WP35
The Social Compression Hypothesis
A Pre-Registered Test of Coordination Demand, Institutional Capacity, and Instability in Historical and Modern Societies, with a Formal Framework and Agent-Based Experiments
Institutions, standards, records and administrative hierarchies can be read as devices that lower the communication cost of coordinating many people: a form of compression. This paper states that reading formally, derives what it does and does not imply, and tests its empirical corollary, that a mismatch between a…