The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
TL;DR — An economic historian’s five laws of stupidity, defining it precisely: harming others while gaining nothing yourself.
Carlo M. Cipolla, illustrations by James Donnelly — this copy from a UC Davis personal page, which is how it circulated for years.
Cipolla was a serious economic historian writing a joke with a real structure. His definition is the load-bearing part: a stupid person is one who causes losses to another while deriving no gain, and possibly incurring losses themselves. That splits the world into four quadrants — intelligent, helpless, bandit, stupid — and the third law makes stupidity a distinct and more dangerous category than malice, because it is not predictable by incentive.
Nine pages. The fifth law: the stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Where this came from
9 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.