Deborah Gordon on Ants, Humans, the Division of Labor and Emergent Order

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2007

⏱️ 66 minutes

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Summary

Deborah M. Gordon, Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, is an authority on ants and order that emerges without control or centralized authority. The conversation begins with what might be called the economics of ant colonies, how they manage to be organized without an organizer, the division of labor and the role of tradeoffs. The discussion then turns to the implications for human societies and the similarities and differences between human and natural orders.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:12.5	I'm your host Russ Roberts of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover
0:17.3	Institution.
0:18.7	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast,
0:25.8	and find links to other information related to today's conversation.
0:29.9	Our email address is mailadicontalk.org.
0:33.6	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	My guest today is Deborah M. Gordon, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University.
0:42.1	And our topic goes by different names, spontaneous order, complexity, emergence, self-organizing
0:48.0	systems, the way that order emerges without control, the way that individuals can have
0:53.4	very little knowledge, yet can act in concert as if the group had wisdom.
0:58.5	Deborah is an expert on ants.
1:00.5	She's the author of ants at work, and the recent article in Nature Control Without Hierarchy.
1:05.0	And this phenomenon of emergent order is one of the central ideas in economics.
1:10.4	So I wanted to learn more about ants, and I think Deborah has some interest in learning
1:14.6	about what economists think about it.
1:16.0	So I thought it might be interesting for you, the listener, to listen in on this conversation.
1:23.8	Deborah, welcome to Econ Talk.
1:25.1	Thank you.
1:26.1	I want to start with a quote from your book, Ants at Work, which is a really interesting
1:29.6	book about ants, but has implications beyond ants.
1:33.8	Here's the quote, the basic mystery about ant colonies is that there is no management.
	...

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