The Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente (IsIAO), standard bearer of the scholastic brilliance incarnated in Giuseppe Tucci, co-founder of its predecessor institution, is a walking ghost. Its liquidation has already been decreed. But this is a ghost that will not go quietly. Let me satiate the preta by linking to its disembodied voice: isiaoghost.wordpress.com.
IsIAO Ghost opens with a quote from Carlo M. Cipolla, a one-time professor of economics at UC Berkeley who articulated the laws of stupidity:
A stupid person is a person who caused losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see that this is directed at the bureaucrats who sacrificed Tucci’s and Gnoli’s legacy upon the unholy altar of economic irrationality. Come to think of it, though, it could equally apply to certain academics. “It is not difficult to understand how […] institutional power enhances the damaging potential of a stupid person,” Prof. Cipolla observes. How true!
(Thanks to A. for the pointer.)