Laws, Theorems, Postulates and Razors

During a long car ride to Ohio, Daniel and I were listening to a podcast that was quite informative.* Anyway, the segment made mention of a theory that I found quite interesting: Parkinson's law. This prompted a quick discussion between Daniel and I of other laws applied to human behavior and society (we only knew of one, maybe two, others so it was very brief). Having come from an engineering background** I found laws and theories not applicable to physics or mathematics almost mind-blowing (keep in mind I use Ohm's law daily.) Here are a few I found fascinating:

Parkinson's law
"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."
Basically, give a person 2 days for a project and it will get done in 2 days. Give the same person the same project a one week deadline and the project will get done in a week. This is the primary principle behind the 5 day weekend (actually a quirky ad campaign by the Asheville, NC tourism industry - because if you have 5 day weekends, you'll spend them in Asheville.)

Peter principle
"In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
You get promoted until you are incompetent and then you stay in that position, so after a while everyone is incompetent at their job.

Murphy's law
"If anything can go wrong, it will"
Well known - I don't think it needs any explanation.

Rothbard's law
Everyone specializes in his own area of weakness.
Rothbard asserts that experts and lay people alike spend more time focusing on their areas of weakness than what they excel at. This law, coupled with the Peter principle just seems like we have a bunch of incompetent people running the show.

The Pygmalion Effect
People tend to live up to what's expected of them and they tend to do better when treated as if they are capable of success.
More commonly phrased: Self-fulfilling prophecy.

Don't you feel better knowing all these behaviors have a theorem to define them? I do.

*Now, before you scoff at that sentence, please keep in mind the drive was 7 hours and books on tape and podcasts are perfect for that kind of drive (or in L.A. traffic). Especially on the interstate highway, even if you get a radio station to come in, it is only for a few hours max and - let's face it - we are music snobs so regular radio will not do.

** This may explain my poor sentence structure and punctuation.