Wiseguys: Mobsters who went to college made more moolah than their less-educated mafia pals
In the novel “The Godfather,” Mario Puzo writes: “The lawyer with the briefcase can steal more money than the man with the gun.” And it turns out to have a bit of truth to it. It seems even members of the mob get an income bump from higher education.Researchers at the University of Essex and University of California-Merced used US census data to study the education levels of the Italian-American mafia between 1930s and the 1960s. Their report—titled “Returns to education in criminal organizations: Did going to college help Michael Corleone?” and recently published in the Economics of Education Review—found that, for each year that a mafia member attended college, their income level rose as much as 8.5%.That figure is on par with the return on education for the US population at large at the time, and is also higher than the return for college-educated Italian immigrants who didn’t join the mafia....MORE
