I'm reminded of what Christopher Alexander et. al. wrote in A Pattern Language. Made up of 253 patterns organized by scale, the largest scale discussed (and the

I'm reminded of what Christopher Alexander et. al. wrote in A Pattern Language. Made up of 253 patterns organized by scale, the largest scale discussed (and therefore Pattern #1) is "Independent Regions:" Do what you can to establish a world government, with a thousand independent regions, instead of Metropolitan regions will not come to balance until each one is small and autonomous enough to be an independent sphere of culture. There are four separate arguments which have led us to this conclusion: I. The nature and limits of human government. 2. Equity among regions in a world community. 3. Regional planning considerations. 4. Support for the intensity and diversity of human cultures. I. There are natural limits to the size of groups that can govern themselves in a human way. The biologist J. B. S. Haldane has remarked on this in his paper, "On Being the Right Size": > ...just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. . . . (J. B. S Haldane, "On Being the Right Size," The World of Mathematics, Vol. II, J. R. Newman, ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956, pp. 962-67). It is not hard to see why the government of a region becomes less and less manageable with size. In a population of N persons, there are of the order of N^2 person-to-person links needed to keep channels of communication open. Naturally, when N goes beyond a certain limit, the channels of communication needed for democracy and justice and information are simply too clogged, and too complex; bureaucracy overwhelms human processes. And, of course, as N grows the number of levels in the hierarchy of government increases too. In small countries like Denmark there are so few levels, that any private citizen can have access to the Minister of Education. But this kind of direct access is quite impossible in larger countries like England or the United States. We believe the limits are reached when the population of a region reaches some 2 to 10 million. Beyond this size, people become remote from the large-scale processes of government. Our estimate may seem extraordinary in the light of modern history: the nation-states have grown mightily and their governments hold power over tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of people. But these huge powers cannot claim to have a natural size. 54 regions, total population 318.9m. So that averages 5.9 million per, right smack in the middle. A more complete analysis with a histogram would be interesting.