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Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth
Not if the decisions made are broad in nature. The number of types of goods and services certainly isn't proportional to the population.
(Also, the total number of economic decisions made regardless of how they're made can't be scaling faster than population, because the total number that can be made by people only scales proportional to population. Scaling as the square is right out.)
That said, the point that plebiscites are at best population-independent in frequency holds, unless you have something akin to federalism going on.
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It seems to me that "broad in nature" omits virtually all the real economic decisions. When Steve Jackson Games has me write a book, I'm not providing them with so many units of "prose" or of "recreational material"; I'm providing them with units of my specific kind of writing on a specific topic for a specific game. And knowing things about me, and about Rory Fansler, and about Hans-Christian Vortisch, is part of what Kromm does for SJ Games. Some Central Committee administrator or planner, or some deliberative body of citizens, could know that they wanted X quantity of "roleplaying game supplements," maybe, but they couldn't know the local details. And as you go to a bigger scale your locus of decision's "general" approach gets more and more abstracted from the actual substance of the economic decisions.
And I think when you say that "the total number that
can be made by people only scales proportional to population" you're actually making my point for me. Suppose that it DOES scale as the square (that is, roughly in proportion to the number of possible two-person encounters in the entire population). With 100 people, say, you might need 1 unit of decision making. With 1000 people, then, you'd need 100 units. With 10,000 people, you'd need 10,000 units—and it's all you can do to stay on top. And when you go to 100,000 the system fails catastrophically. That sort of scaling effect is what I was suggesting in the first place. See Haldane's "On Being the Right Size" for a biologist's discussion of this.
(Back around WWI, the German socialist activist Roberts Michels came up with "the iron law of oligarchy," which says that as an organization intended to function democratically gets more successful and thus larger, it unavoidably develops an inner circle who make the actual decisions—because that's the only way it can function at all.)