Didn’t know about the plankton thing either and I asked Claude, it’s actually pretty interesting.
On the general historical point, it’s something that I’ve been wondering about for a long time—for me, it’s on the Pareto frontier of how important of a question it is vs how little explicit study it has received. I think it’s more thorny than it might first appear, because while the “maximal size/power” of entities increases (companies and economies of scale, nations and the consolidation process that you mention), there is also some vague intuition that technology and the information age has given some power back to flexible, smaller entities like startups or the individual. (see e.g. this old Claude chat).
As of now, I feel relatively undecided and want to think more about it.
Didn’t know about the plankton thing either and I asked Claude, it’s actually pretty interesting.
On the general historical point, it’s something that I’ve been wondering about for a long time—for me, it’s on the Pareto frontier of how important of a question it is vs how little explicit study it has received. I think it’s more thorny than it might first appear, because while the “maximal size/power” of entities increases (companies and economies of scale, nations and the consolidation process that you mention), there is also some vague intuition that technology and the information age has given some power back to flexible, smaller entities like startups or the individual. (see e.g. this old Claude chat).
As of now, I feel relatively undecided and want to think more about it.