Practice question · Multiple choice
A band of thirty foragers has no chief; a neighbouring chiefdom of two thousand does. Why does political centralisation track group size so closely?
Hints
- Count the pairs of people in a group of 30 and in one of 2,000.
- What must happen to a dispute once everyone cannot be in one conversation?
Show the answer
D. Because face-to-face consensus stops scaling past a few dozen
Why
The number of relationships grows roughly as the square of the group, so consensus fails long before the group feels large. Centralisation answers that arithmetic.
Practise Political Organization
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