"How can they be so stupid?"

 A friend recently called me to describe a conversation he'd had with a not-so-bright local guy who is clearly well into the stupid quadrant. I tried to link my friend to this article, "The Five Universal Laws of Human Stupidity," but discovered that I had never finished writing about this brilliant piece of sociology. So, there it is (the link earlier in this paragraph) and it is well worth reading the original essay.

In 1976, Carlo M. Cipolla, a professor of economic history at the UC-Berkeley, "published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity."  He listed their identifying traits as: "they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being."  He warned that "The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren."  We appear to be approaching a point in history where the incredibly stupid so outnumber the rest of humanity that work alone won't do the job. 

Cipolla defines the "laws of stupidity" as: 

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

#2)The probability that a certain person 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 created a quadrant of human types that accurately defines the possibilities, clockwise from top right: Helpless, Intelligent, Bandit, & Stupid.

 Hopefully, you can see from his illustration that this was a semi-light-hearted essay. Or maybe he just figured we were all too dumb to take his warning seriously and went for the humor; since we have to laugh about the stuff we'd cry about otherwise. Anyway, I recommend the essay and . . . look out for stupid people.