““Edward Banfield, a political scientist, studied an impoverished town in Italy in the 1950s and concluded that it was poor because everybody in it schemed and backstabbed and refused to help each other, unless they got something in return. His 1958 book, “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society’’ concluded that trustworthiness — the ability to trust and be trusted — is a key ingredient for a prosperous community. To Banfield, poor people were poor because of their culture.””
