The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations

A long tradition of research in the social sciences, and particularly in archaeology, anthropology, economics, and urban studies, has demonstrated the strong relationships between the size of the largest settlements within a society and the complexity of its social organization.¹ The correlation is far from perfect, but it works well enough at the coarse-grained level of an index of social development spanning sixteen thousand years.

City size also has the great advantage of being, in principle, conceptually simple. All we need to do is (a) establish the size of the largest settlements in East and West at each point in the past for which an index score is being calculated, (b) establish the size of the world’s largest city in 2000 CE, (c) divide the population of the largest city in 2000 CE by 250 (the full complement of social development points to be awarded on this trait), and then (d) divide the populations of past cities by that number.

Opinions do vary among demographers on the size of the world’s largest city in 2000 CE, depending on definitions of urban boundaries and the reliability of census data; to establish a fairly uncontroversial baseline, I simply took the estimate of the Economist Pocket World in Figures that Tokyo topped the league, with a population of 26.4 million, and that New York was the biggest city in the Western core, with 16.7 million people.² There are plenty of other estimates I

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