The Laws of Life: Social Physics for Better Decisions

Why We Need Social Physics.

When most people hear the word law, they think of physics or government. Newton’s laws describe motion. Congress writes laws to regulate behavior. But there is another category worth considering: the recurring patterns of human behavior that are so persistent, so reliable, they function like laws of nature.

Economists, philosophers, and scientists have been cataloging these principles for centuries. Some, like comparative advantage, explain why markets flourish. Others, like Goodhart’s Law, reveal why measurement can backfire. Still others reach back two thousand years to the Stoics, who distilled timeless truths about control, balance, and preparation.

I call this collection the laws of life — social physics that describe how people drift, decide, innovate, and succeed. They are not iron rules; they are mental models that reduce complexity and sharpen our judgment. Organizing them into clusters gives us a roadmap:

1. The Laws of Drift – Why disorder is the default.

2. The Laws of Decision and Perception – How our minds distort reality.

3. The Laws of Economics and Innovation – How wealth and necessity are created.

4. The Laws of Success and Human Nature – Why some thrive and others stall.

5. Ancient and Enduring Laws – Wisdom that outlasts empires.

Let’s explore each cluster.

About the author: Jeff Hulett leads Personal Finance Reimagined, a decision-making and financial education platform. He teaches personal finance at James Madison University and provides personal finance seminars. Check out his book -- Making Choices, Making Money: Your Guide to Making Confident Financial Decisions.

Jeff is a career banker, data scientist, behavioral economist, and choice architect. Jeff has held banking and consulting leadership roles at Wells Fargo, Citibank, KPMG, and IBM.

1. The Laws of Drift – Why Disorder is the Default

Drift laws describe the constant pull away from order, efficiency, and control. Systems—whether physical, organizational, or personal—naturally move toward complexity and decay unless deliberate effort holds them in check. These laws matter because they remind us that discipline, structure, and intentional limits are not optional; they are the only way to resist the inertia of disorder.

• Entropy Law: Systems drift toward disorder unless maintained. Like a clean desk that becomes messy, order decays unless energy is continually applied.

• Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available. A one-hour task will take a week if you give it a week. Deadlines create artificial scarcity that forces efficiency.

• Hofstadter’s Law: Everything takes longer than expected, even when you expect it to. Renovations, research projects, or software development rarely finish on schedule.

• The Law of Expanding Capacity: Human consumption expands to fill the space available, regardless of utility. Bigger houses, garages, or hard drives almost always become cluttered.

• The Law of Unintended Consequences: Every action sets off ripple effects, many unforeseen. For example, cash incentives to kill pests often create more pests when people breed them for profit.

• Heraclitus’ Law of Change: No man ever steps in the same river twice. Change is the only constant; stability is the illusion.

Why powerful: Drift explains why bureaucracy expands, why our calendars overflow, and why clutter multiplies. Understanding drift means accepting disorder and delay as the default — and designing systems that resist them.

2. The Laws of Decision and Perception – How Our Minds Distort Reality

Decision laws reveal the limits of human judgment. We mismeasure, misframe, and misinterpret the world, often confusing noise for signal. These patterns matter because they explain why good intentions go astray and why careful structures for decision-making are so critical. They remind us that perception is not reality, and that discipline in thought can help us overcome the biases that otherwise govern our choices.

• Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Standardized tests illustrate how metrics can distort the very learning they were designed to measure.

• Campbell’s Law: The more an indicator is used for decision-making, the more it will be corrupted. Hospital ratings, for example, often incentivize gaming rather than true improvement.

• Failure of Invariance (Kahneman & Tversky): Framing alters decisions even when facts remain constant. People fear a “90% survival rate” less than a “10% mortality rate,” though the outcomes are identical.

• The Impartial Spectator (Smith): A moral inner observer helps balance self-interest with fairness. It is the imagined voice of conscience reminding us to play fair even when no one is watching.

• Brandolini’s Law: Nonsense spreads faster than it can be refuted. Social media memes take seconds to share but hours to debunk.

• Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Bureaucratic blunders are usually errors, not conspiracies.

• Occam’s Razor (Ockham): Favor simplicity unless complexity adds real explanatory power. A leaky faucet is usually a worn washer, not a municipal water conspiracy.

Why powerful: These laws reveal why human judgment drifts from truth and why discipline is needed. Structured decision-making, like the Definitive Choice framework I use in Making Choices, Making Money, is the antidote.

3. The Laws of Economics and Innovation – How Wealth and Necessity Are Created

Economic and innovation laws describe how prosperity emerges, how costs persist, and how invention reshapes what we consider essential. They show that wealth is not just produced, but also distributed and redefined as new technologies and ideas shift human expectations. These laws matter because they explain both the growth of abundance and the paradoxes it creates—why progress delivers both liberation and new dependencies.

• Wright’s Law: Costs decline predictably with cumulative production. The more solar panels are produced, the cheaper they become.

• Comparative Advantage (Ricardo): Specialization increases collective wealth, even when one party is better at everything. Countries prosper by focusing on what they do relatively best.

• The Law of Inverted Necessity (Say + Veblen): Invention creates necessity; supply shapes demand. Smartphones did not meet a pre-existing need — they created one, now considered essential.

• Law of Diminishing Returns: For people, each additional unit yields less satisfaction. Except under extreme scarcity, more is almost never better — it is only a matter of degree. As Daniel Kahneman noted, “Money does not buy happiness, but a lack of money provides misery.”

• Baumol’s Cost Disease: Service costs rise because productivity lags. A teacher cannot double her classroom size without sacrificing quality, even as manufacturing output doubles.

• Metcalfe’s Law: The value of a network grows as the square of its users. The power of Facebook or LinkedIn is not in its technology but in its millions of users.

• Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is low quality. From books to YouTube videos, filtering the signal from the noise is essential.

• Chesterton’s Fence: Never remove a rule until you understand why it was built. Outdated-seeming HOA or zoning rules may have hidden rationales.

Why powerful: These laws explain why prosperity rises, why costs persist, and why innovation both liberates and traps us. They show why markets flourish through specialization but also why technology creates new dependencies.

4. The Laws of Success and Human Nature – Why Some Thrive and Others Stall

Success is rarely determined by raw talent or resources alone. It emerges from how humans navigate opportunity, manage fear, and respond to the powerful pull of group dynamics. These laws highlight the tension between leverage and limits: when to focus on the vital few, how to balance pragmatism with ambition, and why belonging often outweighs rational calculation. They remind us that achievement is not just a matter of economics or planning, but of psychology and social context—forces that shape whether individuals and organizations adapt, stagnate, or thrive.

• Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule): A small share of inputs produces a disproportionate share of outcomes. Focus on the vital few, not the trivial many.

• Voltaire’s Maxim (“Perfect is the enemy of good”): Chasing perfection undermines progress. “Good enough” on the vital few beats perfection on the trivial many.

• Luck = Preparation × Opportunity (Seneca): Success emerges at the intersection of readiness and chance. “Luck” favors those who prepare for the opportunity when it arrives.

• Social Death > Physical Death (Harrington): Humans fear exclusion more than harm. As Brooke Harrington observed, “If there were an E=MC² of social science, it would be that the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death.”

• Hayek’s Knowledge Problem: Central planning fails because knowledge is dispersed. Markets aggregate what no planner can see.

• Primacy of Use Test (Hulett): Judge rules by whether they maximize resource use and adaptability. If a regulation blocks productive use, it should be rethought.

• Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB): Reset rules from scratch to prevent bureaucratic drift. Build each budget as if starting anew.

• Murphy’s Law: What can go wrong will go wrong. Designing with redundancy prevents failure.

• Peter Principle: People are promoted to their level of incompetence. Organizations stall when promotions stop rewarding competence.

• Cobra Effect: Incentives often backfire. Colonial India’s cobra bounty created cobra farms.

• Lindy’s Effect: The longer an idea lasts, the longer it is likely to endure. Books read for centuries are more likely to still be read in the future.

Why powerful: Success is shaped by leverage, preparation, and belonging. Recognizing the pull of group dynamics — especially our fear of exclusion — helps explain why people make the choices they do, even when those choices defy logic.

5. Ancient & Enduring Laws – Wisdom That Outlasts Empires

Ancient laws remind us that human nature has changed little over millennia. Long before modern economics or psychology, philosophers observed recurring truths about control, balance, and perspective. These laws matter because they reveal constants that transcend culture and technology, offering wisdom that grounds modern decision-making in principles that have endured across civilizations.

• Epictetus’ Dichotomy of Control: Some things are up to us, and some are not. Freedom lies in focusing on the controllable.

• Marcus Aurelius’ Law of Perspective: We control our mind, not external events. Strength comes from framing challenges as opportunities.

• Aristotle’s Golden Mean: Virtue lies between extremes; balance creates resilience. Courage is the mean between cowardice and recklessness.

• Law of Reciprocity (cross-cultural): Kindness or harm is usually returned in kind. The Golden Rule appears in nearly every culture.

• Ecclesiastes’ Law of Cycles (“Nothing New Under the Sun”): Human patterns repeat across generations. What looks new is often ancient behavior in modern form.

Why powerful: The ancients saw what we still live: our limits, our habits, and our recurring struggles. Their laws endure because they speak to the constants of human nature.

Conclusion: Working with the Grain of Human Nature

The laws of life are not fate but patterns. Like the laws of physics, they describe forces that pull on us whether we acknowledge them or not. By recognizing drift, bias, innovation, human nature, and enduring wisdom, we can work with these forces rather than against them.

In personal finance, careers, or community building, these laws offer practical wisdom: focus on the vital few, resist drift, check your perceptions, and respect the limits of control. Doing so does not guarantee perfection — but as Voltaire reminds us, perfection is not the goal. Progress is.

Resources for the Curious

Ancient & Enduring Wisdom

• Epictetus. The Enchiridion. 125 CE.

• Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. 2nd century CE.

• Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. c. 340 BCE.

• Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. Penguin Classics, 1969 (original c. 65 CE).

• Heraclitus. Fragments. 5th century BCE.

Economic and Social Thought

• Ricardo, David. On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. 1817.

• Say, Jean-Baptiste. A Treatise on Political Economy. 1803.

• Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Macmillan, 1899.

• Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759.

• Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. 1776.

• Hayek, F.A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review, 35(4), 1945, pp. 519–530.

Modern Behavioral and Decision Science

• Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Choices, Values, and Frames.” American Psychologist, 39(4), 1984, pp. 341–350.

• Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

• Brandolini, Alberto. “The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.” Twitter, 2013.

• Munger, Michael. The Answer is Transaction Costs [podcast].

• Harrington, Brooke. Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent. Harvard University Press, 2016.

• Hofstadter, Douglas. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books, 1979.

Systems, Technology, and Innovation

• Wright, Theodore P. “Factors Affecting the Cost of Airplanes.” Journal of Aeronautical Sciences, 3(4), 1936, pp. 122–128.

• Metcalfe, Robert. “Metcalfe’s Law after 40 Years of Ethernet.” Computer, 46(12), 2013, pp. 26–31.

• Baumol, William J., and William G. Bowen. Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. Twentieth Century Fund, 1966.

• Chesterton, G.K. The Thing. Sheed & Ward, 1929.

Practical Heuristics and Maxims

• Parkinson, C. Northcote. Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress. John Murray, 1958.

• Murphy, Edward A. (attributed). “Murphy’s Law.” U.S. Air Force, 1949.

• Peter, Laurence J., and Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle. William Morrow, 1969.

• Voltaire. La Bégueule. 1772.