The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity - Hardcover

Cipolla, Carlo M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385546475 ISBN 13: 9780385546478

Verlag: Doubleday Books, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • An economist explains five laws that confirm our worst fears: stupid people can and do rule the world

"A masterly book" —Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan • "A classic" —Simon Kuper, Financial Times

Throughout history, a powerful force has hindered the growth of human welfare and happiness. It is more powerful than the Mafia or the military. It has global catastrophic effects and can be found anywhere from the world's most powerful boardrooms to your local bar.

It is human stupidity.

Carlo M. Cipolla, noted professor of economic history at the UC Berkeley, created this vitally important book in order to detect and neutralize its threat. Both hilarious and dead serious, it will leave you better equipped to confront political realities, unreasonable colleagues, or your next dinner with your in-laws.

The Laws:

1. Everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals among us.
2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses themselves.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CARLO M. CIPOLLA (1922-2000) was an Italian economic historian, Fulbright Fellow and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Cipolla was awarded the International Balzan Prize for Economic History in 1995 and held honorary degrees in Italy and Switzerland. His classic treatise The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity was first published in 1988 and has been published in more than ten languages. Originally written in English, this is the first time it's being published in the US.

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Chapter I

The First Basic Law

ALWAYS AND INEVITABLY EVERYONE UNDERESTIMATES

THE NUMBER OF STUPID INDIVIDUALS IN CIRCULATION.

The First Basic Law of Human Stupidity asserts without ambiguity that

Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

At first, the statement sounds trivial, vague and horribly ungenerous. Closer scrutiny will, however, reveal its realistic veracity. No matter how high are one’s estimates of human stupidity, one is repeatedly and recurrently startled by the fact that

a) people whom one had once judged rational and intelligent turn out to be unashamedly stupid;

b) day after day, with unceasing monotony, one is harassed in one’s activities by stupid individuals who appear suddenly and unexpectedly in the most inconvenient places and at the most improbable moments.

The First Basic Law prevents me from attributing a specific numerical value to the fraction of stupid people within the total population: any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate. Thus in the following pages I will denote the fraction of stupid people within a population by the symbol σ.

Chapter II

The Second Basic Law

THE PROBABILITY THAT A CERTAIN PERSON BE STUPID

IS INDEPENDENT OF ANY OTHER CHARACTERISTIC OF THAT PERSON.

Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favor an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations, that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than the others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature.

I take exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence.

Although convinced that fraction σ of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion. This fact is scientifically expressed by the Second Basic Law, which states that

The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

In this regard, Nature seems indeed to have outdone herself. It is well known that Nature manages, rather mysteriously, to keep constant the relative frequency of certain natural phenomena. For instance, whether men proliferate at the North Pole or at the equator, whether the matching couples are developed or developing, whether they are black or white, the female to male ratio among the newly born is a constant, with a very slight prevalence of males. We do not know how Nature achieves this remarkable result but we know that in order to achieve it Nature must operate with large numbers. The most remarkable fact about the frequency of stupidity is that Nature succeeds in making this frequency equal to the probability σ quite independently from the size of the group. Thus one finds the same percentage of stupid people whether one is considering very large groups or dealing with very small ones. No other set of observable phenomena offers such striking proof of the powers of Nature.

The evidence that education has nothing to do with the probability σ was provided by experiments carried out in a large number of universities all over the world. One may distinguish the composite population that constitutes a university in five major groups, namely the blue-collar workers, the white-collar employees, the students, the administrators, and the professors.

Whenever I analyzed the blue-collar workers I found that the fraction σ of them were stupid. As σ’s value was higher than I expected (First Law), paying my tribute to fashion I thought at first that segregation, poverty, lack of education were to be blamed. But moving up the social ladder I found that the same ratio was prevalent among the white-collar employees and among the students. More impressive still were the results among the professors. Whether I considered a large university or a small college, a famous institution or an obscure one, I found that the same fraction σ of the professors were stupid. So bewildered was I by the results that I made a special point to extend my research to a specially selected group, to a real elite, the Nobel laureates. The result confirmed Nature’s supreme powers: σ fraction of the Nobel laureates were stupid.

This idea was hard to accept and digest, but too many experimental results proved its fundamental veracity. The Second Basic Law is an iron law, and it does not admit exceptions. The Women’s Liberation Movement will support the Second Basic Law; as it shows that stupid individuals are proportionally as numerous among men as among women. The “developing” of the “Third World” will probably take solace in the Second Basic Law as they can find in it the proof that after all the developed are not so developed. Whether the Second Basic Law is liked or not, however, its implications are frightening: the law implies that whether you move in distinguished circles or you take refuge among the headhunters of Polynesia, whether you lock yourself in a monastery or decide to spend the rest of your life in the company of beautiful and lascivious women, you always have to face the same percentage of stupid people—which percentage (in accordance with the First Law) will always surpass your expectations.

Chapter III

A Technical Interlude

At this point it is imperative to elucidate the concept of human stupidity and to define the dramatis personae.

Individuals are characterized by different degrees of propensity to socialize. There are individuals for whom any contact with other individuals is a painful necessity. They literally have to put up with people, and people have to put up with them. At the other extreme of the spectrum there are individuals who absolutely cannot live by themselves and are even ready to spend time in the company of people whom they do not really like rather than be alone. Between these two extremes, there is an extreme variety of conditions, although by far the greatest majority of people are closer to the type who cannot face loneliness than to the type who has no taste for human intercourse. Aristotle recognized this fact when he wrote that “Man is a social animal” and the validity of his statement is demonstrated by the fact that we move in social groups, that there are more married people than bachelors and spinsters, that so much wealth and time are wasted in fatiguing and boring cocktail parties, and that the word loneliness normally carries a negative connotation.

Whether one belongs to the hermit or to the socialite type, one deals with people, although with different intensity. Even the hermits occasionally meet people. Moreover, one affects human beings also by avoiding them. What I could have done for an individual or a group but did not do is an opportunity-cost (i.e., a lost gain or loss) for that particular person or group. The moral of the story is that each one of us has a current balance with everybody else. From each action or inaction we derive a gain or a loss and at...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Doubleday Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385546475
• ISBN 13: 9780385546478
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 81
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Doubleday; https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland