Rational stupidity, or why nobody is actually being stupid
With apologies to Magritte
© RudolphLAB, 2026
I came across Professor Christian Rieck by accident, during the aftermath of the Nord Stream pipeline attacks. Most of the news coverage at the time was the familiar mix of speculation and filler, but Rieck had interviewed an actual expert – someone who could explain, in detail and without hedging, what was and was not known about the technical situation. It was the kind of interview that reminded me how refreshing real expertise can be in public discussion, and how much of what passes for analysis is just the sound of people saying words in the general vicinity of a topic.
Christian Rieck is Professor of Finance and Economic Theory at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, a former doctoral student of the Nobel laureate Reinhard Selten, and the author of a standard German game theory textbook as well as a number of bestselling books in the general area of strategy, economics and productivity. Since 2019 he has also run a YouTube channel applying game theory to current events, which has become one of the thoughtful corners of German-language public intellectual life. I have been watching ever since.
One useful idea I have taken from him is what he calls "Rieck's razor". It reads as a structural inversion of Hanlon's razor, the well-known principle that one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Rieck's razor goes the other way: assume intent, even when stupidity is the more comfortable explanation. It sounds trivial, but it is not – precisely because stupidity is the more comfortable explanation. Dismissing a decision as foolish costs nothing; working out what incentive structure would make it rational takes real effort, and often produces uncomfortable answers. Once you start applying it seriously, an enormous amount of behaviour that appears baffling or foolish resolves into something quite different – not admirable, necessarily, but coherent.
Rieck illustrated this with several examples over the years. One example was vaccine refusal during the pandemic. The example is not about whether the underlying beliefs were correct. It is about how incentive structures and beliefs jointly determine what constitutes a rational decision. Imagine a simple grid: good for me/bad for me on one axis, good for society/bad for society on the other. If you accept that vaccination works, then vaccinating yourself and vaccinating as many others as possible sits in the top-right corner: good for you, good for society. If, however, you have genuinely absorbed the view that vaccines are harmful – a view Rieck connected to the anxieties of a generation that grew up hearing about "gene food" and industrial contamination – then vaccination sits in the bottom-left: bad for you, bad for society. The disagreement persists because each group evaluates the same decision within a fundamentally different picture of reality. They are sitting in opposite corners of the same grid, and each is behaving rationally given where they think they are. This is not a psychological explanation. It is a purely structural one, and it is more illuminating than most of what was said about vaccine hesitancy at the time.
The reason Rieck's razor matters for academic life is that universities are dense stacks of misaligned incentives, and the resulting behaviours often look irrational to whoever is on the receiving end of them.
Consider students and academic staff. For a student, their studies are the entire point of the interaction. They have paid to be here; they have questions; they expect responses on a reasonable timescale. From their vantage point, an academic who takes three days to reply to an email is being negligent. From the academic's vantage point, that same student is one of several hundred, sitting alongside grant deadlines, manuscripts under revision, PhD supervision, teaching, administration and the research programme on which much of their career progression will depend. The redundancy waves going through various UK institutions have made academics acutely aware that excellent teaching alone may not protect a post; research performance carries more weight. Both parties are behaving rationally. Neither is wrong. But the incentive structures point in different directions, and the friction is unavoidable – no amount of goodwill on either side dissolves it, because it is not really about goodwill.
The more interesting case, and the one I have been thinking about recently, sits one layer up. A researcher's incentive is straightforward: spend the available funds on research, produce outputs, secure the next grant. The overall financial position of the institution is not really their problem, and cannot be, because if every academic tried to hold research funds back out of institutional solidarity nothing would ever get done. A senior College administrator – a Dean, say – has a very different set of incentives. Under current conditions in UK higher education, financial stewardship is inevitably a major part of what senior College leadership is appointed and expected to deliver. That is the philosophy they were hired for. Their rational incentive is, correctly, to protect College funds wherever possible, to consolidate where they can, and to be cautious with any discretionary balances that might otherwise leak into individual research budgets.
And yet the same Dean is also required to deliver research excellence, in the form of REF outputs, grant income, and reputational standing. These two demands – protect the money, deliver the research – point in opposite directions under scarcity. There is no clean way to satisfy both, and every decision a Dean makes will fail one of the two criteria they are being judged on. What looks from the researcher's side like foot-dragging, opacity, or unhelpfulness may be, from the Dean's side, the least bad response to a genuinely impossible remit. Rieck's razor applies here too: assume intent before assuming foolishness.
The trouble is that Rieck's razor, applied consistently to academic life, explains too much. Once you see the incentive structures, most of what feels frustrating about institutional life resolves into predictable equilibria. Students behave as students because they are students. PIs behave as PIs because they are PIs. Deans behave as Deans because they are Deans, appointed by people whose own incentives shape who gets appointed and what they are asked to prioritise. Every level looks rational when examined in isolation. The aggregate is often a bad equilibrium in which nothing gets decided, nothing gets funded, and everyone feels obstructed by everyone else.
That is intellectually satisfying, but emotionally hollow, because it means that changing outcomes requires changing incentives, and almost nobody in the system has the standing to change the incentives that matter. Rieck's razor does not tell us that institutions are well designed. Quite the opposite. It tells us that systems can produce poor outcomes even when most of the individuals within them are behaving entirely rationally. Understanding that distinction is uncomfortable, but it is often the first step towards understanding where change might actually be possible.
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