The Power Of Stupidity

Sometimes, academics and philosophers help us understand widespread human frailties and idiocies. In 2005, The American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt wrote “On Bullshit” a book in which he defined bullshit as speech intended to persuade without any regard for the truth. That definition certainly seems pertinent to the current state of our politics.

I’ve read “On Bullshit,” but I was unaware of an earlier, equally pertinent publication written fifty years ago by an economic historian. The title was “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity,” and the thesis of the book–which an article in The New Republic explained grew out of an essay originally written for some friends–was that “stupid people, as a group, are much more powerful than the mafia, or the military industrial complex.”

Well, that might explain America’s current woes…

I’d never heard of him, but the article described the author, Carlo Cipolla, as a “prolific intellectual,” and his observations certainly seem apt for our current times. As the linked article notes, we are currently witnessing

one of the dumbest wars in history unraveling in Iran, an inept health and human services secretary working to bring back measles and polio, a Republican Party wherein only 20 percent view the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a violent insurrection but 71 percent deny Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and an administration that refuses to properly regulate AI and crypto industries that threaten the economic well-being and safety of all.

Cipolla outlined what he called “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity” in 1976—another time of considerable social unrest. It is described as a mixture of satire and serious scholarship, which he introduced with the following paragraph:

Let me point out at this juncture that most emphatically this little book is neither a product of cynicism nor an exercise in defeatism—no more than a book on microbiology is. The following pages are in fact the result of a constructive effort to detect, know, and thus possibly neutralize one of the most powerful dark forces that hinder the growth of human welfare and happiness.

Cipolla identified four different groups of people: the helpless (or hapless), whose actions–while harming themselves–  benefit others; the intelligent, whose actions benefit both themselves and others; the bandits, who enrich themselves while harming others; and the stupid, whose actions harm others while producing no benefit to themselves. (The author of the linked article has difficulty deciding whether Trump is a bandit or stupid; he concludes that Trump’s obvious, utter stupidity still can’t match his unadulterated greed, so he puts him in the “bandit” category, but “right beside” stupid.)

According to Cipolla’s 50-year-old book, what must be avoided at all costs is allowing stupid people to gain power, something that endangers everyone. When the intelligent fail to keep the stupid in check, he says societies “head downhill fast.” Anyone paying attention to what’s happened to the United States in the less than two years of Trump II will agree.

The book identifies five laws of stupidity:

  • Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
  • The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
  • 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.
  • 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 infallibly turns out to be a costly mistake.
  • A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Stupidity shouldn’t be confused with a lack of education. As the article notes, a number of stupid people hold degrees from prestigious institutions: Ted Cruz (Harvard), RFK Jr. (Harvard), Sam Alito (Yale), Clarence Thomas (Yale), Josh Hawley (Yale).  For that matter, individuals with power and credentials are more dangerous than stupid people who only have power, because “they’re more likely to think they actually know what they’re talking about.”

The linked article contrasts the guardrails erected to limit the threat posed by the Atom bomb to the Trump administration’s refusal to regulate AI, despite the fact that people involved in AI’s development are warning of its dangers. “It’s like we built a hydrogen bomb, then entrusted Gordon Gekko to make a profit off it and Barney Fife to monitor him. What could go wrong?”

I guess we’ll see.

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Early Voting Starts Today In Indiana

Early voting starts today in Indiana. Later today, my husband and I intend to cast our ballots, and I encourage every registered voter reading this in Indiana–or in any state where early voting has begun– to do the same. I’ve previously explained why early voting, preferably in person, is so important this year; a massive early turnout will make it far more difficult for Trump to play games with the midterm results.

Here in Red Indiana, I intend to vote Blue, and I have high hopes that Hoosiers can rid ourselves of the GOP’s culture-war super-majority in our dreadful state legislature. But Indiana’s ballot also asks us to approve two changes to the state constitution. I intend to vote NO on both, and I hope those of you in the Hoosier state will join me in rejecting them.

The first proposed measure is the most pernicious. It would amend Article I, Section 17 of the state constitution. It reads as follows:

Currently, under the Constitution of the State of Indiana, a person charged with murder or treason is not entitled to be released on bail if the proof is evident or the presumption strong. Shall the Constitution of the State of Indiana be amended to provide that a person charged with an offense other than murder or treason is not entitled to bail if: (1) the proof is evident or the presumption strong; and (2) the state proves by clear and convincing evidence that no release conditions will reasonably protect the safety of any other person or the community.

There are all kinds of reasons why this is a bad idea. Courts already have ample tools to protect public safety while accused folks (who are, remember, innocent until proven guilty) are out on bail: supervision, money bail, electronic monitoring, no-contact orders, treatment, testing, and travel restrictions come to mind. Furthermore, available data shows that 98.6% of those deemed high risk do not commit violent crimes while they are out on bail.

It seems unfair to keep people who have yet to be convicted from earning a living during the months between being charged and being tried, but it’s Indiana jails that will face the real problem if this unnecessary measure passes. For more years than I can count, the state’s jails have been so stretched, so over-crowded and under-resourced that they have frequently been targets of successful lawsuits requiring them to expand. When those lawsuits succeed–and most do– we taxpayers shell out a lot of money. In 2024, thirty-one of Indiana’s jails were operating above above the state’s recommended capacity threshold, and eight were above 100% capacity.

Most of the judges I know are thoughtful and fair-minded, but there is no reason to give the occasional MAGA rogue additional authority to “lock ’em up.” This ballot question is a solution in search of a problem, and I hope voters recognize that and vote NO.

The second ballot question is less pernicious, and you may disagree with my conclusion that it, too, should garner a NO vote. it would amend Article 6, Section 6, of the state’s constitution. It reads:

Shall the Constitution of the State of Indiana be amended to permit the judge of a city or town court to reside in: (1) the county in which the court is located; or (2) the bordering county closest to the city or town in which the court is located?

I think there are good reasons for judges to reside in the counties inhabited by the people their decisions affect. There are undoubtedly highly competent lawyers in the fancier suburbs of Indiana’s urban counties, but I see no persuasive reason why they shouldn’t confine their desire for judicial status to the counties within which they have chosen to live. Granted, a judgeship in a more highly populated city is likely to produce more publicity and attention, but I personally see no reason to change Indiana’s constitution simply to allow ambitious lawyers to occupy more prominent benches.

Whatever my fellow Hoosiers decide when faced with these ballot measures, I urge you–plead with you– to VOTE EARLY. As I’ve previously argued, early voting allows campaigns to improve their Get-Out-The-Vote efforts. Every night, campaigns get a list of people who voted that day, allowing them to focus their efforts only on the people who haven’t yet voted. The larger the number of voters who vote early–preferably on Day 1–the easier it is to increase turnout for one’s candidate. And in this midterm election, massive turnout is essential.

See you at the polls–EARLY.

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What If…??

A few years ago, my husband and I were on a very small chartered boat cruising the coast of Croatia (which is an absolutely beautiful country, by the way). There were only 13 people on board. Two of the other couples were Australian, and one of the Australian women was a retired professor of public policy and management.

We obviously had a lot to talk about and compare, and I was particularly struck by a fact I hadn’t previously known–that in Australia, voting is mandatory. Initially, I was shocked–my instincts tend toward the libertarian, and my first impulse was to respond with something like “If I don’t want to participate, that’s my right!” But I’ve subsequently thought about the pros and cons of such a mandate, and done some research on Australia’s experience.

It turns out that Australia has had compulsory voting for that country’s federal elections since 1924. (Enrollment/registration had been compulsory since 1911.) What the law requires is simply that the voter show up and get a ballot. What that voter does with the ballot is irrelevant– it can be left blank or even deliberately spoiled.

Non-voters–those who don’t show up at the polls–are required to explain. If they lack a valid reason–illness, etc.–they are required to pay a small fine.

So how has this worked?

Turnout for Australia’s elections has consistently hovered between 90-96% of enrolled/registered voters, placing Australia’s turnout among the highest in the democratic world. People who don’t comply get a notice requiring them to either supply a reason or pay the fine.

Rather obviously, when the state demands participation, it has a strong incentive to make voting easy. As a result, unlike in the U.S., voting takes place on Saturdays, and there are multiple and widespread polling places. There is also voting by mail and early voting.

The system has a number of virtues. Thanks to the massive turnout, results have more legitimacy and representativeness than in the U.S. (In the last few municipal elections in my city, something like 17% of registered voters have chosen our mayor…). Research has shown that turnout in voluntary systems skews older, wealthier, and more educated, while compulsory voting flattens that gap. Australian governments are elected by nearly the whole electorate.

There are other virtues: Parties don’t need to pour resources into getting out the vote, so campaigns focus more on persuading swing voters. Mandatory voting also dramatically reduces incentives for the sorts of voter suppression tactics that are a feature of U.S. elections.

When voting is mandatory, it becomes a civic norm, a shared civic duty like jury service. The requirement builds habits of engagement and–by rewarding appeals to the broad middle–helps to reduce polarization.

The arguments against mandatory voting (some of which echo my own initial reaction) include what we might call “liberty concerns”– essentially, that freedom to vote should include freedom not to. There’s also a concern about uninformed voting; citizens who are required to participate may vote randomly, or just for whoever is listed on the ballot first. (Of course, as most of us are aware, uninformed voting also features prominently in the U.S., where participation is not required.)

According to Claude, most research shows that compulsory voting “substantially raises turnout and modestly shifts electoral outcomes and policy toward lower-income and younger voters.” The size of partisan effects is debated. Evidence that it makes citizens more informed or engaged over the long run is weaker and mixed. In Australia, public support for the system has been stable and fairly strong, with periodic surveys showing a majority in favor of retaining the system.

The bottom line is that the law has clearly succeeded at the narrow goal of near-universal turnout, and most Australians–like the professor I met on our cruise– treat it as unremarkable, and certainly not as an infringement on their liberties.

Much of the debate about such laws centers on a simple question: is voting a right or is it a civic obligation. I think the correct answer to that question is “both.”

As regular readers of this blog know, in America’s 2024 election, a greater number of people failed to vote than voted for either candidate. Political scientists and sociologists can make of that statistic what they will, but it is clearly a massive failure of civic obligation.

There is a continuing debate between libertarians and communitarians over the privileging of individualism versus the degree of “embeddedness” in the community. I am firmly with the ancient Greeks, who aimed for the “golden mean” between extremes, and I’ve come to think that the Australians have hit that golden mean when it comes to mandatory voting.

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Things That Drive Me Nuts…

I’m annoyed and I need to vent.

A comprehensive list of things I find infuriating (or that drive me to drink) would be far too long to post. (I’m pretty cranky.) That said, I want to focus this diatribe on two related falsehoods: the widespread, rampant dishonesty about crime rates generally, and the related, wildly distorted perceptions of danger in the downtown I happily inhabit.

Crime and punishment first.

In the upcoming election, Indianapolis voters will decide whether to retain Democrat Ryan Mears–our current prosecutor–or replace him with Philip Foust, his Republican opponent. As you might expect, those opposed to Mears are trotting out all the usual tropes about criminals running rampant through the streets of Marion County, and claiming that this (nonexistent) onslaught is a direct result of Mears being “soft on crime.”

The Indianapolis Star actually looked at the data–delving into plea deals, convictions and the like, and pretty thoroughly debunked that accusation. (It’s a lengthy article, and my own impression after reading it was that what really annoys at least one of Mears’ critics–the head of the police union–is that Mears isn’t “soft” on police misconduct.)

I happen to greatly admire Prosecutor Mears, who has angered GOP culture warriors by announcing that he isn’t going to send teenagers to jail for smoking small amounts of weed, and that he definitely isn’t going to prosecute women who’ve had abortions. They’re free to criticise those decisions; that’s politics. What makes me fume is the phoney rhetoric that accompanies those criticisms–accusations about the presumed prevalence of crime in our city.

I’ve looked at the data: Total homicides are about half of what they were five years ago. One source puts the drop from the 2021 peak at roughly 45%, with 2025 as the fourth straight year of decreases. Non-fatal shootings have been cut in half since 2022, and IMPD has reported a 38% decline so far in 2026 compared with the same point in 2025. Robberies have dropped nearly 60 percent, according to IMPD’s mid-year 2026 statistics.

The clear implication of the political charges being thrown at Mears is that crime is on the upswing and it’s his fault, so the actual steep decline in the Marion County crime rate is rather inconvenient. More to the point, in real life, the successes and failures of the criminal justice system are a function of the way the entire system–including police, prosecutors, and judges–operates.

And that brings me to the second of today’s irritations, the belief that the Indianapolis downtown is especially dangerous. Last December, then-IMPD Chief Chris Bailey reported that downtown accounts for less than 6% of crime in the entire city.

One reason for the belief that downtown is a hellhole is that, whenever a criminal incident does occur downtown, it garners publicity that feeds a perception that is simply not supported by that pesky thing called data. There is, rather obviously, another reason for the belief in downtown’s dangers–a belief held primarily by suburbanites and those who retreat each night to the presumed safety of gated communities.

As I have noted previously, thanks to Trump’s rhetoric and his constant assaults on immigrants of color, the racism that has always been latent in much of our population has surfaced and become far more pronounced. Densely populated urban areas–especially city centers–are typically diverse. (The IBJ recently reported that the Indianapolis downtown–with its 30,500 residents–is 8.6% Asian, 16.2% Black, 8.9% Hispanic, 61.9% White and 4.4% other. In lily-White Indiana, that’s diverse.)

In other words, there are more of “those people” downtown. And “those people” are scary. Dangerous. (If you believe MAGA rhetoric, “they” are all criminals…)

I live in the very center of Indianapolis. I walk to my bank, to my dentist, to my grocery store, to a variety of bars and restaurants. I have never felt threatened. Believe it or not, the people I pass on the street who don’t look like me are just  people who don’t look like me, going about their own business.

Thanks to the current political environment fostered by Trump and MAGA, Americans are constantly being primed to fear anyone who can be considered “other.” Folks who live in less diverse precincts are vulnerable to that fear. It’s pernicious and unfounded. (One example: a couple of months ago, I tripped on a sidewalk that needed repair–the condition of our sidewalks is a legitimate critique of downtown–and several of “those people” rushed to help me up and ask if I was okay.)

Perhaps if those frightened people spent more time downtown, they’d be less likely to buy into the stereotypes.

OK. Rant over.

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The Prerogative State

A while back, Lincoln Square published an essay that focused on a book written by an immigrant named Ernst Fraenkel. Born in 1898 in Germany, Fraenkel fought for the Kaiser in World War I. He then became a prominent lawyer, but he was Jewish–and when the Nazi party gained control, he was banned from appearing in court. In 1938, he fled Germany, came to America and became an American citizen.

After studying American law at the University of Chicago, Fraenkel wrote a book analyzing what was happening in Germany, and as the essay says, that book, The Dual State, has a lot to tell us about today’s America.

Fraenkel’s book contrasted the “normative state” to the “prerogative state.”

Even under the Nazis, most Germans continued to live in the normative state, where the rule of law continued as it always had, a state where contracts were enforced, and laws continued to constrain prosecutors and courts. But other Germans—particularly Jews—lived in the prerogative state, where they were subject to “all the power and none of the justice that a state can deliver.”

Inhabitants of the normative state could remain largely unaware of the activities occurring in the prerogative state.

Among the insidious dangers of a dual state is that, for most citizens, it is business as usual. They don’t see the cruelty. They don’t experience the coercion. They think these are normal times. They say things like, “The pendulum swung too far in one direction, but it will swing back, like it always does.” And they don’t notice as the prerogative state expands, and their own freedom leaches away.

Donald Trump and the Republicans have recreated that dual state in our country. To be sure, we have more tools than the Weimar Republic to fight back. But the dangers are very real—and, for some, fatal.

White Americans can ignore the savagery of ICE–which, after all, is being directed primarily at people of color. They live in the normative state, where there is oversight, and bad officers are (usually) relieved of duty. But as we’ve seen repeatedly, ICE officers occupy a Trumpian space “where the law is no more than the armed weaponization of his desires. It is his prerogative whether someone gets arrested, charged, or even killed.”

A second example is what happened after Trump was convicted of 32 felonies in a normative state operation. Trump’s prerogative state intervened. Jim Jordan held hearings in the House to discredit the judge and create the impression that Trump’s prosecution had been political. Andrew Boutros—Chicago’s US Attorney–launched an investigation into the judge’s daughter’s firm in an effort to create an  impression that an impropriety existed, although it was never clear what that impropriety might be. (Boutros was also responsible for the fraudulent indictments of the Broadview Six). Abuse of power is a hallmark of the prerogative state.

A third example is what Trump’s government did after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered by ICE operatives.

The federal government opened an investigation—not into the killings, but instead targeting labor unions, environmental groups, the Democratic Socialists of America, and a local activist coalition.

They were looking for evidence that these groups supported protesters. It is not illegal to protest in America. It is not illegal to support protesters in America. Not in the normative state. But in the prerogative one, instead of investigating the murder of Americans, the tools of government coercion target the regime’s critics.

As the essay notes, there are plenty of other examples.

There is welcome evidence that occupants of the normative state are increasingly aware of the threat, and are powering a growing resistance. But as the essay also notes, those resistance efforts are predicated on the rule of law. They rely on a system that protects us from arbitrary power.

In America, unlike in Russia, our government cannot just jail us. In America, unlike in Tiananmen Square, our government cannot just shoot us.

And yet, in some instances, that is exactly what is happening.

It’s hard to argue with the essay’s conclusion:

The prerogative state in America still faces real constraints. We still have space to push back. But we are in a race. We simply must win in November, and we must insist that the winners be seated in Congress. But we cannot stop there. As Fraenkel witnessed, no one is safe in a dual state. The Executive Branch is powerful. So long as Donald Trump leads it, it acts to satisfy his whims rather than our laws. Until he is removed from power, American freedom is at risk.

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