Is the Dunbar number a simple solution to political representation where gets a say in world affairs?

Stephen Hinton
3 min readDec 7, 2019

As I write this, COP 25 is going on. Children activists interviewed on stage, including Greta Thunberg, are stating simply that they represent the younger generation who want a chance to be able to live on the Earth in future and they see no action that is going to offer them more than a 50% chance of an inhabitable planet. No change since their last COP, only increasing CO2 levels. They, like most people cannot understand why they, their needs and the voices of scientists and ordinary people have no agency. Maybe there is a way … building on insights from chimps.

Perhaps our world government arrangement has got out of hand and we have dimensioned it wrong. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, back in the 1990s, proposed that there is a maximum number of people -148 -with whom we can maintain stable social relationships. In these an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

He arrived at this number by researching chimp communities and size of brains. Proponents say that larger numbers require an administrative burden of rules, laws, enforced norms etc. to maintain a stable, cohesive group.

We need something that connects us all. This comprises at least the living layer that we all live on — water, air, all species of life. It COULD encompass even the mineral endowment and the fossil endowment so you could say we should all share it even if a…

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Stephen Hinton

Sustainability visionary, Co-founder of Invest in Peace, consultant, author of “Inventing for the Sustainable Planet”.