One of the things I hear a lot when I am listening to audio books or podcasts is a saying to the effect of: “modern organized governments (roughly dating back to the first Sumerian city-states around 3500 BCE) have been around for only about 1.5% to 2% of human history.” 

The idea behind this statement is that there must have been better ways (or at least different ways) to do government (or lack of one) in the 98% of history that happened before modern times. This is a cute statement and it is worth thinking about.  But the problem with that is there just wasn’t a lot of people around back then and there are a whole lot of people around now. Even though there was a lot of time, there still wasn’t many people. Accounting for that really makes a difference.

Here is the world population curve:

So what I did was took this curve into python, fit the curve to two mathematical functions and determined the average population over three time periods.  The ultimate aim is to provide a weight for the “human history” statement in the context of population. 

I should have only gone to 3500 BCE instead of 10,000 BCE. I am sorry.

So from -1,000,000 to -10,000 we should give it a weight of 80,000

(Weighted years (1e6 – 1e4)*8e4 = 7.9e10)

From -10,000  to 1800 let’s give it a weight of 90,000,000

(Weighted years (1e4 + 1800)*9e7 = 7.9e10) = 1e12)

From 1800 to Today, let’s give that a weight of 2.7 billion or 3,000,000,000

(Weighted years (224)*3e9 = 7.9e10) = 6e11)

So if we include the population weight, we can say that from 1800 to today represents 6e11 / (6e11 + 1e12 + 7.9e10) 35% of history.  And of course from 10,000 BCE to today we can see its nearly 95% of history (1e12+6e11) / (6e11 + 1e12 + 7.9e10) if weighted by population. There are already a million corrections that folks can make to my analysis – do the numbers right, make the mathematical functions match better, what about the length of time a person lives, etc etc. Lots of good corrections to be made and discussions to be had.

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Of course the problem is even more complex that that

“modern organized governments (roughly dating back to the first Sumerian city-states around 3500 BCE) have been around for only about 1.5% to 2% of human history.” 

At no other time in history has the Earth been in such a complex environment where the entire system depends on a large population with such interconnected, technology-enhanced markets. The population of world is over 8 billion. That’s a lot of people. More than I think people realize.  I wonder if it is more than someone like Aristotle could have ever imagined.