On Dunbar's Number
I read a fair amount of pop-econ and pop-psych. For instance, Malcolm Gladwell's excellent books, such The Tipping Point , and recently, Outliers . I recently read Chris Anderson's Free , breaking down the potential of companies (or bands) to make money by giving stuff away. It's interesting to see some topics arise in several of these books and one I've seen in the above - and in some other articles lately - is Dunbar's Number . In basic terms, Dunbar's Number is 150 - being the maximum size of a given person's true social network. The number was established through research... of course there is some dispute that 150 is the number, but, Dunbar did notice some interesting things. You can find plenty of examples through history of societies that broke apart into two groups when their total populations exceeded 150. Roman army units were made up of 150 soldiers. The idea is that, once you exceed 150 people in a group, cohesiveness - or common mutual int...