What Makes A Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism

Alan B. Krueger, “What Makes A Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism”, Princeton Univ. Press (2007) 162 pp.

"What Makes a Terrorist brings together disparate data, such as academic studies and government reports, arraying them into a concise, accessible argument against the notion that we can defeat terrorism through aid and education. While Krueger is careful to affirm that these are useful in combating many social ills, he is adamant that terrorism is not one of them. He offers skilled analysis to show that an aggressive foreign policy based on this fallacious assumption has cost several nations dearly and also warns that continuing along this course may provoke further terrorist acts."--Tony Azios, Christian Science Monitor

This book written by Princeton economist Alan Krueger is a composite of three of his lectures.   Krueger dispels the common belief that terrorists are from the poor and uneducated and desperate portions of society.  Instead, data shows that the majority of terrorists are highly educated, professionally employed, from a middle class or higher background, and, most important, from a country that suppresses civil liberties.  Neither the overall literacy rate nor the female literacy rate appears to have any effect on countries’ tendency to be origins of terrorism; furthermore, although economic factors are not important, religion is. 

www.krueger.princeton.edu

My Notes:

Pg. 4:  The West is often a target of terrorism—not because it is rich, but because it is influential and because terrorism has a greater chance of succeeding when it is perpetrated against a democracy (with a free press) than an autocracy.  The author suspects that terrorists believe they can have a larger impact by targeting such countries because public opinion in democratic countries can influence policy, contray to the situation in autocratic countries.

Pg. 14:  Terrorism is difficult to define.  The author would rather use politically motivated violence as a more accurate descriptive term.  It is premeditated, politically motivated violence.  It is perpetrated by substate organizations and individuals with the intent of influencing an audience beyond the immediate victims.  The goal is to spread fear. 

Pg. 24:  Data supports that people with a higher level of education are in general more likely to say that suicide attacks against Americans and Westerners in Iraq are justified. 

Pg. 72:  The 9/11 attack does not fit the pattern of terrorist’s attacks, it is an anomaly.  Most Terrorism is local, with the terrorists and a majority of their victims often from the same country.  Within a given country, the average probability for two randomly selected people to be of different religions is 27 percent.  Interestingly, for suicide attacks, 90 percent of the time the victims and the perpetrators are of a different religion. Something about suicide attacks seems to be more closely connected with religious differences. 

About 4 percent of the attacks are on embassies.  Twelve percent of the attacks targeted the U.S.  Seven percent were on international organizations.  It is not uncommon for the United Nations, the Red Cross, or other international organizations to be targeted.  Just 5 percent of the attacks were suicide bombings.  Based on State Department data, there are on average sixteen significant terrorist attacks a year against the U.S.

Pg. 79:  The countries of origin for terrorists tend to be countries with low levels of civil liberties, such as Saudi Arabia.  Countries with high levels of civil liberties are less likely to be origin countries. 

Pg. 139:  A person in the U.S. has a lifetime risk of dying by heart attack of 1 in 4; 1 in 7 for cancer; and 1 in 69,000 of a terrorist attack.