Bibliographic record
Abstract
The major threat to security in the 21st century appears to come from ‘ungoverned spaces’ – areas where governmental control is weak or contested by clans, gangs or terrorist organizations. In a situation where trust in government is weak, the Mafia provides the service of enforcing transactions and protection. The paper builds a model to explain why, even though the Mafia appears to fulfill a valuable function, namely to provide contract enforcement when state support for that is weak, it is nevertheless so destructive. The reason, I suggest, is not simply that the Mafia is a private supplier of a public good (trust) but that it also supplies a public bad (distrust). The Mafia supplies trust by enforcing contracts but it also has to prevent that trust from spreading to those who do not pay. To stop this, the Mafia also supplies distrust. So the Mafia leader always has a choice between two ways of making profits: to supply trust, or to supply distrust. This is Il Padrino’s dilemma. The next and crucial point is that trust tends to get undervalued and distrust overvalued by Mafia leaders. Among the reasons for this are that trust is fragile, while distrust is durable, combined with the peculiar ‘ownership’ structure of the Mafia, which is that the reputation of the organization cannot be capitalized and sold. So the Mafia leader oversupplies distrust and neglects the damages this does to the society in which it operates. This distortion in Il Padrino’s thinking—the undervaluation of trust and overvaluation of distrust relative to their social values—partly explains why the Mafia is so destructive, and why areas where their control is strong tend to remain poor.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".