The 31 people on the cover of Parade magazine’s “What People Earn” issue make an average income of 5.8 Million a year. They over sample the elities and under sample the poor.

Meanwhile I want to rant a bit on Dunbar’s number. Dunbar’s number is nicely explained here. The theory goes that you weight the monkey’s noodle and then you plot that versus group sizes you find a correlation. Humans are on the perimeter of this plot (aren’t we?). If you want to play along then our group size is then around a 150. I guess that might work if we were monkeys.

But we aren’t. Language changes the game. It’s a lot easier to solve coordination problems with a bit of language. Technology changes the game. Rolodex, Outlook, oh and the printing press.

Specialization changes the game. In both the business models that give rise to income and the social models that give rise to group structure humans are pretty clever at finding frameworks that enable them to work around limits that might otherwise put a limit on the upper bounds of these things. The distribution of group sizes, the distribution of social contacts, the distribution of wealth do not appear to be capped by physical limitations. My first problem with Dunbar’s number is that it posits the existence of an upper limit when the data doesn’t seem to show any such limit. For example we don’t see any sign that village/city/nation sizes are capped by some limit.

My second problem with Dunbar’s number is that everything seen of it suggests that its fans are uninformed by the power-law distribution in the underlying data. Which means that they aren’t aware of the extremely skew’d distribution of affiliations in real populations.

Dunbar’s number is a measure of social capital. Social capital, like economic capital is not a zero sum game nor is it uniformly distributed. Reasoning by analogy or on the basis of small samples sets is almost always extremely misleading in the presence of highly skew’d distributions.

The bottom 20% of households in the United states captured 3.4% of the total income. Think about that! Should the same distribution holds for affiliations, and I see no reason to think otherwise, that means that one out of five people participate less than 4% of the the benefits generated by the social fabric.

Parade? It misleads you about the elite portions of the social network and the long tail. So does Dunbar’s number. Parade magazine isn’t pretending to be professional, it’s just trying to sell you mattresses, celebrities, and herbal remedies. Dunbar’s number on the other hand is just, well, wrong.

Is community really about proximity or place? I don’t think so. Here’s some data.

This shows four flavors of group; bowling, church, political, and neighborhood. Members of neighborhood groups trust each other the least. Bowling provides a stronger way to build community than living in proximity.

That chart is from the book Trust in Society. It’s full of interesting essays. That chart in particular is from an essay by Dietlind Stolle.

Certainly in the top ten way to manage a group boundary is having an exam. The exam is good if the owner/governors of the group want fine control over the group membrane. The primary problem with an exam is it tends to make your group a monoculture and not surprisingly that monoculture’s primary attribute is skill at exam taking. That displaces practical skills. Pretty soon the folks in charge of the group start thinking that exams are the hammer for every nail and the groups most complementary group is something like Kaplan’s test prep company.

I heard tell of an exam for set designers that involves locking them in a large building containing a stage and a lot of materials and then coming back later and seeing what they came up with. I like that. Presumably that too has unintended consequences. Wouldn’t it be better if they filled the building with difficult producers, stage managers, investors, suppliers, etc.?

Professions societies get stuck in a tough bind when they go to design the next revision of their entrance exams. On the one hand they want to use it to raise professional standards and assure quality. If they can do that then they and their clients know that people in the group can be trusted. Trust is extremely valuable since it creates efficiency.

On the other hand they want to manage the supply of professionals because that directly effects what they can charge. Make the test harder the supply goes down and your prices go up.

Doesn’t matter who manages the test you still have to worry thru both the agency problems and the question of what exactly your goals really are. In this country we have laws that preclude “company unions,” i.e. unions who’s governance power is held by the firm’s management. That’s an obvious setup for abuse.

So I was amused to see that Microsoft is currently offering free retests for Microsoft certified engineers. My first reaction was that they were attempting to increase the supply; i.e. lower prices. Then I got to thinking about how “company unions” are illegal “company defined professions” aren’t.

Our stove has been a disappointment. We bought it when we remodeled the kitchen. We had the repair guy in at least five times during the warranty period. I have disassembled the entire thing at four times. The grills don’t fit. Few of the exposed plastic bits remain unbroken. One of the bits of plastic in the control panel broke so you couldn’t turn off the oven. That control panel captures spills and then stains. etc. etc.

So I wrote a review at epinions. In the days after I wrote the review nice members of the epinion’s community rated my review as “somewhat helpful.” My reaction was ‘what!’ I write a review that should save people a thousand dollars and these folks think I should have included more information about the stoves dimensions and features!

Actually, I recognize this pattern. It is a good thing to keep your community positive. Maybe they just wanted to send a signal that I shouldn’t be so negative. Luckily other people have since piled on and written similar reviews about this poor stove.

This story is about some guy who has gone to court because he’s upset about the ratings people are giving his apartment complex If the guy that ran this place was more clueful he’d have gone to the web site’s community leaders and urged them to work harder to keep the tone positive.

Cause you know – negativity – it just turns people off! No money in that.

Caterina, the Duchess of Flickr, quibbles. Here is a portion of what triggered that.

What creates a community in the real world is proximity…. Same theme in social networking: Orkut, Friendster, even Flickr you GO to a specific location on the web.

I too have an easily triggered sore spot about that. The presumption that community in the real world arises from proximity is romantic nonsense. The romantic anthropologist may wander into the bush and return with a fairy tail of idilic bliss. The professional anthropologist comes back with stories of gossip, long simmering feuds, resource hoarding, murders, kidnapping. It’s easy to announce that proximity breeds community but it’s also a fine way to breed contempt. The romantic myth that tribes huddled around the fire are some how a more valid, original, and pure form of community is poppycock.

Communities crystalize out of working on a common cause. Yes surviving the winter night by keeping a fire alive counts as common cause. As does keeping the wolves from the door or raising the passel of children. But the common cause of making creating a profession, developing a craft, mutual aid in the hobby of keeping your glow in the dark guppies alive, or forcing a vendor to honor a warranty are common causes and none of them demand proximity.

The romantic myth is only part of the problem. Deeper is a confusion about cause and effect. Proximity is a possible solution to a coordination problem, nothing more. It doesn’t create community. Because communities always have coordination problems and one means to solving these is proximity they are oft correlated. Proximity is causative It can either help or hinder working on the common cause. It is entirely neutral. Putting people into a cube space, packing prisoners four to a cell, loading up buses with commuters, assigning 30 third graders in a class room, placing college freshmen together in dorm rooms – none of these create communities except by dump luck or hard work.

Proximity serves other masters as well, in a business plan jargon it’s what’s called sticky. If you have a group of people locked into proximity with each other that’s just about as sticky as it gets. And of course a common cause emerges, the common cause of dealing with the problems created by this lock up. This is why a monopoly’s customers are a community. It maybe acceptable in such cases to say that proximity generates community; but it would be more accurate to say that forced proximity is a coercive way to force a community into existence.

The sentence that follows the one quoted above is:

He challenges that these are communities, there’s “proximity” (all on one site) but not community.

I see signs that he is was beginning to see thru the romantic myth and is looking for words to split the difference; hence the communities v.s. community split. In the end, starting from proximity is not helpful.