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Since the dawn of time, people have been trying to make others go the direction they want. Whether a simple path in the grass or specifying people\\u2019s place in society.

One of the earliest documented examples of this kind of idea at work is Plato\\u2019s Republic. Socrates\\u2019 student laid out a society in which all of humanity would be divided up into specific castes, with the philosophers at the top (any time anyone tries to plan a society, his class is always at the top), the warriors next and then workers. Breeding was to be strictly controlled so that the correct offspring would be produced in arguably the first large scale eugenic plan.\\xa0

Plenty of others have tried to plan societies from the top down. Every socialist country represents an attempt to do this, always to disastrous results as the failure of the rulers to consider any number of variables results in famines and economic stagnation. China is considered by many to be an exception, but if you follow them at all, you know that they currently are running concentration camps and have been backing off their one child policy for years now, most recently allowing couples to have three kids as they realize they are on the verge of a demographic collapse. This reflects a remarkable lack of foresight.

It doesn\\u2019t even work on a small scale. The Puritans who came over on the Mayflower were originally organized in an overly planned way, dictated by those who financed their burgeoning colony. It was a very communal structure and had little incentive for people to work on their own terms, leading to the near-death of the entire colony. It was only when they abandoned the plan and let people find their own path that things turned around.\\xa0

Why is that? Why do the plans so seldom work? Most top down plans are simply too rigid. You can have a general layout for a village, or guardrails to keep people from falling off a cliff, but if you get much more granular than that you tend to run up against human nature.\\xa0

Here\\u2019s the deal, when you try to control people too closely you get one of three responses. One is that people are cowed and lose all motivation to better themselves and the world around them. They become broken by the system. Or people become enamored of the system and their whole life becomes about promoting the system. When the system is too controlling it doesn\\u2019t wind up producing anything good, just more people absorbed by it. Finally, there are those who rebel against the control and you wind up with violence against the system, leading eventually to some kind of revolution.\\xa0

The same principles apply even down to a very micro level, down to keeping people off the grass. When you just put paths arbitrarily through the grass, it can be very difficult to get people to stay on them. This is something that Princeton University learned the hard way. No matter how much they tried to keep people off the grass, they wouldn\\u2019t listen. People walked wherever they wanted and thus tended to ruin the grass. Finally, the university came up with a novel solution \\u2013 they paid attention to where people were walking on their own. As it turned out, people tended to find their own, more efficient paths when left to themselves. Princeton then set about making new paths to fit what people were doing on their own. That simple change, of backing off and letting people find their own way of doing things and working with that rather than trying to direct it meant a whole lot fewer headaches for the groundskeepers. It also illustrated that trying to wedge people into particular paths doesn\\u2019t work all that well.\\xa0

Having paths of course is good. And there will always be a need for the occasional guardrail to keep people from doing something stupid. However, most of the time, working with people rather than forcing them will lead to better and more efficient results. All because rather than wedging people into a system, someone observed, gathered the relevant data and adjusted their plans around people, instead of adjusting people around their plans.

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