Still, the fact that individual companies, for instance, develop layers of bureaucracy is not an argument against having a large economy.
This is true in principle, but population growth has led to the creation of larger companies in practice. ChatGPT when I asked it what proportion of the economy is controlled by the biggest 100 companies:
For a rough estimate, consider the market capitalization of the 100 largest public companies relative to GDP. As of early 2023, the market capitalization of the S&P 100, which includes the 100 largest U.S. companies by market cap, was several trillion USD, while the U.S. GDP was about 23 trillion USD. This suggests a significant but not dominant share, with the caveat that market cap doesn’t directly translate to economic contribution.
And if the population in every country would grow, then we’d end up with larger governments even if we kept the current system and never established a world government. To avoid governments getting bigger, you’d need to actively break up countries into smaller ones as their population increased. That doesn’t seem like a thing that’s going to happen.
This is true in principle, but population growth has led to the creation of larger companies in practice. ChatGPT when I asked it what proportion of the economy is controlled by the biggest 100 companies:
And if the population in every country would grow, then we’d end up with larger governments even if we kept the current system and never established a world government. To avoid governments getting bigger, you’d need to actively break up countries into smaller ones as their population increased. That doesn’t seem like a thing that’s going to happen.