The Fool Tax
By Mike Torchinsky · July 11, 2026 · Leadership
For a long time, one thing gnawed at me, and I refused to make my peace with it.
To earn anything close to decent money, you almost always have to fight your way through other people's mistakes first. Not so much the work itself as the thing someone next to you botched: didn't think through, forgot, got wrong. Sometimes it's minor carelessness. Sometimes it's something so absurd and dumb you can't wrap your head around it: how could a grown adult do that?
For years I took it as personal bad luck, or as a sign that something was off with the people around me. Then I came across an old essay by the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla on the basic laws of human stupidity.
He offers a definition that clears a lot up. A stupid person, in his sense, is someone who harms another while gaining nothing himself, and often takes a loss in the bargain. That's what separates him from the bandit, who harms you for his own benefit, and from the naive one, who harms himself to someone else's benefit.
From there Cipolla draws a conclusion that sounds paradoxical at first. Stupidity is more dangerous than malice. You can bargain with a bandit, or at least anticipate him: he has interests, and that gives him a logic you can follow. You can't bargain with someone else's absurdity, because there's nothing behind it to understand. It arrives from a direction common sense says it shouldn't, which is exactly why you can't prepare for it.
Cipolla adds one more observation. The share of such people in any group is roughly constant, and it doesn't track education, status, or rank. Among senior executives and business owners there are exactly as many as anywhere else. That's simply how anything works once people are involved. It's life.
These days I prefer to think of it as a tax. And it isn't even a tax on stupidity. You pay for the mere presence of other people, and the "stupid" category just carries the highest rate. The ordinary mistakes of diligent people you can live with; that's the base rate. People get tired, mix things up, forget, and you budget for it in advance, the way you budget for depreciation. Absurdity doesn't work that way. You can't see it coming.
From here it's easy to slip toward a tempting conclusion, especially if you're conscientious and used to carrying everything. If there's this much absurdity around me, maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the one drawing it in. But let's stop there: responsibility and cause are not the same thing.
You are not the reason stupidity exists, or broken products, or broken AI. There's no more and no less of it because you happen to be here. In the bad reading, "I'm responsible for everything" quickly becomes "everything wrong around me, I brought on myself," and that isn't responsibility anymore. It's vanity turned inside out: the conviction that the world revolves around you and your failures. The truth looks a good deal simpler. You are not responsible for the fact that fools exist. You are responsible for what they cost you.
There's one more feeling worth testing before you trust it. It seems as though things only get worse over time: more incompetence, more stupidity, more hours lost. But psychologists showed long ago that the sense of "people used to be sharper, and now it's all going downhill" repeats from one generation to the next, for centuries, no matter what is actually happening.
The mechanism is simple. You've forgotten the old blunders because they worked themselves out long ago, and you see the current ones in full detail because they're right in front of you. And the more capable and more senior you are, the more people, and the more of other people's work, pass through your hands, and the more sharply you register every slip. There aren't more fools around you. What has grown is your dependence on them and your sensitivity to their mistakes. That's a sign of scale, not of decline.
So what do you do with all of it? It's easier to begin with what not to do. Don't fight it as if it were something you could defeat for good. Almost all the fatigue that comes from other people's mistakes starts right there. You fight for a world where everything runs clean and predictable. That world doesn't exist, it never did, and, most important of all, it can't. Reality never promised the standard we somehow hold it to.
The people who earn over the long run never forget this imperfection. They price it in ahead of time. Sometimes literally, in money, but more often into the very design of the work. Slack in the schedule where the plan says there shouldn't be any. A second support beside the first, so that one giving way doesn't bring the whole thing down. Treating a mistake as something expected, not as a personal defeat or a wound. When someone else's stupidity turns from a catastrophe into an ordinary line item, it stops wearing you out.
Cipolla himself is entirely practical about this. You don't argue with stupidity and you don't talk it out of anything. You cut your dependence on it. And the next time something breaks for an absurd reason, the most useful question isn't who's to blame. It's about you: where in your own structure did someone else's absurdity manage to reach you, and why is that spot still open?
You can't remove other people's mistakes from your life; their number doesn't depend on you. What depends on you is only whether you built that tax into the price ahead of time, or pay it each time as a sudden fine. The second wears you down. The first doesn't. And that, unlike the stupidity itself, is entirely in your hands.
For a long time, one thing gnawed at me, and I refused to make my peace with it.
To earn anything close to decent money, you almost always have to fight your way through other people's mistakes first. Not so much the work itself as the thing someone next to you botched: didn't think through, forgot, got wrong. Sometimes it's minor carelessness. Sometimes it's something so absurd and dumb you can't wrap your head around it: how could a grown adult do that?
For years I took it as personal bad luck, or as a sign that something was off with the people around me. Then I came across an old essay by the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla on the basic laws of human stupidity.
He offers a definition that clears a lot up. A stupid person, in his sense, is someone who harms another while gaining nothing himself, and often takes a loss in the bargain. That's what separates him from the bandit, who harms you for his own benefit, and from the naive one, who harms himself to someone else's benefit.
From there Cipolla draws a conclusion that sounds paradoxical at first. Stupidity is more dangerous than malice. You can bargain with a bandit, or at least anticipate him: he has interests, and that gives him a logic you can follow. You can't bargain with someone else's absurdity, because there's nothing behind it to understand. It arrives from a direction common sense says it shouldn't, which is exactly why you can't prepare for it.
Cipolla adds one more observation. The share of such people in any group is roughly constant, and it doesn't track education, status, or rank. Among senior executives and business owners there are exactly as many as anywhere else. That's simply how anything works once people are involved. It's life.
These days I prefer to think of it as a tax. And it isn't even a tax on stupidity. You pay for the mere presence of other people, and the "stupid" category just carries the highest rate. The ordinary mistakes of diligent people you can live with; that's the base rate. People get tired, mix things up, forget, and you budget for it in advance, the way you budget for depreciation. Absurdity doesn't work that way. You can't see it coming.
From here it's easy to slip toward a tempting conclusion, especially if you're conscientious and used to carrying everything. If there's this much absurdity around me, maybe it's me. Maybe I'm the one drawing it in. But let's stop there: responsibility and cause are not the same thing.
You are not the reason stupidity exists, or broken products, or broken AI. There's no more and no less of it because you happen to be here. In the bad reading, "I'm responsible for everything" quickly becomes "everything wrong around me, I brought on myself," and that isn't responsibility anymore. It's vanity turned inside out: the conviction that the world revolves around you and your failures. The truth looks a good deal simpler. You are not responsible for the fact that fools exist. You are responsible for what they cost you.
There's one more feeling worth testing before you trust it. It seems as though things only get worse over time: more incompetence, more stupidity, more hours lost. But psychologists showed long ago that the sense of "people used to be sharper, and now it's all going downhill" repeats from one generation to the next, for centuries, no matter what is actually happening.
The mechanism is simple. You've forgotten the old blunders because they worked themselves out long ago, and you see the current ones in full detail because they're right in front of you. And the more capable and more senior you are, the more people, and the more of other people's work, pass through your hands, and the more sharply you register every slip. There aren't more fools around you. What has grown is your dependence on them and your sensitivity to their mistakes. That's a sign of scale, not of decline.
So what do you do with all of it? It's easier to begin with what not to do. Don't fight it as if it were something you could defeat for good. Almost all the fatigue that comes from other people's mistakes starts right there. You fight for a world where everything runs clean and predictable. That world doesn't exist, it never did, and, most important of all, it can't. Reality never promised the standard we somehow hold it to.
The people who earn over the long run never forget this imperfection. They price it in ahead of time. Sometimes literally, in money, but more often into the very design of the work. Slack in the schedule where the plan says there shouldn't be any. A second support beside the first, so that one giving way doesn't bring the whole thing down. Treating a mistake as something expected, not as a personal defeat or a wound. When someone else's stupidity turns from a catastrophe into an ordinary line item, it stops wearing you out.
Cipolla himself is entirely practical about this. You don't argue with stupidity and you don't talk it out of anything. You cut your dependence on it. And the next time something breaks for an absurd reason, the most useful question isn't who's to blame. It's about you: where in your own structure did someone else's absurdity manage to reach you, and why is that spot still open?
You can't remove other people's mistakes from your life; their number doesn't depend on you. What depends on you is only whether you built that tax into the price ahead of time, or pay it each time as a sudden fine. The second wears you down. The first doesn't. And that, unlike the stupidity itself, is entirely in your hands.
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