In the latest post on Matt Gurney’s Code 47 Substack blog, he considers the trade-off between population density and the range of specialization that can be supported at various densities:

“Model A Ford in front of Gilmore’s historic Shell gas station” by Corvair Owner is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

I wish I remembered where I read this. It was a book I was blowing through for a university paper; only one chapter was really of interest to me when I was trawling for footnotes but I stumbled upon an interesting section that talked about services and specialization in a modern economy. The author offered a simple explanation of service specialization that I’ve never forgotten. Imagine a village with 100 people, the author said. Now imagine what services are available there. There’s probably a gas station, and maybe you can get a few services done to your car there, too. Basic repairs. Tire rotations. Oil changes. Things like that. There’s probably also a convenience store, and the store might also have a place to send or receive mail, or maybe even to rent a movie. (Back when that was a thing we did.) You might have a coffee shop of some kind, maybe a diner. But that’s marginal. You almost certainly don’t have a school, full post office, bank branch or medical centre of any kind. Not in a village of 100 people.

When you itemize out all the services you can get, it’s probably about five or maybe 10 — gas pumped, tires changed, oil changed, basic engine repairs, store clerk, movie rental, mail sent and received. Maybe someone to pour you a cup of coffee and get you a sandwich — but only maybe. The point isn’t to be precise in our list or count, but just to contemplate the relationship between the population and the number and type of available services.

Now scale that village up 10 fold, the author said. Now it’s a town of 1,000. The number of services explodes. You still have everything you did before. But now you’ve also got specialized shops, restaurants, a bank or two (and all the services they provide), probably a house of worship, medical services of various kinds (including eye care, dentistry, etc), personal-care services, better access to home and lawn care, various repair and maintenance service, technical services, a post office … the list goes on. You also start to see competition and the efficiency that brings — our village of 100 would have a gas station and a convenience store (quite possibly at the same location!). But our town of 1,000 would have a few of each. You’d get more services, and start to see prices dropping for the commonly available offerings.

You get the idea — the more you scale up a population, the more specialized services that are available and the more accessible they become. And this includes not just categories of service, but also increasing degrees of specialization. Our village of 100 probably has no full-time doctor. Our town of 1,000 probably has a family physician. But after we bump things up to 10,000, 100,000 and then a million people, we’re getting not just doctors, but highly trained, specialized physicians, surgeons and diagnosticians. Our town of 1,000 has a dentist, but our city of a million has dental surgeons who’ve specialized in repairing specific kinds of trauma and injury.

Anyway. I don’t remember what book this was from. But I do remember this short section. I think about it a lot. We Canadians of 2021 are, for the most part, hyper-specialized. I’ve written columns about this before, including this one from 2019, which I’m going to quote liberally below:

Human history is, in one simplified viewing, the story of specialization. As our technology advanced, a smaller and smaller share of the labour pool was required just to keep everyone alive. Perhaps the easiest way to summarize this is to note that 150 years ago, even in the most advanced industrial countries, something close to 50 per cent of the population was directly engaged in agriculture — half the people tilled fields so the other half could eat. Today, in both Canada and the United States, it’s closer to two per cent — one person’s efforts feed 49 others. Those 49 can pursue any of the thousands of specialized jobs that allow our technological civilization to exist. … Those 49 people are our artists and doctors and scientists and teachers. Human advancement depends on this — a civilization that’s scrambling to feed itself doesn’t build particle colliders or invent new neonatal surgeries and cancer-stopping wonderdrugs.

I stand by those remarks. But I’ve been pondering them of late with a different perspective. I’ve spent much of this week talking with doctors and medical experts in Ontario, where the third wave of COVID-19 is threatening to overwhelm the health-care system, with tragic results. And one recurring theme that comes up in these conversations is how this disaster is going to take place almost entirely out of public view. There won’t be any general mobilizations or widespread damage. People are going to die, behind closed doors or tent flaps, and other people will be forever scarred by their inability to save those people. But for most of us — those who aren’t sick, or highly specialized medical professionals — life is going to be something reasonably close to normal.