Numerous interesting comments on previous posts expressed every possible theory. The topic is complicated, but here are a few brief responses:
Bigger (in the sense of population size, not land area) is better, because of economies of scale. Imagine that a country builds an expensive asteroid warning system that protects the territory from asteroids. The system has a large fixed cost. The greater the population, the less each person needs to contribute to the protection system. Large countries also can have larger markets, allowing for greater division of labor, and hence greater wealth. In a phrase, enormousness is not an enormity.
However, maybe small countries can obtain these economies of scale by contracting with each other. Countries can, by treaty, share the costs of asteroid warning systems and enter trade treaties that provide for the reduction of tariffs. Still, countries have trouble entering treaties and (especially) ensuring compliance, because no external power can force countries to comply with treaties. Evidence suggests that even when trade barriers are eliminated, trade across borders is more expensive than trade within borders, no doubt because of the difficulty of dealing with two separate legal systems with their often conflicting requirements.
Smaller is better, because of heterogeneity. As countries become bigger, they become more diverse, and diverse people have different preferences for political outcomes – taxes, environmental regulation, social welfare, and so forth. As people’s preferences diverge, political bargains are harder to make; either agreement can’t be reached, or transfers to losers must be arranged, and these transfers are economically costly. One might fear that people lose the ability to monitor leaders as the population increases, and so leaders can pursue self-aggrandizing or redistributive policies with little fear of political sanction. Still, maybe diversity brings benefits – cultural and economic – and it is possible, as Madison thought, that groups have more trouble taking control of the political system in a large polity.
Should we cheer whenever an ethnic minority obtains independence for its small or infinitesimal territory? Maybe if it the majority treated it badly. But note that when a minority breaks off from an otherwise adequately governed state, its gains (in the form of greater control over political outcomes in the territory it occupies) come at the expense of the people left in the rump territory, who lose the economies of scale associated with the larger population. There is no natural stopping point to this process if any group can separate for any reason. In an ideal world, other nation states might be skeptical of attempts to secede for this reason, plus the additional important reason that it is harder to cooperate with two little states than one big state, holding constant the effectiveness of the government.
Readers interested in these questions should consult this book, on which I have (loosely) relied.
Related Posts (on one page):
Second, France. Seriously. That's what I recall being told. France, being a hexagon, approximates a circle, which makes for a compact nation. (That is, its vulnerable borders are minimized -- although someone must have forgotten to tell the English and the Germans.) It is large enough to provide plenty of agricultural resources and has access to the sea. Yet it is small enough to inhibit internecine war. It may lack some energy resources and its capital isn't quite centered but, all in all, "l'hexagon" is the ideal.
I could see larger winter camps of more than one band, but for most of the year smaller groups would seem preferable.
It's not a "number of people" issue - it's a "how fast can you communicate?" issue. A very small country with slow communications is less effective than a very large country with fast communications.
How long would it take J. Random Citizen to get a message to the US President, if they REALLY had to? Or (in England) to the Prime Minister? Or the equivalent posts in Russia or China or Iran?
That would be my guess too. So somewhere between that and 7 billion, one country alone likely being bad. The constitution of the polity would seem to be a primary factor, with more liberal polities being perhaps better suited to larger sizes, as they're better positioned to reap the benefits of diversity than more repressive polities.
"those were the same profs who were predicting the imminent demise of capitalism and ascendancy of Soviet socialism."
Were there profs who weren't? I'm kidding, though not as much as I wish I were.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
And note that that's a ~150 that we can manage to relate to, person-to-person, so it's not necessarily the number that you're going to run into every day. Traditionally, humans, chimps, etc., have fission-fusion societies, with small bands (as both of you mention) being the everyday norm.
I do see the number of personal connections as being important in building ties between bands to form dispersed tribes, however I'm not sure that enough inter-band trust could exist under harsh conditions for that to spread very far. (Note I'm thinking ice age type conditions rather than the much more temperate modern period)
But that power is directly related to communications time.
When a hunter/gatherer culture gets too large, they have to spread out over a much larger area - miles in extent, in most cases. So when Grog needs to find Urgh, he has to run around for the best part of a day, asking if anyone has seen him (while neglecting his hunting duties).
On the other hand, if someone finds a ticking nuclear weapon in his back yard in Cleveland, there's a really good chance that the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will hear about it in less than an hour...
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