Babylon had large city's and a range of industry's. We are not talking about self sufficient farmers but weavers, blacksmiths, potters, architects, construction workers, priests, teachers, warriors, etc. They dealt with complex issues like what happens when you build someone a house and it falls down killing the son of the person that bought the house.
I think social complexity scales non-linearly with size and population density (like code complexity), and also scales with things like the number of people possibly affected by one person's activity. Our society is easily millions of times more complex than ancient Babylon.
That's more or less irrelevant to to the legal code. Consider what laws could we remove with 150 million people or how dealing with 600 million people force a lot of new legal complexity.
What really leads to complexity in the legal code is the level of institutionalized corruption. AKA only companies owned by someone living within 50 miles of X and 30 miles of Y may do XYZ. Coupled with the age of the legal system which adds cruft over time.
> That's more or less irrelevant to to the legal code.
Complexity in the society the legal code is designed to govern is irrelevant to the complexity of that legal code?
> What really leads to complexity in the legal code is the level of institutionalized corruption. AKA only companies owned by someone living within 50 miles of X and 30 miles of Y may do XYZ.
Facebooks social graph is incredibly complex, the code that maintains it is slightly more complex than what you would need for 1/10 the users and 1/100th the social graph.
Yes, that law was an exaggeration but there are plenty of examples that include specifics on where the headquarters is which is effectively the same thing.
As to pork, the 50 billion sandy bill 17 billion relating to sand and then a bunch of random junk such as 33 million for Amtrack which is a for profit company. Now in this case nobody felt the need to hide it, but there are plenty of past spending bills aka law that have really specific contract requirements. EX: 693,000$ (~1/20,000th the budget) for beef improvement research in Missouri and Texas went to the Beef Improvement Federation as the only group meeting the requirements despite not being directly named in law. Granted by it's self not a big deal but plenty of things such as vary narrow import tarrifs stick around ex: refined vs raw sugar. http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/sc019
