Societal patterns of flow, movement and organization can be rationalized based on the constructal law. People, goods, money and information move on earth as a conglomerate of point-area and area-point flows, all superimposed, and each morphing toward configurations that provide easier and easier access for what flows. This application of the constructal law has become the constructal theory of social dynamics, which is illustrated here with three examples: the multiscale distribution of city sizes on the landscape, the rigidity of the hierarchy of universities in the annual rankings, and the coexistence of large research groups with individual researchers in the same university. The constructal theory of social dynamics also predicts trends of natural design that until now were known empirically, for example, Zipf’s law.