Organized crime emerges where distrust coexists with feasible social mobility

Evidence

The opportunities for social mobility should be considered as a third concomitant cause. Franchetti does not do so explicitly, yet evidence suggests that the areas in southern Italy where organized crime has traditionally evolved are those where for different reasons social mobility was feasible. As well as in the large urban concentrations such as Naples and Palermo, it emerged in the latifondo of western Sicily where landowners were absenteeists (Blok 1974), but not in other parts of Sicily (Franchetti 1974: 53-6), or in Calabria (Crotonese) and Puglia, areas where the presence of landowners left no opportunity open to the rural middle class (Arlacchi 1980; Cosentino 1983). It also developed in those small farming areas which manifested a thriving agriculture, but not in those based on a subsistence economy (Arrighi and Piselli 1986). Lack of trust, matched by heavy constraints on social mobility - such as in the case of the depressing village studied by Banfield (1958) — does not offer sufficient incentive to ‘specialize’ in prevailing over one’s peers, but simply leads to a deeply fragmented social world and to the reproduction of wretchedly poor economic conditions. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2152

Categorization

• XREF: Strongly parallels Saramago’s Blindness: in total social collapse without mobility escape routes, the doctor’s wife’s order-keeping is the only path up; here mafia arises precisely because mobility is possible within an untrustworthy world, making violence a vehicle for advancement.
• QUESTION: This falsifiable spatial claim — mafia absent where subsistence economy and present landowners block mobility — could be tested against the current geography of organized crime in southern Italy.