During a narrative that takes us from ancient Greece to artificial intelligence, and accompanied by such heroes of stupidity as Flaubert's double act Bouvard and Pécuchet, Jeffries casts a sceptical eye on attempts to root out stupidity by such means as IQ tests, eugenics, gene editing and racist education policies, finding each attempt to be more stupid than the stupidity they were ostensibly devised to eradicate. If today we are living in a fool’s paradise, has our species become too dim to learn anything from its rich history of folly?