Sorting people by whether an action benefits them and benefits others yields four types, and the one who harms others while gaining nothing is the most dangerous because he is unpredictable.
Cipolla, an Italian economic historian at Berkeley, circulated the essay privately in 1976. The matrix crosses gain to self against gain to others and gives the intelligent, the bandit, the helpless and the stupid. His definition is the contribution: a stupid person causes losses to others while deriving no gain and often incurring losses himself, which makes him harder to model than a bandit, whose incentives can at least be predicted. He noted the M in his own name was an invention.
In practice
- A colleague pursuing his own advantage can be negotiated with; one damaging the project and himself at once cannot.
- A committee that assumes bad actors are self-interested is unprepared for the member with no stake in the outcome.
- Possible explanations
- The useful part is the matrix: crossing benefit to oneself with benefit to others separates the merely selfish, who gain at others' expense, from the destructive, who lose while inflicting loss, which ordinary usage runs together.
- In its favour
- The distinction is genuinely clarifying, and it names a category, harm without gain, that most accounts of behaviour leave out.
- Against it
- It was written as satire and offered as laws, no measurement supports the claims about prevalence, and the categories are assigned after the outcome, which makes them descriptive rather than predictive.
- Standing
- Written as satire and offered as laws; no measurement supports the claims about prevalence. The matrix is the durable part, because it separates malice from stupidity on a criterion that can actually be applied.
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Why reasoning works the way it does