I just wrote an article at Aeon, looking at the rise and fall of Ross Ulbricht, the Texan who created and ran the online drugs market Silk Road. The piece uses arguments from social science to understand how Silk Road worked. Here’s some of them (in greater detail but worse prose than the actual essay).
States and mafias have a lot in common.
The main argument of the piece is stolen from two classic articles by sociologists, Charles Tilly’s War making and state making as organized crime and Diego Gambetta’s Mafia: The price of distrust. Tilly’s article shows in brutal, elegant prose that the state began as a kind of protection racket, where kings protected their rulers from each other and from other rulers in exchange for a payoff. Over time, many states have changed and become more responsive to their populations, trading legitimate governance for taxes, building what Margaret Levi calls a ‘state of trust,’ in which the state itself is reasonably trustworthy and also helps build trust among its citizens. Gambetta shows, in contrast, how modern day protection rackets like the mafia started by underpinning trust in deals between who would otherwise distrust each other, while injecting enough suspicion into the relationship that they weren’t able to trust each other independent of the mafia.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:02/24/2015