News aspiring mobsters can use!

in higher •  3 years ago 

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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775716301303

It turns out that mid-20th century Italian-American mobsters with college degrees had substantially higher incomes than otherwise similar criminals without them. Far from a rebellion against the family, going to Dartmouth may have been the real key to Michael Corleone's success. Also worth noting that Don Corleone advised Tom Hagen to go to college and law school, famously saying that "a lawyer with his brief case can steal more than a hundred men with guns."

On a slightly more serious note, this is some evidence against the "signaling" model of higher education income gains. It's unlikely Mafia employers used college degrees for signaling purposes to anything like the same extent that mainstream society does. Not sure, however, whether the study sufficiently deals with selection effects (perhaps smarter and more hard-working criminals were more likely to go to college, and these personality traits account for their income gains more than any skills they picked up in school).

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