by Ugo Bardi
I remember having met Carlo Maria Cipolla in Berkeley in the 1980s. At that time, I wasn’t involved with biophysical studies, but I was already a fan of his work. His treatise on stupidity was truly a masterpiece of intelligence and humor. Then, his description of money forgers in Florence during the Middle Ages included also a mention of some of my remote ancestors, no doubt very enterprising people, actually too much! Cipolla was an incredibly brilliant writer and, in real life, he was charming, generous, and modest.
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Cipolla’s work on stupidity has been in my mind for a long time. His ideas on the matter were so simple and yet so deep. And he was expressing these deep concepts in a plain language that everyone could understand. The “third law,” the basic one, is expressed as
“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.”
So simple, and it happens all the time. We are surrounded by stupidity, embedded in stupidity, accomplices of stupidity, perpetrators of stupidity. It seems to be a sort of cosmic ether that permeates everything and, unlike the ether of physics, it really exists. But why is it so common?
Recently, we got together with my coworker Ilaria Perissi, and we started thinking about making a model of Cipolla’s law. Ilaria has been modeling the production cycles of fisheries using the biophysical model called the “Lotka-Volterra” model and, together, we published an entire book, “The Empty Sea,” on that subject starting from those studies. (as you can see in the picture, Ilaria is very proud of that book: her first book in English!).
As you probably know, the Lotka-Volterra model is supposed to describe the interaction of two populations: predators and prey. It is often called the “Foxes and Rabbits” model. But it is much more than that. It is a simple model that goes very deep into the concept of “potential dissipation” that dominates the functioning of complex systems in the real world.
So, not surprising that the Lotka-Volterra model could give us some deep insight into Cipolla’s intuition. According to our interpretation, stupidity occurs when the dissipation of an energy potential goes too fast: the result is what we call “overexploitation” in which people exploit a resource to the point of destroying it, and damage themselves in the process. Fortunately, we also found that these systems can adapt in the long run. In an evolutionary system, stupidity punishes itself, but it takes time. Unfortunately, we are still in the midst of what could be the greatest stupidity wave that the ecosystem ever saw in its nearly four billion years of existence.
Here is the introduction to our paper. You can read it on ArXiv (we are planning to publish it in a scientific journal soon). It is written according to the rules of formal scientific prose, but one of our purposes in writing it was to follow Cipolla’s example and demonstrate that a scientific paper need not be incomprehensible and boring!
The 6th Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla’s Stupidity Laws
Ilaria Perissi and Ugo Bardi
Dipartimento di Chimica – Università di Firenze.
Polo Scientifico di Sesto Fiorentino, via della Lastruccia 3
50019 Sesto Fiorentino (Fi) – Italy
Abstract
Carlo Cipolla’s “stupidity quadrant” and his five laws of stupidity were proposed for the first time in 1976 [1]. Exposed in a humorous mood by the author, these concepts nevertheless describe very serious features of the interactions among human beings. Here, we propose a new interpretation of Cipolla’s ideas in a biophysical framework, using the well-known “predator-prey,” Lotka-Volterra model. We find that there is indeed a correspondence between Cipolla’s approach – based on economics – and biophysical economics. Based on this examination, we propose a “6th law of stupidity,” additional to the five proposed by Cipolla. The law states that “humans are the stupidest species in the ecosystem”
Introduction
In 1976, the economist and historian Carlo M. Cipolla (1922-2000) wrote an essay titled “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.” Initially, it was only a pamphlet circulated among friends [1], but later it was published as a book [2]. Written in a tongue-in-cheek style, Cipolla’s text analyzed human behavior using a simple semi-quantitative model in the form of two individuals (“agents”) interacting with each other in performing an economic transaction.
Cipolla reasoned in terms of the payoff of each transaction, arranging the possible outcomes as a quadrant divided into four subsectors. One of the two agents may gain something at the expense of the other, but it may also happen that both profit from the exchange. The worst possible situation is the one in which both lose something. The kind of agents who cause someone else’s loss while damaging also themselves in the process were labeled by Cipolla as “stupid people.”
From there, Cipolla went on defining the five “laws of stupidity” as 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, and 5) A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Today, Carlo Cipolla may well be better known for his quadrant and the five laws, that he probably thought of as a joke, than for his academic papers. One of the reasons for this popularity is that these ideas ring true: they make sense according to our everyday experience. Indeed, Cipolla’s ideas have been examined, discussed, and modeled in various ways for instance in terms of game theory [3] and of agent-based modeling [4].
Here, we wish to take a fresh look at Cipolla’s theory using a biophysical approach. That is, we will frame Cipolla’s quadrant in terms of a complex system similar to biological ones. We’ll use the model known as the “Lotka-Volterra” (LV) one, also known as the “predator-prey” or “Foxes and Rabbits” model [5], [6]. Our examination leads us to propose a “6th law of stupidity” that applies to the whole ecosystem and that has that “Humans are the stupidest species on Earth.”
This article was published on The Seneca Effect 12 April 2021.
The caption graphic was adapted from the following:
Illustration by James Donnelly for the original 1976 paper by Carlo M. Cipolla “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” Recently, Ugo Bardi and Ilaria Perissi reviewed his work on the basis of modern Biophysical Economics arriving to validate and extend the laws. Not only, as Cipolla said, stupidity is common and dangerous among humans, but humans may be the stupidest species in the whole ecosystem!
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