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The poverty/terror myth
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| Krypton |
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| quote: | There may be an economic dimension to terrorism -- but it's not what you think, says Fortune's Cait Murphy.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Cait Murphy, Fortune assistant managing editor
March 13 2007: 11:14 AM EDT
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- The idea that poverty breeds terror appears obvious; how could it be otherwise? And people as different as the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Bush, Jacques Chirac and Pakistan's leader, Pervez Musharraf, have also noted a link between poverty and terrorism.
In fact, there is now robust evidence that there is no such link. That does not mean, however, that economics is irrelevant.
First, to the question of poverty. Of the 50 poorest countries in the world (see list at right) only Afghanistan (and perhaps Bangladesh and Yemen) has much experience in terrorism, global or domestic.
But surely that is the wrong way to look at things. Aren't the people who commit terrorist acts poor, even if they are from countries that are not? No. Remember, most of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were middle-class sons of Saudi Arabia and many were well-educated. And Osama bin Laden himself is from one of the richest families in the Middle East.
But it goes deeper than that. In a 2003 study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova reported the results of a post-9/11 survey of Palestinians. Asked whether there were "any circumstances under which you would justify the use of terrorism to achieve political goals," the higher-status respondents (merchant, farmer or professional) were more likely to agree (43.3 percent) than those lower down the ladder (laborer, craftsman or employee) (34.6 percent). The higher-status respondents were also more likely to support armed attacks against Israeli targets (86.7 percent to 80.8 percent). The same dynamic existed when education was taken into account.
In another study, 129 Hezbollah militants who died in action (not all of them in activities that could be considered terrorism) were compared to the general Lebanese population. The Hezbollah members were slightly less likely to be poor, and significantly more likely to have finished high school.
Outside Palestine, there is general agreement that suicide attacks on civilians is a form of terrorism. So where do suicide bombers fit in? A study looked at the biographies of 285 suicide bombers as published in local journals, from 1987-2002. And this found that those who carried out suicide attacks were, on the whole, richer (fewer than 15 percent under the poverty line, compared to almost 35 percent for the population as a whole) and more educated (95 percent with high school or higher) than the rest of the population (almost half of whom went no further than middle school). A similar survey of terrorists in the Jewish Underground, which killed 29 Palestinians in the early 1970s, found the same pattern.
A comprehensive study of 1,776 terrorist incidents (240 international, the rest domestic) by Harvard professor Albert Abadie, who was sympathetic to the poverty-terrorism idea at first, found no such thing. "When you look at the data," he told the Harvard Gazette, "it's not there."
What he did find was more intriguing. The freest countries experienced little terrorism; and the same was true for the most oppressed. It was in the middle - where politics was unsettled and evolving and governments are often weak - that suffered the most. He also found that geography contributed to terrorist destiny. Places like Afghanistan, with its austere mountains, or Colombia, with its remote jungles, might have been designed to sustain terrorism.
So, is there no economic dimension to terrorism? There may, be, but not in the way the conventional wisdom would have it.
Consider a chilling, but compelling recent paper by Efraim Benmelech of Harvard and Claude Berrebi of Rand. The two ask, in effect, what makes someone become a suicide bomber? Their answer: "Since there are returns to human capital in both the productive and the terror sectors, high-ability individuals will become suicide bombers if the expected payoff from suicide bombing is higher than their skill-adjusted expected lifetime earnings in the productive sector."
They test this proposition using a data base of 148 Palestinian suicide bombers from 2000-05. And they find that older and more educated suicide bombers are assigned to higher-profile targets, kill more people, and are less likely to fail or be caught. In short, there is a match between human capital, in this grossly distorted sense, and the desired goal.
And as for the bombers themselves, these authors argue that the bombers have made, what is for them, a rational choice: There is enough moral, psychological and sometimes financial payoff from the act of killing many people to offset the economic loss of their death. Therefore, the terrorist manager assigns the most deadly tasks to the highest-caliber people; otherwise, they will not bother. In an awful way, it makes sense, and it seems to be true. Caught and failed suicide bombers are conspicuously less educated than those who carry out their tasks.
The argument, with its "incentive-compatibility constraints" and various formulas, does not (and is not intended to) come to grips with a much more elemental question. What creates and sustains the hate to make mass killing over living an arguably rational choice?
That is a much tougher question. But it probably gets closer to the point than vague analogies between poverty and terrorism. There are many good reasons to worry about poverty, and to take action to alleviate it. But ending terrorism is not one of them. |
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| Lira |
| That's quite interesting... do you know of any similar researches? |
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| MrSquirrel |
Do you have a source that is not a publication whose readership is not overwhelmingly in the high net worth category?
This is not to say that Fortune and the WSJ are examples of bad journalism, but they make no denials of their editorial bias.
And again, you try to debunk something through an absolutist set of reasoning. The world is a lot more complex than you are trying to make it.
No one in their right mind would say that poverty is the only factor in terrorism, but the places where there is a well-known hotbed of terrorism, there is probably more people living in poverty than there are in the places on the 50 poorest countries list. Saudi Arabia is considered overall to be a very wealthy country, but the wealth does not trickle down to the masses much at all, it all goes into gold commodes for the royal family. If you think that the anger of the average Saudi over living on subsistance level while the royal family hoards all the money is not a contributing factor to their slide into terrorism you are horribly naive.
The 'problem of terrorism' cannot be simplified into having a single cause or effect. It is a much more complex situation.
MrS |
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| venomX |
I agree with squirrel here, this is a gross oversimplification of human behaviour. Economists have a tendency to do this. Just because you are middle-class or finished high-school, does not mean that you are in a relatively same comfortable environment or that you have advantageous opportunities in your country compared to people in more developed countries. The definition of poor they're using is subjective, so it's customized so to say for every country. But since almost everyone is poor in that country to begin with, being in the middle echelons of a considerably poor system is nothing to brag about.
Another situation I have with that article is that it equates terrorism to suicide bombing. There are many posts and tasks to be filled and done in a terrorist organization. Just because suicide bombers tend to be a bit more educated does not mean must of the muscle for terrorism does not come from poorer sectors.
And yet another issue is their data. Where did they gather it, when did they gather it. This things matter. It could just be that most poor people that support terrorism are already involved in some sort of terrorist activity and it is probably not in their favor to be divulging support for terrorism in public.
Economist tend to get the big picture of things fairly well, but when it comes to human dynamics economists have never gotten it right because they always assume that the ultimate motivation for humans is cost/benefit analysis. If i were a gambling man, I definitely would not put my money on this fad. |
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| Krypton |
If you read the article, it's based on studies by a Harvard professor, a Journal on Economic Perspectives and cites experts on the subject. What more do you want? It's an article straight out of a hugely circulated publication, and you guys don't like the source. Do you need it out of the New York Times or right in front of your face to be credible to you? It is the high net-income earners who do way more of the charity work, it is they who will have to finance these counter-terrorism efforts by helping to improve the lives of those in third world countries. Magazines that cater to this audience and not just that audience, but anyone who wants to be successful in a capitalistic society are perfect to address the problem of terrorism from the economical standpoint.
Aside from the credibility of the source, my view is poor economics does play some roll in the fomenting of radicalism. But the main roll, I believe, is the use of religion to justify the acts. How are economic breaks going to change the radicalism of millions of muslims who hate the infidel west even if the west gives more billions than we already do? The west can't just give them assistance if they're going to use it against us. That's one of the reasons the Palestinian government lead by Hamas has had all WESTERN aid cut off. |
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| Omega_M |
Most terrorists follow a hard radical islamic ideology. Money would no longer be an issue for these brain washed people. It is the martyrdom that they would be after. A belief in life after death in the heavens would be a good enough reason for the suicide bombers to blow themselves up for the "cause". They die a quick painless death anyway. Only the higher ups play for money and power. They are educated and and exploit the hardline ideology to suit their purpose.
The religious angle is far more important than the economic one in my opinion. How many other religions breed terrorists who carry out such attacks on a mass scale ? |
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