What is the minimal population necessary for a modern society?
Can a population smaller than 2 milion people sustain the levels of a modern western style society?
thnx Mythological Beast
I think you are also talking about the survival of the species here!
A minimal regret-society is based on 10 milion people but is this the minimum to sustain the society itself or the species?
thnx Mythological Beast
I think you are also talking about the survival of the species here!
A minimal regret-society is based on 10 milion people but is this the minimum to sustain the society itself or the species?
By: daanlevi
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Filed under Sociology by on Jan 12th, 2010. 
Comments on What is the minimal population necessary for a modern society?
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Really don’t need a lot of people to sustain a western style society. Even if its entirely self sustaining it could be accomplished with just a hand full of people.
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Grog is wrong. There is definitely a minimum requirement. Just the transportation issue necessary to turn raw goods into finished products requires that we have a minimum supply of people in the various places where the materials are mined and produced, plus a bunch to move it from one place to another, maintain roads, etc.
I don’t know if anyone’s calculated it, but there are two ways to approach it. If you wonder how many people it would take to maintain small settlements then you have a smaller number than if you calculate how many people we would need to survive a [plague|meteor strike|WW3|insert disaster here] for us to not fall back into feudalism. Small settlements would have appropriately sized infrastructure, whereas we’d have to attempt to use and maintain infrastructure designed for a larger population.
Off the top of my head, I’d suspect that the number required to avoid fallback would be somewhere between 500million and 20 million. The number required to sustain a “settlement” situation is probably somewhere around half a million.
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Montecarlo (Principautée de Monaco) teaches us how to live (not to survive) when you got money for 20 millions people and you only need it for a few hundred thousand!