Saturday, November 03, 2007

Amit Varma reviews Alan Krueger's "What makes a terrorist?"


And it's a pretty positive one:

... Looking into the economic background of terrorists, Krueger cites a study that compares “suicide bombers and other militants” from the West Bank and Gaza strip with the entire male population aged 16 to 50, and find that “suicide bombers were less than half as likely to come from families that were below the poverty line.” Krueger gets similar results from studies on Hezbollah and Gush Emunim, an Israeli group.

Krueger cites public opinion surveys across Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey that show that terrorism finds more support among the better educated than among the uneducated. The biographical details of known terrorists bring him to an identical conclusion.

This is a good time to link -- again -- to Alan Krueger's article titled "Five myths about terrorism." The previous time I linked to it, some of the comments were, how do I put it, very interesting...

1 Comments:

  1. The Silent Guru said...

    any relation to ashok varma?