And it's not quite what was expected.
Harvard Gazette: Freedom squelches terrorist violenceOf course, this won't make the evening news. "Tonight - Terrorism NOT caused by poverty!" isn't something I ever expect to see on CNN. There's a lot of folks who've got a lot invested in the "Poverty=Cause for Terrorism" meme...Before analyzing the data, Abadie believed it was a reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in poverty, especially since studies have linked civil war to economic factors. However, once the data was corrected for the influence of other factors studied, Abadie said he found no significant relationship between a nation's wealth and the level of terrorism it experiences.
"In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin," Abadie said.
Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.
Anyway - this is interesting news, and may well explain why we've had so few terroristic incidents in the US over the last 40 years or so...
J.
Comments (2)
The left just can't believe that terrorists are evil, and they don't need a reason to be evil.
Posted by Ben USN, (Ret) | January 9, 2007 8:22 AM
Posted on January 9, 2007 08:22
There's no such thing as Evil, Ben - unless you're right of center at which point you're evil.
Seriously, at this point there's a lot of time and energy invested in the idea that if we could just all sit down and tak things out war would just be a bad memory. However, there's been sufficient examples over the years that it's a stupid idea... but they keep trying to force it to fit.
J.
Posted by JLawson | January 9, 2007 11:39 PM
Posted on January 9, 2007 23:39