A Sicilian on the Mafia

Email from a reader, who prefers to remain anonymous.

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Hi Bryan,

I’m glad you enjoyed your trip to Sicily. It looks like you have a wonderful family and I think I can say that your Selfish Reasons book played a role in my decision to have a second child (but it might well be post-hoc rationalization). I grew up in Sicily, actually in one of its poorest and most backwards areas. I think your post is quite good. However, I would point out the following:

1. I think we should make another sharp distinction between small for-profit businesses (the kind of businesses you would find also in a pre-capitalistic society, like restaurants) and medium-size or big business. Maybe small businesses run like clockwork in Sicily, but how is medium-large business doing? It is practically non-existent. In general, the size of Italian firms is quite small. Only 0.6% of all Italian firms employ at least 50 people. For comparison, this percentage in the United States is 5%, and in Germany is 3%. In Lombardy, 1% of firms employ 50+ employees; in Sicily, 0.3%. In terms of fraction of people employed: Firms with 50+ employees employ 72% of people in the US, 37% in Italy as a whole, 49% in Lombardy, only 17% in Sicily. Probably there’s a literature on the determinants on firm sizes in an economy, and maybe you are familiar with it and your point 7 is consistent with it, but my intuition is that your view that Sicilian culture can be fixed with a modicum of incentives struggles to explain these data. Traditional “medieval” small businesses can thrive, yes, but real market transactions do not really work in Sicily.

1. I don’t know much about the Mafia. I left Sicily for college and never went back (except for vacation and to visit family). But when I was in elementary school, there were mafia-related murders almost every week. There was an actual mafia war with 120 murders over 3 years, in a city of about 80,000. One day, several people were killed around 7pm, around the corner from my school, including a couple of unlucky “civilians” who happened to pass by. This period made quite an impression on my very young mind. To me, for many years, the fact that people got routinely shot around the city, in daylight, was normal. This is much worse than the experience of Americans living in some of the most violent big cities, because here we’re talking about a small city (back-on-the-envelope: twice the murder rate than Chicago!) and shootings happened pretty much everywhere. So, with these memories in mind, your references to anti-mafia “propaganda” and anecdotal evidence of the mafia being better than the government sounded a bit strident, if I may say so. (Despite the Sicilian government being actually terrible). I know what you mean and I see the kernel of truth in it. But I also know that things were brutal in those years.

Anyway, Mafia remarks aside, it’s a pleasure to read your stuff, and I hope that we’ll meet in person someday.