Mafia cooperation extends through rational economic adaptation by ordinary citizens

Evidence

Outside it, a wide range of economic bonds are formed: they can involve the corruption of civil servants, the exchange of favours for electoral support, or the handling of labour disputes for the benefit of landowners and entrepreneurs. But they may also be remote and aseptically insulated from the violent core of mafia activity: when private citizens, for instances, are offered extremely high interest rates to invest their money in informal banking systems without needing to know, like most investors, whether that money will be spent in financing philanthropic enterprises or drug trafficking. Thus the network of interests that mafiosi form around themselves can be widely ramified, ranging from active criminality, through corruption, to rational adaptation on the part of ordinary citizens (Franchetti 1974: 101). — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2222

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘rational adaptation of ordinary citizens’ who knowingly invest without asking parallels the doctor’s wife in Saramago and the observability problem: willingly suspended scrutiny sustains cooperation.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the sacrifice essay’s theme of stratified society stabilization — mafia order stabilizes itself by recruiting ordinary citizens into self-interested cooperation.