| Born | August 15, 1922 |
|---|---|
| Died | September 5, 2000 (aged 78) |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Field | Economic history |
| Alma mater | University of Pavia |
| Opposed | Robert Fogel Douglass North |
Carlo M. Cipolla (August 15, 1922 – September 5, 2000) was an Italian economic historian. He was born in Pavia, where he got his academic degree in 1944.
Through his study of economic history, he showed a keen interest in the causes that prompted specific economic and social situations during history, instead of focusing on facts and figures. He was noted as well for his work on overpopulation and his essays on human stupidity.
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As a young man, Cipolla wanted to teach history and philosophy in an Italian high school, and therefore enrolled at the political science faculty at Pavia University. Whilst a student there, thanks to professor Franco Borlandi, a specialist in Medieval economic history, he discovered his passion for economic history. Subsequently he studied at the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics.
Cipolla obtained his first teaching post in economic history in Catania at the age of 27. This was to be the first stop in a long academic career in Italy (Venice, Turin, Pavia, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and Fiesole) and abroad. In 1953 Cipolla left for the United States as a Fulbright fellow and in 1957 became a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Two years later he obtained a full professorship. In 1995 he received the Balzan Prize with this motivation "Carlo Maria Cipolla is considered by his peers as a leader in economic history who knew how to instill a spirit of innovation in the discipline. Thanks to his intellectual curiosity, dominated by the most rigorous thought and methodology, and through meticulous research of source material, he has combined the macro-historic approach with studies in micro-history in works of great originality and solidity, which cover a broad range of economic and cultural fields".
Cipolla's most popular work is a collection of two tongue-in-cheek essays on economics, first published in 1988 with the title Allegro ma non troppo ("Happy but not by too much" or, as in music, "Quickly, but not too quick").
The first essay, The Fundamental Laws of Human Stupidity,[1] explores the controversial subject of stupidity. Stupid people are seen as a group, more powerful by far than major organizations such as the Mafia and the industrial complex, which without regulations, leaders or manifesto nonetheless manages to operate to great effect and with incredible coordination.
These are Cipolla's five fundamental laws of stupidity:
As is evident from the third law, Cipolla identifies two factors to consider when exploring human behaviour:
By creating a graph with the first factor on the x-axis and the second on the y-axis, we obtain four groups of people:
Cipolla further refines his definition of "Bandits" and "Helpless People" by noting that members of these groups can either add to or detract from the general welfare, depending on the relative gains (or losses) that they cause themselves and society. A bandit may enrich himself more or less than he impoverishes society, and a helpless person may enrich society more or less than he impoverishes himself. Graphically, this idea is represented by a line of slope -1, which bisects the second and fourth quadrants and intersects the y-axis at the origin. The helpless people and bandits to the left of this line are thus semi "stupid," because they represent a net drain of societal welfare.
The second essay, The role of spices (and black pepper in particular) in Medieval Economic Development, traces the curious correlation between spice import and population expansion in the late Middle Ages, postulating a causation due to a supposed aphrodisiac effect of black pepper.