A Unifying Theory for Scaling Laws of Human Populations Henry Lin & Abraham Loeb1 1 Institute for Theory & Computation, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA The spatial distribution of people exhibits...
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A Unifying Theory for Scaling Laws of Human Populations Henry Lin & Abraham Loeb1 1 Institute for Theory & Computation, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA The spatial distribution of people exhibits clustering across a wide range of scales, from household (∼ 10−2 km) to continental (∼ 104 km) scales. Empirical data indicates simple power-law scalings for the size distribution of cities (known as Zipf’s law1 ), the geographic distribution of friends2 , and the population density fluctuations as a function of scale. We derive a simple statistical model that explains all of these scaling laws based on a single unifying principle involving the random spatial growth of clusters of people on all scales. The model makes important new predictions for the spread of diseases and other social phenomena. Human populations exhibit remarkably simple properties given the complexity of socioeconomic interactions between humans and their environments.
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