This week I happened to stumble across a video, which is apparently a few years old, of Jeff Bezos talking about there being a trillion humans living on various colonies somewhere out in space. The claim Bezos made was that this would somehow give rise to a 1,000 Mozarts, as if the production of genius was some fixed statistical proportion of the total population and all you had to do to get more geniuses was to increase the number of people.
There have been many attempts to try and theoretically deduce how to produce human excellence. However, by now, we also have a great deal of empirical evidence that could be used to try and arrive at the answer inductively. I haven’t thought about this issue anywhere near enough to provide any answers. But, as a fun exercise, I decided to do a very quick bit of research. I took a list of geniuses and looked up the places where they grew up as children and then where they flourished as adults. Rather than do any kind of qualitative analysis, I decided to choose the single metric of population. Here is a table of the results with the populations of the various cities at the time the genius lived there:-
| Childhood and Adolescence | Adulthood | |
| Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Pericles, Sophocles etc. | Athens: 150,000 (30k citizens) | Athens: 150,000 (30k citizens) |
| Bacon | Rural England | Paris: 150,000 |
| Aquinas | Rural Italy, Naples 40,000 | Paris: 150,000 |
| Michelangelo | Florence: 50,000 | Rome: 55,000 |
| Raphael | Urbino and Florence | Rome: 55,000 |
| Da Vinci | Rural Italy | Florence: 55,000 |
| Galileo | Florence: 75,000 | Venice: 110,000 |
| Shakespeare | Stratford: 2,000 | London: 150,000 |
| Newton | Rural England | Cambridge: 6,000 |
| Descartes | Rural France | Amsterdam: 100,000 |
| Goethe | Frankfurt: 36,000 | Weimar: 9,000 |
| Mozart | Salzburg: 16,000 | Vienna: 200,000 |
| Beethoven | Bonn: 10,000 | Vienna: 250,000 |
| Einstein | Munich: 250,000 | Zurich: 150,000 |
Fun fact: when Newton moved to London later in life, it had a population of half a million. Newton spent three decades there and made no further advances on his work. Same thing happened when Einstein moved to the US.
Other notable numbers: Berlin had a population of 200,000 when Hegel and other luminaries were there. Königsberg had a population of 50,000 when Kant was there. Freiburg had a population of 110,000 when Heidegger was there. Leipzig had a population of about 40,000 when Wagner and Nietzsche were there.
It is strange how these numbers seems to coalesce. The pattern for genius seems to be that you are born in a smaller region where you cut your teeth and then move to the dominant city of the time to flourish. But the dominant city’s population is always in the region of 100,000, give or take. It’s also notable that almost all the cities in the list were undergoing rapid economic expansion at the time the genius was there, which I suppose provides the resources to nurture greatness. However, it’s clear that economic resources are not enough. Otherwise, the modern world would be swimming in geniuses. Of course, our dominant cities have populations in the millions.
In short, if Jeff Bezos wants a thousand Mozarts, simply increasing the population is not going to be enough.
Hi Simon. I would imagine that high housing, living and study costs might limit genius development as the genius will need to be working to pay for a roof over their head, rather than developing their talents. Perhaps a patron is needed. Sandra
Sandra – true. Pretty much the entire list had patronage whether directly or via a university. The ancient Athenians didn’t have to worry about that sort of thing since citizens never worked. So, yeah, student debt and real estate bubbles are probably not conducive to genius.
Hey mate,
The theory of a linear relationship between population size and genius has been around for a while. I first came across it in a sci-fi novel written probably in the sixties.
At the time I thought it was an exceptionally stupid use of linear extrapolation.
Not sure what creates a genius but I got a sneaking suspicion that our society is highly effective at preventing it.
Further analysis would be valuable
Cheers
Hey Roland – I was thinking about it more in terms of a graph. The number of nodes (people) grows linearly but the number of edges (connections between people) grows quadratically. Beyond a certain number, everything becomes noise and you couldn’t find the geniuses even if you wanted to.
Of course, there’s also a question of whether the society wants to find geniuses. Growing societies want to find geniuses because they are moving away from a status quo towards something new. Mature societies view geniuses as a threat to the status quo.
Hi Simon,
An interesting topic. Agreed, my perspective is also that civilisations in decline will tend towards homogenisation of thought in order to prop up the existing status quo (the state of mind, and not the 70’s rock band!) Bad thought is generally punished in those circumstances, and to break out of a rut and solve reluctantly ignored problems, does require thinking about things from an entirely different perspective.
The super clever bloke Einstein is quoted as having said: A society’s competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.
Have you ever raised an issue of concern with a coder and observed the light of their comprehension illuminating?
Any plans for further fiction?
Cheers
Chris
Chris – true, although it’s not an exact science. Socrates was put to death, after all. Galileo was all but put to death by the Catholic Church. Shakespeare was targeted by the puritans. Then you have cases like Bach who died in obscurity only to be rediscovered decades later. Same thing happened with Mendel and, in a shorter timeframe, Nietzsche. The other side of genius is that the “audience” must be ready to understand it.
I did have an idea for a new work of fiction but also have two non-fiction books I am ruminating over. Am currently weighing up which one to tackle first.