And lastly there is the helpless person, whose actions enrich others at his own expense. Then there is the bandit, who benefits himself at others' expense. First there is the intelligent person, whose actions benefit both himself and others. This law also introduces three other phenotypes that Cipolla says co-exist alongside stupidity. The customer service representative who keeps you on the phone for an hour, hangs up on you twice, and somehow still manages to screw up your account? Stupid. The uncle unable to stop himself from posting fake news articles to Facebook? Stupid. A stupid person, according to the economist, is one who causes problems for others without any clear benefit to himself. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.Ĭipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. And any guess would almost certainly violate the first law, anyway. How numerous are the stupid amongst us? It's impossible to say. There are stupid people in every nation on earth. There are stupid people at Davos and at the UN General Assembly. Every category one can imagine-gender, race, nationality, education level, income-possesses a fixed percentage of stupid people. Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.Ĭipolla posits stupidity is a variable that remains constant across all populations. This problem is compounded by biased assumptions that certain people are intelligent based on superficial factors like their job, education level, or other traits we believe to be exclusive of stupidity. No matter how many idiots you suspect yourself surrounded by, Cipolla wrote, you are invariably lowballing the total. Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. Let's take a look at Cipolla's five basic laws of human stupidity: The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000.
Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society's total well-being. In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity's greatest existential threat: Stupidity. In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.
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