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JOSEPH REISERT: Ants may have an edge when designing efficient systems

The really important political debate today is not between Democrats and Republicans, or between liberals and conservatives.

It’s between the architects and the ants.

The architects see the state and society as if it were a building, designed and constructed according to a rational blueprint. The architect makes the plans, then tells the various workers what to do, and when and how to do it. If the workers run into a problem, the architect wants to hear about it to decide what the remedy should be. As the architect sees it, the alternative to the centralized, intelligent direction he provides is inefficiency, waste, chaos and ugliness.

Unlike the architects, who have a view of the whole project and seek to create order, the ants have very limited perspectives. Each individual ant sees only what’s right in front of him and performs only a limited task, according to a few, simple rules given him by instinct. No one is there to impose order, but, when multitudes of these  individually limited individuals work together, somehow a kind of order and even a sort of collective intelligence emerges spontaneously.

As in most great political debates, neither side in this one has a monopoly on the truth.

The partial truth, in the architects’ view of politics, is that specific laws and institutions do not arise spontaneously; they must be designed by someone and brought into working order by the actions of many.

Anyone who venerates the American Constitution or admires George Washington and the other heroes of the founding generation for creating the first continent-spanning republic in the history of the world recognizes the partial truth in the architects’ perspective.

The ants, or at least those who see in human societies a measure of the spontaneous order found in ant colonies, also have a point. Free markets operate according to the ants’ principle of decentralized decision-making by individuals.

As Adam Smith long ago observed, each individual in a free market seeks to maximize his own profit and welfare. Although no individual directly aims to bring about the common good, the sum total of all their individual decisions brings about a vast increase in prosperity for all.

Markets and other decentralized systems have two great advantages over centralized systems. First, the ants collectively have access to, and can make good use of, far more information than the architect, since one planner or designer can know only so much. Not only does each ant have a subjective sense of his own preferences that the architect can never know, he is also in close contact with a few particulars, which he will also know well. Each ant may know a small fraction of what the architect knows, but there are millions of them.

Second, the individual ants don’t have to trust in the wisdom of some architects’s plans, nor is there anyone to force them to build what the architect designs. In a decentralized system, individuals have a wide scope to make choices, subject to a few, firm constraints (though these may have to be set and enforced by architect-leaders).

In political debates, the architects always have an edge. No one likes to think of himself as a lowly ant, and politicians especially are drawn to see themselves as architects, endowed with superior intelligence and wisdom. Politicians also like being in control and giving orders, and tend always to expand the powers of government.

To be fair, we get architects for our political leaders because we voters tend to reward them. When there is a crisis, we want swift action and clear direction; we prefer the “strong leader” to the “do nothing” almost every time.

In the Obama administration, the architects run the show. The new health-care law centralizes regulation and empowers experts to define appropriate insurance plans and, ultimately, to determine appropriate standards of care. The newly enacted financial regulations act according to the same principle: A new regulator will  standardize consumer lending and another systemic risk regulator will be empowered to predict and prevent future crises.

In each area, however, there were already dense thickets of regulation and many architect-planners, and it is doubtful that the new architect-planners, with their new powers, will succeed where the old planners failed. 

It is time we started learning from the ants.



Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American constitutional law and chairman of the department of government at Colby College in Waterville.

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