Carlo M. Cipolla

[1][2] 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 the University of Pavia.

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.

[citation needed] The first essay, "The Role of Spices (and Black Pepper in Particular) in Medieval Economic Development" ("Il ruolo delle spezie (e del pepe nero in particolare) nello sviluppo economico del Medioevo", 1973), traces the curious correlations between spice import and population expansion in the late Middle Ages, postulating a causation due to a supposed aphrodisiac effect of black pepper.

The naive people to the left of this line are thus "semi-stupid" because their conduct creates/allows a net drain of societal welfare; some bandits may fit this description as well, although many bandits such as sociopaths, psychopaths, and non-pathological "jerks" and amoralists may act with full knowledge of the net negative consequences to a society that they neither identify with nor care about.

By creating a graph of Cipolla's two factors, we obtain four groups of people. Helpless people contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it; Intelligent people contribute to society and leverage their contributions into personal benefits; Stupid people are counterproductive to both their and others' interests; Bandits pursue their own self-interest even when this poses a net detriment to societal welfare. An additional category of ineffectual people either exists in its own right or can be considered to be in the center of the graph.