Men as Termites

Not accident, but a natural law based on deep bio-social necessity determines the pattern by which people settle in towns of different sizes. Such is the simple conclusion--with arresting implications--of Lecturer George Kingsley Zipf of Harvard, who analyzes the mathematics of population distribution in his new book, National Unity and Disunity (Principia Press; $3.50).

"If the reader will consult the census of the U.S. for 1930 he will note a very curious relationship between all the communities that contain at least 2,500 inhabitants. Thus he will find that New York was first in size . . . that the second largest city had 1/2 as many inhabitants as New York; that the third largest city had 1/3 as many . . . that the fourth had 1/4 as many; the fifth 1/5--indeed, that the nth largest community had i/n as many inhabitants as New York."

This means that the rank of each community, multiplied by its size, is a constant. It also means that when these relationships are expressed in a graph, the resulting "curve" approximates a straight line. This discovery is not a mathematical trick. Zipf has found that the same strange relationship among towns also prevails in many other countries and at other historical periods.

What is the significance of Zipf's facts? Here Zipf's theories take over.

"Our real interests are not primarily in the number and sizes of communities but in the laws governing the conservation of energy in the processing of raw materials and in the distribution of finished goods within a social-economic system. . . . The number and sizes of a nation's . . . communities may reflect the economy with which that nation processes and distributes its consumable goods."

An economically healthy nation will always reveal its equilibrium in its straight-line community pattern, like a healthy body with its temperature of 98.6DEG. If the graphed line sags, wrinkles severely or bulges, the nation is maladjusted. But natural bio-social forces tend always to restore straight-line health.

Thus Zipf interprets U.S. history (see chart). Though its parts were in equilibrium, the new-formed Union in 1790 was as a whole unbalanced. Economic forces imperceptibly demanded population shifts, obscured somewhat by a century of expanding frontiers. The trend toward equilibrium is clear except for the period of about a century ago. The worsening equilibriums of 1840 (see chart), 1850 and 1860 reveal the underlying struggle between the concept of federation (homogeneity) and of the sovereign parts.

Proceeding from his basic mathematical discover about city sizes, Zipf then goes on to use income statistics to show that exactly the same distribution exists between the size of incomes of individual members of a community. It would seem to follow that the social implication of this discovery, if it should prove to be the rule for economically healthy communities, is that men must give up dreaming of an equal distribution of wealth--for to raise the general level of a community's wealth, the richest men would have to be made still richer.

Zipf goes on with other figures to try to demonstrate that similar distributions occur in other fields. He grapples U.S. corporate assets, discerns the inescapable harmonic curve again. Still farther afield, he finds that protein molecules (vastly important in living processes) contain 51% carbon, 25% oxygen, 16% nitrogen--again the series, 1, 1/2, 1/3. He even finds that frequency of word-use in James Joyce's Ulysses has an analagous distribution. Concludes Zipf:

"This 'law of the generalized harmonic series, 'if true, is a law of the economical organization of energy in moving masses of materials in three-dimensional space by living process regardless of who or what the living process is that moves them." Further Zipfisms:

> Russia has one of the poorest city patterns of any nation, partly because her economic efficiency is relatively poor. Russia is so vast that probably she "will become at best but a confederation of interrelated [social-economic] systems instead of one single system, like that of the U.S. or Germany (as of May, 1939)."

>-"A nation may very well be a natural bio-social entity, quite comparable ... to that of a colony of ants, or of bees, or of termites."

> "The turmoil of war and strife are perhaps to be viewed primarily as the correctives and the cures of maladjustments, rather than as their causes. . . ."

> The British Empire has a very sick-looking homogeneity curve, but Germany's gets healthier as Austria, the Sudetenland, etc. are added. "Nature in a love of balance may at present be engaged in restoring more nearly a condition of [equilibrium] in ... Western-Eastern Europe as well as in ... much of the rest of the earth's surface," observes Zipf, who often seems more sympathetic toward the termites than toward the bees and ants.

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