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But why would you need to do this?
A modern industrial society arguably needs the ability to make microchips. Today we have a big race to the top to design and make newer and better microchips to make more powerful phones and better missile guidance systems, but does our hypothetical MVIS need the best microchips or the best phones or the best cruise missiles to be considered truly industrial?
It seems to me a society that was planning for, say, a Mars colonization, or a Pacific Island post-apocalyptic nation-state, would aim for the lower-hanging 80% capability 20% effort tools. If cell phone technology has to go back to what it was in 2006, are we saying they aren't really industrial?
I'm open to that argument! It just doesn't seem self-evident to me.
I think a lot of the problems with things like "unit prices" and "production lines" are ~solved with additive manufacturing though, yeah? We don't use additive manufacturing to do everything today because
But if you aren't doing things at scale, your economy would collapse from "blender factory, toaster factory, microwave factory" to "home appliance fab" and the economy of scale (or lack thereof) would make those things much more expensive.
Similarly, there are entire swaths of jobs and industries we can cut and still be industrial. Nobody really needs 200 different kinds of fruits and nuts; if you've scaled down to a million people and you're really on your own, you likely don't need commercial trains, cars, and aircraft, or at least not at the scale we do today; either you have a somewhat dispersed population with cars or a close-knit population with subway.
And if you're inheriting our current tech and knowledge stack, there are large parts of the workforce you can probably eliminate. You'll never need people employed as entertainers ever again - that's not to say that your economy wouldn't support it (it might) but our efficient industrial economy allows for a lot of "slack" that we can take up in our scenario.
A massive amount of our population is involved in K-12 education, and frankly we can probably dispense with most of that, too. If we were in an oil rich part of the world, we could run our entire society off of oil and ignore the entire supply chain needed for solar/nuclear/etc. - we'd need maybe 20 million barrels annually? We can do that with 2 or 3 good offshore rigs.
We can probably do it more efficiently with a smaller society, because our supply chain is plausibly smaller. If we're okay with eating POTATOES, we can have, what, 100 farmers feed a million people? (100 farmers x 1000 acres x 30,000 pounds of potatoes per acre = >8 pounds of potatoes per day). That's overly efficient, we're targeting 5 pounds per day, so some of those people can work on something else to make life interesting. People can hunt or fish for meat, and raise herb gardens.
This I do tend to agree with. It would be a much poorer society! And I do think it would be extremely hard to get off the ground and rebuild an industrial society with just a million or 500 million people. But if we're talking about an attempt at an intentionally bootstrapped self-sufficiency scenario, I suspect the number could be lower than 500 million. Perhaps we're thinking of very different scenarios, though!
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