Harvard professor: no link exists between poverty and terrorism.
Harvard professor Alberto Adabie has studied the causes of terrorism. He concludes that there is no link between poverty and terrorism. (*) Instead, there is a link between lack of freedom and terrorism, though extremely tightly controlled societies have low incidents of terrorism.
It makes sense. In free societies with responsive and accountable governments, grievances can be resolved peacefully. Without the rule of law, they cannot. Both the poor and the rich benefit from the rule of law, and suffer from the lack thereof.
November 12th, 2004 at 06:48
It’s something I tell every jury I pick–that in most societies, in almost every time period man has lived, we have settled disputes through either violence, or by turning to a king or warlord. Only our system relies on our neighbors to render justice–and while somebody almost always goes away unhappy, rarely do people leave with that bile-spitting feeling of having been cheated unfairly.
Without getting too far afield, that was, I thought, the strongest point made when Nixon was chased from office–that no person is above the law–and one of the most disappointing things about the way Democrats blindly defended Clinton.
November 12th, 2004 at 11:10
That makes a lot of sense. Probably explains why there is a lot of terrorism, or rather sponsered terrorism in Iran. Selah!
January 20th, 2005 at 21:19
Careful. I’ve looked at the professor’s data and he’s used some questionable analysis techniques. For instance, he’s not really talking about terrorists but the risk of terrorist attack. This really rules out the importance of poverty from his analysis, as per the article byline we would assume that the question is if poverty is breeding terrorists, not if poor nations come under attack the most. Also, as far as I can tell he doesn’t correct for population—a critical variable considering that there is such a tight correlation between population and terrorist risk—which is well supported theoretically (bigger cities, more people = very rapid growth of radical groups).
October 6th, 2005 at 20:04
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