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The question of Northern vs Southern Italy is back with this new graphic. I'm going to dox myself slightly and say I have some perspective on this because both of my parents are Sicilian from Sicily, although I grew up in America. Though I will add it just to interject my general bemusement and provide some Med charm. My background isn't needed to reach this conclusion (though I'm surprised to see so few people arguing it... so maybe!)
Anyway, I presume HBD enjoyers love this North vs South divide because it comes across like that satellite photo of North vs South Korea where the dependent variable is "Communism", except in the case of Italy it's "African ancestry". That's fun to think about, and it certainly has a lot of pop culture roots (that hard scene in True Romance where the Sicilian mob boss is infuriated by being accused of being descended from the Moors), but this link is weak and it mostly ignores the elephant in the room: colonialism.
Yeah yeah we're all sick of hearing about colonialism, but hear me out. I don't mean the kind of colonialism where the natives resist being dragged kicking and screaming into an empire with reading, roads, global trade and capital. I mean the kind of colonialism where your island is considered a useful military outpost and changes hands constantly in wars of dominance.
Quick incomplete list of who ran Sicily over the last thousand years: Byzantines, then Arabs (reasonably good rulers, all things considered), then the Normans rolled in around 1060, then the Hohenstaufens, then the French Angevins, who got kicked out in 1282 in the Sicilian Vespers. A real popular uprising, my people murdering 3000+ Frenchmen over Easter weekend. Much proud. But short-lived! Then the Sicilians, having won, immediately had to invite the Aragonese in to rule them, because a chunk of land in the middle of the Mediterranean does not get to just be independent. The (definitely not gay) hypermasculine types who love the Vesper story seem to not really read to the next chapter where you have to bend the knee to a different imperial lord. Curious!
Anyway then there's the Spanish Habsburgs, who figured out how to maximally extract Naples and Sicily to fund their wars in Flanders. Then the Bourbons. Then briefly Napoleon. Then the Bourbons again. Then finally Garibaldi shows up in 1860 and the place gets annexed into the new Italian state. Run from afar, by people who didn't speak the language and considered the south basically Africa. BTW you knew these regions spoke different languages, right?
Sure, history is sad everywhere. But my point is you can't build anything durable on top of that. Every time a new overlord shows up, the previous administrative class either gets purged or has to switch sides. Whatever institutional knowledge existed gets fragmented. The legal system is whatever the new guy says it is. Tax collection is whatever can be extracted before the next regime change. Land tenure is locked in whatever extractive configuration was useful to the latest set of foreigners, which in Sicily's case meant gigantic estates owned by absentee landlords who lived in Naples or Madrid and never set foot on the property. Nobody is investing in the long term because there is no long term. The mafia isn't a quirk of North African ancestry but rather a survival instinct when you have a long, long standing tradition and belief that the state is illegitimate.
Again, whatever, story of the world. But now we're trying to compare this outpost (these outposts, not just Sicily here) to the seat of the fucking Renaissance up north! Genoa, Venice, Florence, Milan. City-states running their own banks, their own foreign policies, colonial empires of their own. Bit players in bootstrapping the enlightenment! Nobody could conquer the whole north cheaply because the Po Valley was fragmented and the cities played the Holy Roman Empire and France against each other for centuries.
The South had very little of this. It's not so much Guns, Germs and Steel as it is one is a series of defensible mini-Switzerlands and the other are islands easily starved.
The "one peoples, different outcomes, let's Notice" framing seems so off to me because it's clearly more more like smooshing two different countries together and asking why they're still so different. Cultural antibodies hardened over a millenium that rejects the state, trusting strangers, higher IQ institutions doesn't really change in decades.
You can conclude the South is poorer because of African ancestry. Or you can notice that the South spent a thousand years as a strategic chokepoint that every Mediterranean power needed to control, while the North was a fractured set of city-states that nobody could grab easily. One of these explanations predicts the data and the other is constructing vibes based on a satellite photo.
Having spent time in southern Italy I don't buy the historic narratives. Singapore was a swamp long after the historic issues impacted Southern Italy. China was wrecked in the 1900s but they are really putting in effort into building their country.
The issues in Southern Italy are related to an inability to organize. Buses crawl through cities in Sicily because there are parked cars everywhere. Building will be in disrepair and nobody bothers to paint them. They are not too poor to buy paint. The ticket machine at the train stations are constantly broken. There is garbage on the street despite high unemployment. Why are they not cleaning if they have nothing to do? There are basic issues with petty crime, people not being able to queue properly, loud behaviour and other anti social issues that make life hard there.
What struck me most about southern Italy is the lack of any large scale organization. Even when walking through large cities like Naples there are few businesses or organizations that seem to have a turnover of more than one million Euros. There are plenty of small restaurants, cafés, tiny hotels etc. Southern Italians seem perfectly capable of managing their own small scale operation. But they seem to fail specularly at scale. There seem to be few instances of larger groups of people coming together to achieve anything. Southern Italians are the inverse of Chinese and Japanese people.
There is simply no way a semiconductor manufacturer or any high tech firm can function when people can't cooperate. Southern Italy is a bit like India. There is plenty of talent and individually the people can be amazing. However, as a collective there is widespread dysfunction.
As for HBD narrative I found southern Italians to be much more European and lighter in complexion than expected.
Could you appreciate the brain drain argument? Going by my own family, something like 17 out of 20 of my parents' generation left Sicily for America to start a new life away from the rest of the europoors.
This should tell you a lot about the psychology of those who chose to remain (though I love some of them). If you have enough ambition to paint your 700 square foot "house" with no windows that was a carriage repair shop in the 1940s, you might also have enough ambition to say fuck this lets leave for America.
The issue is that other European nations had similar levels of migration without long term disastrous effects on the economy and IQ.
It seems more likely to me that there might have been some initial difference and that most of the brain drain was internal in Italy due to very long running differences is economic development between the north and the south. Perhaps similar things happen in other places but it's less of a regional divide and more that the talented people went to the local city so if you measure the entire region it looks unchanged, while in Italy it doesn't.
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