Meeting notice: The 04.Feb.03 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the Royal 
East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and 
Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably 
know where we are. More details below.

Suggested topic:  Scaling laws in the social sciences

Everyone who comes out of the technical world, be it science or 
engineering, has a deep appreciation for the importance of scaling 
laws.  For such a person, the idea that any given character or 
feature, any entity or dynamic, onlys exist over a given scale is 
second nature. If we don't see a scaling property we go looking for 
one; we know it must be there.

That is nowhere near as true of social scientists.  Discussions of the 
concepts of sociology (ie, class, culture), economics (markets), or 
political science (democracy, equality) are almost always entirely 
free of considerations of scale.  Yet a technical person knows in his 
bones that this cannot be true.  There must be a 'high end' somewhere 
past which democracy has no meaning, or even becomes oppressive. 
There must be a 'low end' past which markets make no sense, etc.

Indeed, there are almost certainly several scaling laws, each with its 
own dimension (complexity, financial scale, populations, etc.) all 
setting boundaries on the usefulness of these concepts. 

This seems like a good time to raise the issue, since the reference 
culture for most societies is currently moving from being national (at 
most) to something far more global. In this US, this represents a 
growth factor of 20.  In other countries the transition will be even 
more radical.  Surely there must be scaling laws relevant to such 
great changes.

For instance, does the notion of 'economic equality,' as something 
that is good to have, and anyway better than 'economic inequality,' 
mean the same thing when measured against a global baseline? 
Presumably one reason why economic inequality is bad is because it 
raises the risk of caste formation and the development of political 
inequality. 

But caste formation is not only much harder on a world scale but 
harder to translate into political inequality.  

So: does egalitarianism have a scaling law?  And has it hit it?



 
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In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon.

				-- Jules Verne, 1865

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