By .David Fidelman
The best function a newspaper column can perform is to enlighten its readers. A recent column by a respected writer showed that many people are confused about some of the important laws that govern human behavior. The laws of nature which are the most misunderstood are Murphy's Law, Parkinson's Law, the Peter Principle, and the Law of Conservation of Energy.
Murphy's law, although it got its name in recent times, was actually discovered the first day a caveman made the questionable decision to turn one more corner in search of food instead of heading back to his cave, and ended up face-to-face with a hungry saber-toothed tiger. According to Murphy's Law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And it usually does so in a manner that will cause the maximum possible confusion.
It is named after Edward Murphy, a U.S. Air Force engineer who, in 1949, observed an experiment which involved a set of 16 sensors, each of which could be installed in either of two ways, and somebody methodically installed all 16 the wrong way around.
Everybody is familiar with some of the common consequences of Murphy's Law. When you bend over to pick something up, everything falls out of your shirt pocket, and everybody else has a hard time keeping a straight face. You're driving and have to make a quick stop, everything slides off the front passenger seat onto the floor, and everything breakable or spillable breaks or spills. Buttered bread always falls buttered side down. The other line always moves faster. You always find something in the last place you look. No matter how long or how hard you shop for an item, after you've bought it, it will be on sale somwhere cheaper. Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening. And there is no limit to how bad things can get.
Parkinson's Law is the principle that any human endeavor requires all the resources available for it. No project ever costs less money than is allocated, or is finished earlier than it is supposed to. If you have all day to do something, it takes all day. Home remodeling projects are never completed until the day before the contractor has to start making penalty payments, and never cost less than the estimate. Parkinson's Law applies to Medicare: Every medical procedure costs as much as Medicare will pay for it. Medicare costs as much as it does because that's how much money is available.
The Peter Principle applies mainly to organizations in which there are various levels of performance, of authority and of responsibility. Here's how it works: If a low-level employee does his job well, he gets promoted. If he is competent at this new job, he gets promoted again to a higher level. A good employe will keep getting promoted until he reaches a position at which he is not competent, and therefore from which he cannot be promoted. You can't demote him, so he stays in this position. He has been promoted to his level of incompetence. The Peter Principle explains why the higher levels of management of any organization or bureaucracy are filled by incompetent people who got there because they were good at doing a lower level job than the one they have.
Today, the Peter Principle seems to have been replaced by the Dilbert Principle, which is that the most ineffective workers are moved to the place where they can do the least damage: Management. If you have an employee who can't do anything well, make him a manager of something. So, now instead of having incompetent managers who were good at their former jobs, we now have managers who were never good at anything. The Dilbert Principle applies especially to the boss's son.
The Law of Conservation of Energy is one of the most misunderstood of all. Most people think it means: Don't run if you can walk, don't walk if you can ride, don't stand if you can sit, and don't sit if you can lie down. Or you say to yourself when you bend down to tie your shoelaces, "What else can I do, as long as I'm down here?" Although those are good practices to follow, that is not the Law of Conservation of Energy, which says that the total amount of energy remains the same. Energy can change from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. In other words: You don't get something for nothing. The same conservation principle applies to a number of other transactions. For example, in a friendly poker game you can't have all losers. Nor can you have all winners.
The author hopes that the information presented in this column will help its readers understand why things happen the way they do, and why there's nothing you can do about it.