Alan Krueger, a professor of economics, makes an observation about terrorism.

One set of factors that I examined did consis­tently raise the likelihood that people from a given country will participate in terrorism—namely, the suppression of civil liberties and political rights, including freedom of the press, the freedom to assemble, and democratic rights. Using data from the Freedom House Index, for example, I found that countries with low levels of civil liberties are more likely to be the countries of origin of the perpetra­tors of terrorist attacks. In addition, terrorists tend to attack nearby targets. Even international terror­ism tends to be motivated by local concerns.

So let me get this straight. Those willing to shed other’s blood are less likely to do so when the state they find themselves in respects liberal values. Some of my readers have led me to believe that liberal values hold the same propensity for violence as do other values. Huh. So it turns out that liberal values reduce a citizens willingness to commit violence.

Incidentally this piece is about how poverty is not a very good predictor of terrorism. Even though he has much empirical data, you can color me skeptical. I would like to see how poverty and terrorism was calculated in the studies showing no correlation.

The author notes:

Additional support for these conclusions comes from research I conducted on the nationalities of foreign insurgents in Iraq. Specifically, I studied 311 combatants, representing 27 countries, who were captured in Iraq. Although the vast majority of insurgents are native Iraqis, motivated by domestic issues, foreigners are alleged to have been involved in several significant attacks. I looked at the char­acteristics of the countries insurgents came from, and, importantly, of the countries with no citizens captured in Iraq. It turned out that countries with a higher GDP per capita were actually more likely to have their citizens involved in the insurgency than were poorer countries.

While it’s true that Saudi Arabia has high GDP it not entirely clear how well distributed that wealth is among the citizens. If I had to guess, given that Saudi Arabia is a Monarchy (The old fashion term for socialism) wealth distribution must not be very great. If the other studies that show no correlation between terrorism and poverty are based on GDP I would argue thats the reason.

The author embraces the notion that liberal values reduces terrorism. However, invariably, liberal values lead to wealthier nations which should have improved wealth distribution. I wonder if studies have been done to see if there is a correlation between wealth and liberal values. The data would probably show a relationship giving indirect evidence for poverty at least partly playing a role in terrorism.

One final thing of interest. The author states:

Support turned out to be stronger among those with a higher level of education. For exam­ple, while 26 percent of illiterates and 18 per­cent of those with only an elementary education opposed or strongly opposed armed attacks, the figure for those with a high school education was just 12 percent. The least supportive group turned out to be the unemployed, 74 percent of whom said they support or strongly back armed attacks. By comparison, the support level for merchants and professionals was 87 percent.

This has been my experience working in Academy. So called educated people are really good at apologizing for human butchers. It’s even present on my blog when the most educated of my readers refuse to agree to the proposition that on the whole killing innocent people is a bad thing. Its interesting that the more educated one becomes the less able they are to discern between good and bad. No doubt this is because such thinking is heavily vilified for its lack of nuance. This leads to perverse outcomes like supporting those that intentionally kill innocent civilians and advocating for presidents of oppressive regimes killing our soldiers be allowed to speak.

There is wisdom in good and bad. One must be wise in how it’s used.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 1:56 am and is filed under Terrorism, Socialism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.