the basic laws of human stupidity carlo cipolla

His classic treatise The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity has sold more than half a million copies worldwide in over ten languages. He also held honorary degrees in Italy and Switzerland. Previously, class, caste, and religion guaranteed that stupid people rose to power, but nowadays general elections achieve the same ends by offering stupid voters “a magnificent opportunity to harm everybody else without gaining anything from their action.” In countries on the decline, Cipolla writes, “bandits with overtones of stupidity” proliferate in the corridors of power, while the rest of the population sees an “alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals.” Cipolla never drops his arch, academic tone to reveal his political views, but progressive readers looking for parallels to the Trump era will find plenty in this subtly lacerating account. Cipolla was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1989 and awarded the International Balzan Prize for Economic History in 1995.

An economist explores the five laws that confirm our worst fears: stupid people can and do rule the world. Cipolla (1922–2000), a professor of economic history at UC Berkeley, argues that, of the four types of human beings (”the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit, and the stupid”), a stupid person is the most dangerous to society because he “causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.” Though every group has the same percentage of stupid people, their actual numbers are always underestimated, Cipolla posits. A masterly book Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan. Stupidity is “one of the most powerful dark forces that hinder the growth of human welfare and happiness,” according to this tongue-in-cheek treatise originally published in a 1976 private edition.

The basic laws of human stupidity carlo cipolla