Marie Harf, spokesperson for the State Department, got a lot of heat this past week for saying that all terror groups like ISIS need are … jobs:
“We’re killing a lot of them, and we’re going to keep killing more of them. … But we cannot win this war by killing them,” department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” “We need … to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs, whether –”
Even MSNBC’s Chris Matthews expressed incredulity at this.
And rightly so, according to a 2004 working paper by Harvard’s Alberto Abadie.
Titled “Poverty, Political Freedom and the Roots of Terrorism,” Abadie notes that “terrorist risk is not significantly higher in poorer countries.”
However, recent empirical studies have challenged the view that poverty creates terrorism. Using U.S. State Department data on transnational terrorist attacks, Krueger and Laitin (2003) and Piazza (2004) find no evidence suggesting that poverty may generate terrorism. In particular, the results in Krueger and Laitin (2003) suggest that among countries with similar levels of civil liberties, poor countries do not generate more terrorism than rich countries. Conversely, among countries with similar levels of civil liberties, richer countries seem to be preferred targets for transnational terrorist attacks.
Following an examination of numerous charts and figures, Abadie concludes that “after controlling for other country characteristics, including the level of political rights, fractionalization, and geography, national income is not signifcantly associated with terrorism.”
h/t to The Irishman.
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