I recently posted on how cities and firms are like distributed as a Zipf power law, with a power of one, where above some threshold each scale holds roughly the same number of people, until the size where the world holds less than one. Turns out, this also holds for
"Before the industrial revolution, there were very few firms of any substantial scale. So during the farming era firms existed but could not have been distributed by Zipf’s law. So if firms had a power law distribution then, it must have had a much steeper power.
If we look all the way back to the forager era, then cities and nations could also not plausibly have had a Zipf distribution — there just were none of any substantial scale. So surely their size distribution also fell off faster than Zipf, as individual income does today."
There were far fewer firms, and far fewer cities. If they had a Zipf distribution, there would necessarily be none of any substantial scale by modern standards. You're drawing a conclusion with no discriminatory hypothesis and no data.
Are the definitions of genera sufficiently objective to make "species per genera" a useful number? Couldn't this instead just be telling us something about the human taxonomist?
There certainly were businesses with more than one person, and places where more than one person lived nearby.
"Before the industrial revolution, there were very few firms of any substantial scale. So during the farming era firms existed but could not have been distributed by Zipf’s law. So if firms had a power law distribution then, it must have had a much steeper power.
If we look all the way back to the forager era, then cities and nations could also not plausibly have had a Zipf distribution — there just were none of any substantial scale. So surely their size distribution also fell off faster than Zipf, as individual income does today."
There were far fewer firms, and far fewer cities. If they had a Zipf distribution, there would necessarily be none of any substantial scale by modern standards. You're drawing a conclusion with no discriminatory hypothesis and no data.
Are the definitions of genera sufficiently objective to make "species per genera" a useful number? Couldn't this instead just be telling us something about the human taxonomist?