Right. So then what is the minimum population size given the current economy? Presumably we have a lot of unnecessary variation that could be dispensed with in an emergency. What’s the minimum viable population size that ~maintains standard of living? Still have computers etc.
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Replying to @WilliamAEden @vgr
I'm going to guess that you pretty much can't have an economy like we have now without billions of people involved. Computers of the modern sort require insane precision manufacturing equipment.
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Project Apollo in the 1960s is said to have directly employed 400,000 people, and that's totally ignoring tens of millions (at least) in the supply chains upstream providing everything from T6061 Aluminum to cleaning fluid to box lunches.
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I'd guess that if you do the transitive closure of everyone involved in the production of a modern Intel microprocessor, you end up with at least a third of the world population.
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By that I mean everyone supplied something, or supplied something to a supplier or employee, or supplied something to them, and on all the way back. The web of relationships goes from farm equipment makers to plumbers and people publishing chemical phase diagrams.
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What if you were optimizing for smallness instead of efficiency? I don’t think the minimum number of people who could possibly make X is equal to the number who do in practice make X in the world today.
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You mention "efficiency" as though you could dispatch with it and *reduce* the number of people involved, but if you reduce it, you *increase* the number of people involved. Efficiency is why we can do it with "only" billions of people.
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I mean, the existence of subsistence farmers proves that it *is* possible to live on the food you produce yourself, just lower quantity and quality than you could get with trade.
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I think you're underestimating how badly subsistence farmers live, and how few true subsistence farmers are left. You're also underestimating how badly people used to live in general.
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Replying to @perrymetzger @s_r_constantin and
Yes, in some sense, subsistence farmers "merely" have lower quality food and less of it, but in practice, we're talking about a shocking difference in standard of living.
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Oh, yes, I don’t want to be one! I want to know how *fast* the quality of various things scales down without trade, I’m not saying there’s necessarily any low-trade options I’d like.
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