Optimum size for community

[SherryMayo]

Re: RogerCO's comment about inbreeding

This is only true if the community is comepletely isolated. Many cultures have a practice of marrying out (for one gender) to avoid this problem, and I couldn't imagine such a community that didn't have regular contact with nearby communities (hence ensuring some genetic to-ing and fro-ing).

[Sky]

On the 150 thing...

As Tess explained the reason for 150 being the limit is because at that point the community begins to fracture into separate groups. It is thought that this is the biological limit of our brains - we can only relate to about that number of people, beyond 150 we begin to loose track of the relationships between different people and so start to splinter off.

Gore, the creators of Gore-Tex and considered a very successful business use this rule to organise their company: Firstly they keep everyone involved in a business-line under one roof, from design to sales to production. Whenever one of their groups reaches 150 staff, they split it into two separate groups. The new group may only be across the road, but each 'community' is relatively self contained. Their website.

I think this same understanding could be applied very well to society as a whole where families could be included in this. We could all live in communities of under 150, each one specialising in something, this does not mean that we have no outside contact, nor that our 'village' is geographically isolated. Each community would have representatives that co-ordinated skills and product interaction. Personally I think I would reduce the figure to nearer 100. This would then allow us all to have a spare 50 for interaction with people outside of our specific community, which I think is important. Complicated production processes could be split into several smaller communities alongside each other.

Obviously I am presenting a very simplified view here and don't know how it could be implemented. One obvious problem would when we have very different carriers from our partners. I do find something very appealing to this idea though.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell is a very good read on this and other things.

[isenhand]

I?ll throw in my two pennies worth, even if I?m a bit late.

I would see the optimal size of a community to be about 200. There seams to be a reasonable body of evidence to suggest that as a good number but I would say that that is not a fixed number. I think communities will sort their own numbers out if given room to do so.

For me, I would like to see communities of about 200 as building blocks. Connect up about 5 of them to form the next building block and so on. I would also say each community is self-sufficient to some degree. That is they look after there own food, waste and energy production as but they are also integrated with other communities so they have some degree of dependence on others but that dependency only goes as far as needed.

And then ?.

[Bootstrapper]

I remember being told, in a sales course I did many, many years ago, that the average person knows approximately 200 other people personally. Communities with a population <=200 tend to 'self-manage'. That is, they have little or no need for 'government'. As Sky says, 150 - 200 may be a biological limit, beyond which our brains aren't wired to cope, so if a community grows larger than this number, then government becomes a necessity.

The potential population of any community will, ultimately come up against physical limits, such as the area of land available to the community, for food production, within a reasonable transport distance (given the available transport technology) of the community.