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THE BASIC LAWS OF STUPIDITY, by Carlo Cipolla
Foreword by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
When I start at the top left corner of a page in The Basic Laws, I have the feeling of reading a satire. Ten lines into it, some doubts erupt –this can be serious. When I reach the bottom right corner, I am certain it must be a serious work of scholarship in economic analysis. Then, upon turning the page, the cycle starts again, thankfully, because economics is boring (by design) and this is playful, hence fun to read.
The Basic Laws asserts that 1) there will always be more stupid people than you think, 2) the proportion of stupid people is invariant to intellectual, social, or geographic segmentation. The ratio will be the same among Nobel Prize winners as it will be among a selection of tax accountants (except I am sure that there must be a higher prevalence among laureates of the pseudo-Nobel in economics). I will leave the remaining laws to avoid spoiling the read –this is a very short book.
By the time my eyes reach the bottom right corner, and I realize this is not a joke, the following ideas pop into my head. First, the author has a formal axiomatic definition of what stupid means: someone who harms others without procuring any gain for himself or herself –in contrast to the much more predictable bandit who gains something from harming you. As such stupid persons can cause a lot of damage –unlike bandits, they have no interest in the survival of the system because they do not benefit from their stupidity. Second, the laws here are real laws, as far as economic laws are concerned, no less rigorously obtained than Adam Smith’s three laws, the law of diminishing return, Okun’s law, or some such thing you forget about seconds after taking the final exam. (By contrast, I promise that you will remember Cipolla’s laws forever).
Finally, one wonders: why is there a constant proportion of stupid people, invariant to time, place, geography, profession, body mass index, degrees of separation from the Queen of Denmark, and professional rank? The solution of the mystery may lie in the Italian title, Allegro ma non troppo. Fast, but not too fast. It could be that Mother Nature (or God, whatever your theology) wants to put a brake on things, reduce the speed of progress, slow down the growth of your employer, prevent GDP from an exponential rise so the economy doesn’t overheat. So She created the stupid person acting against both his and the collective interest to just do that.
A masterly book.
