[marcusverus]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "economies of scale", which is normally a benefit of mass production.

It's true that centralization of political power can bring economic benefits, but the economic benefits stem from the elimination of economic/trade friction, not directly from the centralization of power per se. Which is to say that (most of) these economic benefits can be had without incurring the non-economic costs of political centralization.

[ethbr1]

100 separate political units, each with their own version of an industry, are by their nature less economically efficient than one entity that's 100x as big.

Consequently, industry in 1 of those 100 units is always going to be outcompeted, at scale, by industry in the 100x as big entity.

Given more or less global free trade, that leaves the smaller entities economically competitive at... what? Why wouldn't business inherently flow to larger entities?

[marcusverus]

Luckily we don't have to figure this out from first principles, we can just look at the data. 9/10 countries with the highest GDP per capita have populations under ~7 million, and the vast majority of the top 20 do as well. This is true both in PPP and nominal dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...