Free Republic

Cipolla gave a work of beautiful clarity in his essay on the phenomenon of stupidity and its effects on human survival. These are Cipolla's five fundamental laws of stupidity: 1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. 2. The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 3. 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. 4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid...

In the early 1600s, pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler put forth his three laws of planetary motion, which, for the first time, provided an accurate and evidence-based description of the movement of the Solar System's planets around the Sun. By the end of the century, Isaac Newton followed Kepler's example with three laws of his own, describing the relationship between an object and the forces acting on it, thus laying the foundations for classical mechanics. Almost exactly three hundred years later, Carlo M. Cipolla, a professor of economic history at the University of California - Berkeley, introduced a set of laws...

The dominant explanation by mainstream newspaper journalists as to how California got into the budget mess it is in seems to center around a notion of stingy taxpayers (e.g., Prop 13, two-third vote rule to raise taxes, etc.). But such explanations omit any consideration of Parkinson's Law in the historical context of the huge windfall of taxes generated by the Real Estate Bubble. British naval historian and former Civil Service employee C. Northcoate Parkinson wrote a classic book in 1957 titled Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress which humorously but seriously detailed how bureaucracies grow especially when their stated mission...

The Chicago Public Schools, whose superintendent, Arne Duncan, has been tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to be the next education secretary, failed to meet the Illinois state standards set under the No Child Left Behind Act every single year the standards have been in force. For the last five school years (2004-2008), the Chicago district (District 299) failed to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) in key areas, according to the district’s progress report on the Illinois State Board of Education Web site. Under the No Child Left Behind Act that Congress passed in 2003, each state must “develop and implement...