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Notes -
I wonder if there may be entire industries and ways of life whose realization depends on economies of scale.
In other words there may be a limiting number of people such that for any smaller amount, it becomes uneconomical for i.e. advanced microchip research to continue.
Unlikely, I’d say.
You spend years feeding the blacksmith’s apprentice, you expect to get a lot of nails at the end of it. More than any one person could use. This overhang is what makes it uneconomical to run an industry for one person. Your supply and demand curves meet at zero quantity.
How do you avoid the overhang? Option one is moving the demand curve. More population, more aggregate demand, until you can collectively afford a smithy.
The other option is moving the supply curve. That means cheaper capital or cheaper unit cost. In the extreme, if someone can do the job with zero training, it costs you nothing to have the industry around.
I think the latter trend has been more important since the Industrial Revolution. I don’t see that getting worse in an age of improved transport, information access, and automation.
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There are also population diseconomies of scale: higher resource requirements require extracting more resources, at higher and higher marginal cost. Though, if it's just a matter of technological development, then the economies of scale might more than compensate for that. Higher population might also mean higher level coordination mechanisms developing, which seem to take the form of more bureaucracy.
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