Modularity sounds like it would refer, not so much to exploitation in itself, but to federalism. A society of small towns, where everybody knows your name and everybody minds each other’s business, is modular. Feudalism is also modular: every lord with his vassals is an independent unit. Connections are few, tight, and exclusive. Some people see this as a political ideal: local autonomy, life revolving around small modular units like the family, the church, the lodge.
Nestedness seems to refer to repeated arrangements—nodes with many edges. People with many friends, many clients, and so on. This notion is a little confusing to me, because it seems to be a property of nodes, rather than of graphs. A star graph has one central node with a lot of neighbors, but all the other nodes are just connected to the center. So is that a highly nested graph, or not?
Just guessing here at a more formal definition, let’s let nestedness be the average number of neighbors of each node. That’s a measure of how thickly connected the population is, and it makes a rough sort of opposite of modularity.
In that case, a nested society is like an urban society, or like the internet. Each person’s circle is wide. Each person has many options. Ideas and conventions are very global, because they can spread pretty much everywhere.
But note that the definition of nestedness matters a lot. Do we want the average? The median? The maximum? The minimum? If we have some very highly connected nodes, and others much less connected, then we have centers of power or influence. It has the global quality of a highly nested graph, but it doesn’t guarantee that each person has a wide circle of interactions. Most nodes are dependent on very few, very powerful nodes. (What you think about capitalism will depend a lot on whether you see the economy as closer to a star graph or a complete graph.)
Modularity sounds like it would refer, not so much to exploitation in itself, but to federalism. A society of small towns, where everybody knows your name and everybody minds each other’s business, is modular. Feudalism is also modular: every lord with his vassals is an independent unit. Connections are few, tight, and exclusive. Some people see this as a political ideal: local autonomy, life revolving around small modular units like the family, the church, the lodge.
Nestedness seems to refer to repeated arrangements—nodes with many edges. People with many friends, many clients, and so on. This notion is a little confusing to me, because it seems to be a property of nodes, rather than of graphs. A star graph has one central node with a lot of neighbors, but all the other nodes are just connected to the center. So is that a highly nested graph, or not?
Just guessing here at a more formal definition, let’s let nestedness be the average number of neighbors of each node. That’s a measure of how thickly connected the population is, and it makes a rough sort of opposite of modularity.
In that case, a nested society is like an urban society, or like the internet. Each person’s circle is wide. Each person has many options. Ideas and conventions are very global, because they can spread pretty much everywhere.
But note that the definition of nestedness matters a lot. Do we want the average? The median? The maximum? The minimum? If we have some very highly connected nodes, and others much less connected, then we have centers of power or influence. It has the global quality of a highly nested graph, but it doesn’t guarantee that each person has a wide circle of interactions. Most nodes are dependent on very few, very powerful nodes. (What you think about capitalism will depend a lot on whether you see the economy as closer to a star graph or a complete graph.)