question! Good grief.

@piglet 195: You’re really not even reading the posts you’re responding to, are you? I admit some of them are kind of long, but come on.

Answering Dan S. @132:

Robinson Crusoe was based on the story of Alexander Selkirk, who survived for four years on an island off the coast of Chile, retaining and reproducing fire, language, religion, agriculture, pastoralism, tanning, sewing, small boats, small huts, metalworking, and I believe pottery, but failing to produce gunpowder, shipbuilding, masonry, smelting, and so on.

Ultimately, of course, a society of a single person is fairly fragile. They cannot reproduce, and so the society cannot survive longer than their lifetime; and their lifetime is quite likely to be cut short by illness or accident. The fictional Crusoe spent a day or more in delirium and easily could have died; the real Selkirk fell off a cliff
and lay unconscious for the rest of a day.

Aside from these drawbacks, though, a single-person society is evidently capable of sustaining at least a Neolithic lifestyle, given sufficient natural resources.

So, what’s different in your scenario? Selkirk had the opportunity to choose, within limits, what resources he brought with him from the boat he abandoned; your 10n life coaches and cleaning staff did not. And the flora and fauna are perhaps even more unfamiliar than were the ones on Selkirk’s island, although they’re apparently Earthly, since it was a moonseed fruit that laid low our one careless experimenter.

Still, most people can survive for a couple of weeks without food; most poisonous plants are detectable as such by careful incremental approaches to eating them and careful record-keeping; you can probably kill big game with the sysadmin’s Leatherman; with more than 10 people there is no chance of anyone dying of exposure before you get a shelter set up; the file on the Leatherman is also adequate to turn briefcase latches and the like into steel spear points; out of the 10n people, at least n will be smokers, and will thus have cigarette-lighter equipment; no bear or wolf pack would be so foolish as to attack an encampment of 10n people; the party planner’s wine glasses will make admirable skinning knives when you break them; and so on.

So the elements themselves pose no real risk of failing to survive, as a group. As long as you can get along.

Instead, you need to figure out how to bootstrap some more advanced tools from the resources at hand: stone spearpoints for hunting; saws for cutting trees; kilns for making pots and refractory for smelting iron and copper; soap for preventing infections; penicillin for treating them; finely divided magnetite for making fertilizer from air; Portland cement for buildings and compositing with bamboo fiber; quicklime for painting; rubber for condoms and gloves; leather for piston gaskets; glass for scalpels, lightweight vessels, and greenhouses; tamed animals for multiplying the available energy until you get heat engines built; polylactide for lightweight, sturdy objects that don’t merit the expense of Portland cement or iron, or need to be shatterproof; alumina smelting pots for the Hall-Héroult process; vacuum deposition chambers to make huge mirrors for solar collectors; and so on.

Of course, this depends on the abundant game. If everyone has to look for non-poisonous berries for 80 hours a week, you’re going to have a hard time.

One person who has these industrial processes in their head could bootstrap the whole thing pretty quickly, given 10n people to work on it — but only if they have the charisma to persuade the other people it’s really possible, and that risking their lives welding up a steam engine or breaking a mustang is a better use of their remaining lifetime than getting drunk and reminiscing about Camus with the former clerical workers.

Robert Graves wrote a historical novel, “The Isles of Unwisdom” – curiously enough, about Spanish colonising efforts in the Pacific. In it, he mentioned in passing a mediaeval European tradition about the basis of technology. Apparently smiths knew they needed tools to make tools, but in almost every case they could work out how to improvise the first step. However, they did not know how to make tongs without using a previous set of tongs, so a myth sprang up that God had given the first smith his first tongs – the tongs of Tubal Cain. I suppose it might even have been poetically true, if (say) some precisely shaped pieces of stone with the right shape and physical properties had happened to turn up. Can any of our techno-historians comment on whether that or anything else presents a similar bootstrapping problem, i.e. one that needs special accidental resources to overcome rather than human inspiration and ordinary materials?

By the way, shovels are not much use for digging; spades are far better.