The Sixth Law of Stupidity: A Biophysical Interpretation of Carlo Cipolla’s Stupidity Laws

Abstract

Carlo Cipolla’s stupidity quadrant and his five laws of stupidity were proposed for the first time in 1976. Exposed in a humorous mood by the author, these concepts describe the interactions among human beings in terms of a semiquantitative model based on the gains and losses of the agents engaged in a process. Here, we propose a new interpretation of Cipolla’s ideas in a biophysical framework, using the well known “predator–prey”, or “Lotka–Volterra”, model. We find that there is indeed a correspondence between Cipolla’s approach, based on economics and biophysical economics. We propose a “sixth law of stupidity”, additional to the five proposed by Cipolla, stating that “humans are the stupidest species in the whole ecosystem” because of their tendency of overexploiting natural resources.

Keywords

• stupidity
• Lotka–Volterra
• Carlo Cipolla
• economic agents
• predator–prey