Poverty and Terrorism

Greg Mankiw references an important study from the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Fall, 2003) by Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova titled Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?

The conclusion: they found "little direct connection between poverty or education and participation in terrorism."

Read the whole thing here.

So it's not the madrassas, and it's not inequality -- the two most popular explanations. So what is it? At this point, who can tell?

One thing is certain -- the political-social theories that have dominated our discourse for half a century now are no longer adequate to explain the world in which we have to live. For several decades now our answer to nearly every challenge facing us has been economic redistribution and/or education. We were comfortable with that paradigm. But in the face of jihadism they don't seem to matter much. What is more, the Islamist radicals seem to be motivated by hatred for the things we hold most dear.

Oh my! Some serious rethinking is in order.

We may be in the early stages of an intellectual revolution as profound as anything yet seen in the history of Western culture and where we are heading, nobody knows.

These are interesting and troubling times. Hang on..., it's gonna be one hell of a ride.

The paradigms, they are a'shiftin!

UPDATE:

The Telegraph reports;

Twenty-four terrorist suspects being held last night over an alleged plot to blow up as many as 10 transatlantic jets include middle-class, well-educated young men born in Britain. At least one of them converted to Islam only recently.

As Britain remained on a "critical" level of alert, it emerged that among those arrested were the white son of a former Conservative Party worker, the son of an architect and an accountant and a heavily pregnant woman. Some had studied at university and came from families that owned several properties or ran their own businesses.

Read it here. [Emphasis mine]