Since Trump was elected back in 2016, I’ve been referencing these laws to people. Written in 1976 by Italian economic historian Carlo Cipolla, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” began as a funny pamphlet he’d share with friends.

The pamphlet spread through photocopies and word-of-mouth, eventually appearing in publications. It wasn’t formally published until 1988, when it appeared in Italian in a book called “Allegro ma non troppo” .¹

These are Cipolla’s five fundamental laws of stupidity:

1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. 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.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places, and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Cipolla concludes this list by adding this final remark:

Corollary: a stupid person is more dangerous than a pillager.

Which category of idiots came into your mind reading this? Maybe whoever voted the pedo-orange man?

We’re used to thinking about people acting rationally in their own interest (even if that harms others), but stupid behaviour is destructive without purpose, harmful without benefit.

Cipolla’s Wikipedia page includes the graph below.

By creating a graph of Cipolla’s two factors, we obtain four groups of people.  Helpless people contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it; Intelligent people contribute to society and leverage their contributions into personal benefits; Stupid people are counterproductive to both their and others’ interests; Bandits pursue their own self-interest even when this poses a net detriment to societal welfare. An additional category of ineffectual people either exists in its own right or can be considered to be in the center of the graph.

Now tell me you read this without thinking about Elon Musk and all the other techno-oligarchs.

A point to keep in mind is that the distinction between bandits and stupid people often only becomes clear after we see whether they actually gained anything from the harm they caused.

Stupid behaviour is uniquely destructive because it’s unpredictable and purposeless.

Nearly 50 years after Cipolla wrote this, his fourth law feels particularly relevant: non-stupid people constantly underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. We keep expecting rationality where there is none, looking for hidden strategies where there’s only chaos.