Bryan's Challenge

I suspect that communication is a huge factor in idea generation and propagation. I would rather have a small population of people who travel and communicate broadly than a large population of people who stay in their villages their whole lives and rarely communicate with outsiders.

That is an excellent point, having a huge nation full of towns that rarely communicate is essentially the same as having a bunch of tiny nations. No doubt one of the reasons for Israel’s superiority in Nobel Prizes is its intellectuals’ willingness to communicate with intellectuals from other countries, and share ideas with them.

I think the main problem with Bryan’s question is that, unless you live in North Korea, it’s impossible to measure intellectual productivity by nation, because national borders are porous to ideas. Ideas and culture generally have the least trade restrictions of any good, I think probably because they’re (wrongly) seen as less important than physical goods. You hear lots of people complain about Americans buying Japanese cars, but very few complain about Americans watching Japanese movies.

I think the Nobel prize measure in Israel vs Arab countries (or St Lucia vs Caribbean ones, for that matter) is incomplete. This is more similar to the mention in Bryan’s post of Iceland as having high production of films. You’re picking one small country as an outlier: I don’t think Nobel production is uncorrelated with population if we look across all nations.

I like David Friedman’s idea, but I think it might be better to weight not by population, but by share of the society’s world population at the time the work was produced.

Finally, my guess for an intellectual output which is less correlated with population is cuisine. I have no idea how to quantify it. Perhaps that is a question for Tyler Cowen. The only thing that comes to mind is to count up all the restaurants in a selection of global cities which serve an identifiably national or ethnic cuisine, and divide by the number of people in that national/ethnic group.

See Geoffrey West’s research on “superlinear scaling” as reported in Steven Johnson’s *Where Good Ideas Come From.*

A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn’t ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative. Kleiber’s law proved that as life gets bigger, it slows down. But West’s model demonstrated one crucial way in which human-built cities broke from the patterns of biological life: as cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster clip. This is what we call ‘superlinear scaling’: if creativity scaled with size in a straight, linear fashion, you would of course find more patents and inventions in a larger city, but the number of patents and inventions per capita would be stable.

How to measure the size of the network is a very interesting question. My dissertation research seeks to vindicate Adam Smith’s claim that “the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market.” To test this empirically, we need more sophisticated concepts of network size. The theorem certainly does *not* predict merely that larger countries will grow faster, since “the market” is by no means coextensive with national boundaries. Markets might be larger (oil, computers) or smaller (haircuts); they will rarely be the same size.

Immigration.

Hollywood is blowing the world away with its film production. I don’t know that I’ve ever watched a film from Iceland. So what makes Hollywood tick?

I don’t think it’s its own population. So long as there is enough there to support a city, the bulk population doesn’t matter much. More people would just mean more people tending bars and drinking at them.

Immigration matters, though. Hollywood’s ideas don’t come from people born in Hollywood. They’re from people who immigrate there. Thus immigration law makes a huge difference on how effective Hollywood is going to be.

I also suspect the global population doesn’t matter much. At the margin, there are plenty of good people in Hollywood who aren’t getting work. Doubling the potential pool of people working there should not greatly increase the quality of people actively working in Hollywood.

Evan: In terms of ideas protectionism, I think a large part of the reason you don’t hear that is that amongst the English speaking countries, America is so big and so dominant.

As a NZer I’ve heard protectionist arguments, eg in NZ there’s a “voluntary” quota for radio stations to play 10 percent NZ music and public money spent on NZ broadcasting, books, etc (by which I mean specifically NZ, about NZ themes). Of course, there’s not the same cultural protectionism, as freedom of speech is one of those values held very highly by most people regardless of political persuasion. But the impulse is there.

It seems to me that the answer is obvious. Maybe I’m missing something, but:

1) South Korea vs North Korea,

2) West Germany vs East Germany,

3) Hong Kong vs PRC, at least in the time of Mao.

Charles Murray created a vast database in 2003 of 4002 eminent individuals in the arts and sciences from 800 BC to 1950. You could use that to check your theory. I don’t see much evidence for a positive correlation.

I’m not sure how to detect an idea let alone measure an aggregate. Some are easy enough to spot after the fact by the effects they have. My personal experience says most ideas don’t cause ripples big enough to see from a distance, so unless there is something like a pricing system that compresses the information and then transmits it there is no hope. The few that do get seen get noticed BECAUSE an otherwise unrelated transmission mechanism picks them up and spreads them.

That leaves us with proxies that are likely to miss most ideas. How those proxies correlate with population addresses the nature of the proxy more than the nature of idea production I suspect. For example, we could measure journal articles in an academic field weighing each by the references within. Journal page space should correlate with the number of researchers and subscribers (I think), but that describes the nature of the publishing business and not the nature of the ideas in the articles.