Stupidity
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Italian economic historian and raconteur Carlo Cipolla pinned down stupidity in his 1976 essay Le leggi fondamentali della stupidità umana - “the basic laws of human stupidity”. They are, broadly, these:
- To be stupid is to harm someone else without personally benefitting. Stupidity results inevitably in net loss. Pillagers may be nasty, but they aren’t stupid.
- Stupid people are worse that pillagers. At least someone derives a benefit from pillaging.
- An individual’s stupidity is independent of her other qualities. Tenured brainboxes, that is to say, are no less immune to stupidity as the rest of us.
- We systematically underestimate how many stupid people there are.
- We systematically underestimate how much damage stupid people can do.
Cipolla went on to create one of those simplistic four-box charts which of course cannot possibly hope to describe the world, but is still an amusing heuristic. The two axes are “benefits to self” and “benefits to world”. The four quadrants are the intelligent who help others and help themselves; the bandits, who help themselves by harming others, the helpless, who help others without personally benefiting, and the stupid who basically just get in the way, not doing themselves or anyone else any favours.
Being as it is a cost, the JC is somewhere between helpless and stupid. Being a glass half-full sort of fellow, I likes to think of myself as merely helpless. It certainly feels that way.