Why “Everything in Common” Doesn’t Work
In the spring of 1903 Benedetto Madonia, a stonemason from Buffalo, got a letter from his brother-in-law. The man was in prison awaiting sentence and asking for money. Madonia scraped together a thousand dollars from somewhere. A huge sum in those days. He didn’t dare send it directly, so he mailed an envelope to acquaintances in New York with a note: take the cash and hand it to the right man in a saloon on Prince Street. The money was meant for a lawyer, or for leaning on the case somehow.
What happened next was told by his widow, and Dash passes it on. The pals got the money. And did nothing: hired no lawyer, leaned on nothing. They didn’t return what was left either. Madonia wrote letters, then begged, then decided to go to New York himself and take back what was his. A few weeks later his body was found in that very barrel the Morello family’s story starts with. His widow believed it was asking for the money back that killed him. Dash presents this as her version. So do I.
You handed money over to “the common cause” with no agreement, no accounts and no one answerable for it? Consider it no longer yours. And in a system like that, asking for it back is an insult.
A Fund Without an Owner
We’ve just talked about how well a shared fund can work. Now let’s talk about why it so often doesn’t.
The first trouble is whoever stands closest to the fund. In 1873 the Marquis Notarbartolo, whom we’ve met before, became mayor of Palermo. And the first thing he did, Dickie writes, was make Raffaele Palizzolo, a future board member of the Bank of Sicily, pay back money he had stolen from the fund that bought bread for the poor. That started their feud, which twenty years later, if you believe the prosecution, ended in murder. When nobody is watching a public fund, it goes not to those who need it most but to whoever holds the key.
The second trouble is the owner who treats the shared fund as his own wallet. Pistone describes how his capo Sonny Black kept a loan-sharking fund and lent from it at interest. Sonny needed ten thousand, and without thinking twice he had it taken out of the fund and brought to him at the airport. Pistone and his partner flew to New York, each with half the sum in his pocket. The owner takes what he likes, when he likes? That’s not a fund. That’s his wallet, and other people fill it.
The third trouble is promises kept by halves. Gambetta gives the account of a repentant mafioso from a small family in the town of Vicari. By the rules, the family helps its own when they get into trouble with the law. In practice, he says, the money wasn’t always shared out without quarrels, and sometimes those arrested paid the lawyers themselves. In the rules there was mutual aid. In life, half of it.
The Strong Work for the Weak
And now for the most famous trouble with “everything in common”.
In 1620 English settlers landed at Plymouth, in New England. The London investors had set a condition: for the first years the colony works for the common pot, everything grown goes in together and is shared out equally. The colony went hungry. In 1623 Governor William Bradford took counsel with the elders and did what today we’d call a reform. Each family was given a plot of land—for use only, for now, with no right to pass it on to the children—and allowed to plant corn for itself.
What came of it, Bradford set down in his chronicle. It had very good success, he writes: it made all hands very industrious, and far more corn was planted than the governor could have got planted by any other means. Women who used to plead weakness now went willingly into the fields and took their children with them. Whereas the common arrangement, by his account, bred a great deal of confusion and discontent: the young and strong resented working for other men’s wives and children without any reward.
Meet the free rider. Share the harvest equally, and your hard work goes to everyone, and so does your laziness. Work more and you gain nothing; work less and you gain a little, and everyone reasons the same way. Everyone works less. Everyone goes hungry.
When Common Property Does Work
But don’t walk away from here with the easy conclusion “private good, common bad”. It isn’t true.
The American economist Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in 2009, spent her life studying how people around the world share pastures, forests, fishing grounds and water for irrigation. She found plenty of communities that had managed common property for centuries without plundering it. The best-known example is the Alpine pastures of Switzerland: village communities have run them by their own rules since the sixteenth century.
What do the ones that made it have in common? Clear boundaries, so everyone knows who’s one of us and who isn’t; rules the users have adopted themselves and understand; oversight, someone keeping an eye on how many cows you’ve put out to graze; punishment that grows with the offence, first a fine, then expulsion. And a way of settling disputes without a brawl.
Now look at the funds in this essay. Madonia’s pals had no rules, no oversight and no punishment. Palizzolo had the key and no auditor, until the new mayor arrived. Sonny had rules, but not for himself. And the Scottish ministers from the last essay had everything: boundaries, tables, contributions, accounts. Their fund lasted for centuries.
The Rules of the Pressers’ Fund
Remember the pressers’ fund at Don Vincenzo’s? Once it was nearly wrecked by the most ordinary story. A new girl paid in for a month and then “fell ill” for three weeks. She was seen at her sister’s wedding. Danced till morning.
The pressers came to the Don and demanded he throw her out. The Don didn’t. He suggested they come up with a rule themselves. They came up with two: pay out from the fund only to those who have paid in for six months, and only with a doctor’s note. The new girl paid the money back out of her wages and worked for us another twelve years. And the pressers kept their own rules more strictly than they would have kept any the Don could have invented.