Customer Reviews

What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism (Lionel Robbins Lectures)

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This is an original book that challenges mainstream beliefs about the root cause of terrorism. Learning from foreign policy luminaries such as Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Bernard Lewis in What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, and Thomas Friedman in From Beirut to Jerusalem, I believed that poor economic conditions contribute to high unemployment among youths that are prone to become terrorists out of frustration. It made sense.

Krueger demonstrates that poor economic conditions does not cause terrorism. He dismantles this theory by stating that half of the World's population lives on less than $2 a day. If poverty caused terrorism, we'd be overwhelmed by terrorists.

Much of Krueger's findings are counterintuitive. In some cases they are supported by robust statistical analysis (negative binomial regression). His regression models allow him to occasionally differentiate what directional role various socio economic and demographic variables play in relation to terrorism.

Within the book, Krueger expands on three lectures he gave in England and turns them into three long chapters on the subject. The first chapter addresses who becomes a terrorist. The second chapter covers where does terror emerge? And, the third one covers what does terrorism accomplish?

Within the first chapter, he indicates that participation in terrorism is positively correlated with education and negatively correlated with poverty. He found that was the case among Hezbollah militants. He stated that is not surprising as Hezbollah recruits young, educated, middle class students from college campuses in the Middle East.

In the second chapter, he develops a regression model that explains where terrorism originates and what countries it targets. The countries where terrorism originates have authoritarian governments with few civil liberties. The targeted countries are democracies with a more civil liberties and a high GDP per capita. Thus, economic wealth is not a significant variable in whether terrorism originates from a specific country (lack of civil liberties is); but it is in figuring out if a country is likely to be targeted. Democratic governments are vulnerable to terrorism because terrorists attacks can influence the media and government policies within a democracy. Meanwhile, they have little impact on authoritarian governments. Also surprising, trade between countries has no impact in figuring out likelihood of terrorism. Literacy rate has no influence on the likelihood of terrorism originating from a specific country. He concludes this chapter by stating that terrorism should be viewed as a violent political act rather than a response to economic conditions.

In the third chapter he reviews the impact of terrorism. He looks at both the economic and psychological impacts. Within the economic dimension, he conveys that there are two school of thoughts. The first one suggests that terrorism has a weak economic impact. The second one suggests it has a strong one. The difference between the two positions depends in part if terrorist acts are isolated (like in the U.S.) or chronic like in the Basque region. If they are isolated, an economy typically recovers quickly. But when chronic, terrorism leads to depressed foreign and domestic investments leading to economies performing way below potential. He moves on to the psychological and political impact of terrorism. In this area, he does not offer much that is already known. He concludes that overall terrorism has much of an impact only as much as we overreact to it. He seems to prefer a laissez faire attitude towards terrorism. Yet, he also mentions that terrorism could have potentially catastrophic consequences by alluding but not mentioning potential nuclear capability. Yet, he has nothing to prescribe to prevent such scenarios besides suggesting radiation sensors. That seems like an after-the-fact measure.

This book, however, is crippled with contradictions. The author reaches conflicting positions regarding the causal role Muslims play in terrorism. On page 81, he states that he found religion was not a significant factor in determining whether citizens from a country would be perpetrators of terrorism. But, on page 73, his own data shows that Muslim countries originate by far the highest terrorist attacks per million citizens. Also, on page 51 he states that terrorists are motivated by geopolitical grievances related to Western policies. Yet, on page 101 he found that the number of U.S. military troops stationed in a country had actually a lessening impact on the number of foreign insurgents captured in Iraq from such occupied countries. His studying the relationship between education levels and support for terrorism in Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, and Palestine is rather ambiguous. In the majority of cases, the data is trendless. And, you can observe with more confidence that the ones with no formal education have either no opinion or support terrorism less than citizens with other levels of education. Instead, the author pushes the case that it is the ones with university education who support terrorism the most. This argument is weak because it is correct only in certain countries (Turkey and Morocco) and is clearly wrong in others (Jordan and Pakistan). If the author had focused on the illiterate instead, his theory would have stronger data support. Also regarding the impact of terrorism, the entire chapter is ambiguous. He admits to being in both camps that terrorism has a significant economic impact and that it does not.

Overall, this is an interesting book. But, this is a complex subject that deserves further studying resulting in a more coherent analysis.

In a series of three lectures, economist Alan Krueger offers 2 major insights on terrorism, one of them well known but oft forgotten, and the other somewhat more surprising. He then goes on to investigate various consequences of terrorism. Ultimately, his study leaves most of the truly difficult questions of terrorism unanswered - but given the enormity of the challenge, that is not really surprising.

Krueger opens by demolishing a myth that should have died a long time ago - that terrorism is caused by economic depravity. It turns out that there is no statistical correlation between either poverty or lack of education and terrorism. Krueger points out that we tend to analogize terrorism to property crime, of which the poor are guiltier then the rich. But that is the wrong view - terrorism should be seen as the equivalent of voting - an activity carried out by the educated and well informed, not by the hungry and rather apolitical masses.

In the second chapter, Krueger explores other issues relating to terrorism. His main conclusion is that terrorism is mostly a local issue: long range attacks such as 9/11 and 7/7 are the exception rather than the rule. Terrorism often works across religious lines: the targets of terrorist attacks are overwhelmingly members of another religion. But the particular religion doesn't matter: Islamic terrorists are no more widespread then other terrorists. Perhaps most significantly, Krueger finds that terrorists usually come from countries with poor civil and political liberties.

The final lecture deals with the consequences of terrorism. Krueger presents two views of terror's economic effects: That it has a big, lasting effect, or that it is only a temporary thing. Overall, Krueger comes out in favor of the latter, although he concedes that there are good counter arguments.

I think there are a lot of questions that are left unanswered in Krueger's study. First, Krueger does not differentiate his various terrorists. As I pointed out earlier, the ones involved in long range attacks like 9/11 are the exception, rather then the rule. Is the analysis Krueger offers for terrorists in general also relevant for al-Qaeda type terrorists? If terrorism is a world wide phenomenon, why are the majority of the terrorist attacks against US and Western targets Muslim or Arab in origin? More generally, what determines what target will a terrorist chose? Conceivably, North Koreans living under a dictatorship have legitimate grievances against the US for occupying their country - and yet North Korean terrorists are not attacking the US. The same could be said for Latin American and other East Asian countries.

As Krueger points out, Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. The challenge of extreme Islam may be a unique danger even if it has no monopoly on the use of terrorism. And the alleged solution - promoting civil liberties and political rights in states that hate the West - may be worse then the disease, as we are learning, to our sorrow, from the Iraq fiasco.

Terrorists are educated losers with no gripe outlet. That's my take on Krueger's short book. His data and findings are from three lectures he gave at the London School of Economics in 2006.

He documents well several counter-intuitive findings: 1)terrorism is a tactic to get attention, not the "enemy", 2)terrorism is not caused by poverty or lack of education, 3)terrorists are not motivated by their own material gain, 4)terrorism does not much affect an overall economy,5)terrorists are young and male, 6) 95%of attacks are not suicide attacks and are by multiple perpetrators in their own country.

If I follow Krueger's arguments, I might suggest these nostrums to curb terrorism: 1)free up civil and political liberties so the gripers have a non-violent outlet, 2)restrict sensational media reporting to deny terrorists the attention they crave, 3)monitor small dissident groups, 4)heighten security in the morning hours(when most attacks occur), 5)tighten further the availability of weapons of mass destruction.

My research on global megatrends suggests there is a much more encompassing and ominous trend taking place. Terrorists are but minor players. Starting in the 20th century and accelerating into this century, "civilized" people began to accept that it was OK to kill non-combatants. The Nazi bombing raids on London and the holocaust are examples. More sensitive examples are the Allied carpet bombings of Germany or the fire-bombings of Japanese cities. Or the mass killings of non-combatants at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Civilized" people as well as terrorist losers maintain these killings are OK because they get the job done of getting attention and striking terror and making a statement. These killings are supposedly OK because they assist the progress of some aggressive religion or "ism", which includes fascism and communism but also democracy. Are the terrorist losers just mimicking their big brothers?

The title should really be--as Krueger admits in the book--What Doesn't Make a Terrorist. This quibble notwithstanding, it is a book well worth reading. Krueger analyzes the issue in depth--he describes terrorism as a labor market much like any other-- from an empirical, non-ideological perspective and comes to some important conclusions. Terrorists tend to be better educated and more financially secure than their nonviolent countrymen. Lack of civil liberties and political rights predicts terrorism much more than financial deprivation. Terrorists have numerous grievances that can't all possibly be addressed--he argues it is much more practical to choke off the terror organizations' fundraising and communication abilities (he calls this approach targeting the "demand-side" aspect of the terror "labor market." He equates the grievances of the population as the "supply-side" aspect of terrorism and says they are almost impossible to stop.

I highly recommend What Makes a Terrorist. I don't agree with the reviewer who said you need a strong background in economics to get much out of the book. There are a few equations but most of the findings should be easily understood by a non-economist.

Two side notes on Krueger having nothing to do with the book but that I find interesting: 1. He is now the top economics adviser in the U.S. 2. He was referred to as a "data-driven researcher" by Business Week a few months ago. (Is there any researcher who isn't data-driven? How else would you do research? Flipping a coin? 8-ball?)

Forgive me for the title of this review, but just as Levitt and Dubner used economic methods (well... statistical methods) to understand non-economic phenomena, Princeton eocnomist Alan Krueger (and former assistant secretary of the treasury, now chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers) uses econometric methods to understand the roots of terrorism. The number one idea to take away from this book is that there is there is insufficient evidence to conclude that poverty (and lack of education) causes terrorism; or, in less tepid words, poverty is not an incubator for terrorism. Of course, terrorists might be influenced by the poverty of their fellow countrymen (or those elsewhere in the world) to commit acts of terror, but more often than not terrorists are well educated and not poor.

Krueger confidently identifies one thing that he believes to be a significant predictor of terrorism: lack of civil liberties within a nation. His theory first rests on the supposition that the better educated is more likely to be confident in his/her political views (see the first lecture/chapter for related empirical evidence). With a lack of civil liberties, a sufficiently adamant and educated person might see terrorism as a reasonable vehicle to express his/her views. Similarly, Krueger views terrorism as akin to voting, not violent crime. (Aside: most westerners probably think poverty causes crime; Krueger cites two studies [Piehl, 1998; Ruhm, 2000] which show that there is no relationship between economic circumstances and the liklihood of perpetrating violent crime.) In his words, "voting is a better analogy than crime... people with higher incomes and better education tend to vote more often than those in lesser circumstances because, despite the higher opportunity costs for them of voting, they perceive greater benefit from participating in the process and find it less costly to form views that they want to express." Not so dismal after all. This book is far from perfect (does content of education matter?--see other reviews on this page; also, the book reads like a watered-down journal article), but the book gets a favorable rating from this reader because of the sharp insights that it provides.

This book has some insights but it is clearly written for other economists. If you do not understand economics well, you will only understand half of this book.

Moreover, the author is so reluctant to draw conclusions from his research--with good reason, I should add--that it is almost a tease. The conclusions from his findings are very tentative, so while we learn some things from this book, we see how complex terrorism is and how difficult it is to draw broad conclusions about it.

This book is based on a series of 3 lectures that take a deep look at the roots and causes of terrorism. While Krueger is not able to answer all the questions that we may have about this problem, he does an excellent job of examining and explaining the available research. He presents compelling evidence that dispels the common notion that terrorism is caused by poverty and a lack of education. The first lecture is a micro level analysis of individuals, the second lecutre is a macro analysis of countries, and the third lecture describes the wide array of the consequences of terrorism.

This very interesting book helps make sense of a current issue that the media and politicians tend to misunderstand. Good read for anyone interested in economics (although you may want to brush up on some basic statistics before diving in).

Prof. Krueger has connected the dots and makes a true grand slam home run with this slim volume on a critical subject of interest to people from every walk of life. You can take that to the bank. I found his copious and careful analysis of the kind of people who turn into terrorists, and their reasons, extremely compelling. he doesn't skimp on the economic analysis but he keeps it aimed at a general audience. Krueger is also a great writer. He has revised his public lecture into a great book that has truly opened my eyes to the real causes of terrorism.

You owe it to yourself to study this book carefully for yourself and get away from the sloppy stereotypes of terrorism bandied about by politicians and the media.