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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

At the end, the author gets slightly political, when talking about the size of human institutions.

People interested in that kind of speculation might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm

I hope in the future the notion of scale (or just more concrete conceptual frameworks in economics and politics) will be made more known in the popular consciousness. I find Taleb to be onto some interesting writing here: PRINCIPIA POLITICA Politics & Ethics under Scaling and Uncertainty. see https://www.taesch.com/wp-content/plugins/zotpress/lib/reque...

> At the end, the author gets slightly political

Lol, that's the whole point of the piece! The whole rest of it is just a set dressing to sell you on his political theory. It's political from beginning to end, but you just don't know where he's going with it for most of the piece.

No, it really isn't, any more than Darwin's Origin of Species is primarily about the evolution of humanity (Darwin later wrote an entire book on that later). It's just that most non-biologists don't care that much about the parts where Darwin or Haldane were talking about animals and their evolution or optimal size and just fixate on the parts dealing with humanity.

So your supposition is that he was just writing a normal paper about biology for the general public and then he just sort of accidentally added an aside about politics at the end that reframes the whole piece and is extremely relevant to the controversy about democracy vs. dictatorship in the 1920s? No. It's a single extended essay that advances the thesis that human social structures should "be the right size." His other work work is the equivalent of Origin of Species for him, but this is one very short essay with a coherent thesis.

The author was an interesting character (and a very prominent scientist--some of his work on enzymes is still taught to undergraduates) and a committed communist. Many of his essays were first written for the a newspaper. I think it was the Daily Star.

That's very interesting! I would have read that ending of the article as a dig against communism. But perhaps the other had a more interesting point in mind.

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