Do poverty and lack of economic opportunity cause terrorism?

http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Dwyer/Crime_and_Poverty,_Part_II.shtml

According to Barrack Obama, terrorism is an outgrowth of poverty and lack of economic opportunity. Therefore, to fight the Islamists, we must address the grievances that terrorists exploit, including economic grievances, because "when millions of people -- especially youth -- are impoverished and have no hope for the future, when corruption inflicts daily humiliations on people, when there are no outlets by which people can express their concerns, resentments fester. The risk of instability and extremism grow. Where young people have no education, they are more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and radical ideas..."

How true is this explanation for terrorism and Islamic jihad? The notorious ISIS terrorist "Jihadi John" (AKA Mohammed Emwazi) was a well-born Londoner with college degree in computer programming. Remember the mastermind of 9/11, Osama bin Laden? Did he come from an impoverished background bereft of economic opportunity? In fact, he was the son of a Saudi construction magnate and attended the top high school and the best university in Saudi Arabia. British terrorist Omar Sheikh, who kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002, attended the London School of Economics. Pearl was subsequently beheaded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who attended North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro and studied mechanical engineering. Mohamed Atta,who led the 9/11 attacks, was the son of an Egyptian lawyer, and had worked on a doctorate in urban preservation at a German university. The present leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, was a surgeon from a leading Egyptian family. There are 250 U.S.-based Islamic militants since 9/11 who have been indicted or convicted of a terrorist crime. On average, they are middle class, well-educated family men with children, which is to say ordinary Americans.

One could go on to multiply examples of which there are many. So why, in the face of so much contrary evidence, does Obama argue that it is poverty and lack of opportunity that breeds terrorism? The answer lies in our president's fixation on economic determinism as the source of people's ideas and values. The best known advocate of economic determinism is, of course, Karl Marx, who argued that a person's socioeconomic class determines his political views. The same economic determinism can be seen in the standard leftist explanation for crime -- poverty and lack of economic opportunity. According to this view, it is one's socio-economic class, not philosophy or religion, that determines a person's ideas and values. I've already addressed the myth that poverty causes crime by pointing out that if anything it is just the opposite: crime causes poverty by destroying a person's chances for a productive job or career.

See my articles:

http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/Dwyer/Crime_and_Poverty,_Part_I.shtml

So Obama's argument that it is poverty that causes terrorism is just the latest attempt to blame a violation of individual rights on the perpetrator's socioeconomic status -- i.e., by invoking the same view of economic determinism promulgated by Karl Marx in the 19th Century.

In fact, if one wishes to adopt Marx's class-based rhetoric, one could say that terrorism is generally a bourgeois endeavor. This was true of the Russian anarchists of the late 19th century, of the German Marxists of the Baader-Meinhof gang of the 1970s, and of the Japanese terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo in the 1990s. It is not poverty but ideology -- in the case of Islam, religious ideology -- that motivates terrorism, not the desire for a higher standard of living. If someone truly desires a higher standard of living, then he or she would almost surely embrace a productive economic system like capitalism -- exactly the kind of system that Islamists despise for its worship of money, materialism and freedom.

Post 1

Sunday, April 26, 2015 - 2:14am

@ William Dwyer: Excellent deduction! Congratulations! Unfortunately, politicians and further so-called "intellectuals" evidently are unable to think right and come to the conclusions you have presented.

Post 2

Sunday, April 26, 2015 - 5:41am

The elevation of martyrdom in Islam is a big culprit.

Post 3

Sunday, April 26, 2015 - 4:16pm

New tv show!

So instead of Donald Trump saying "You're fired!" They could have Bhagdadi saying "You're martyred!" And blow them selves up on Al Jazeera!

Post 4

Thursday, April 30, 2015 - 7:09pm

It depends on what you mean. Certainly, poverty causes anger, especially when you can see across the gulf. This affects the Palestinians, for instance, but also urban blacks in the USA, and also Catholics in Northern Ireland, all of whom are economically worse off than their immediate neighbors. However, it is also true that the actual terrorists tend to be educated and therefore better-off, what we would label (relatively) middle class. It is also true that terrorists tend to be engineers, rather than scientists. So-called "liberal arts" (actually literature and fine arts, political science, etc.) majors tend to be under-represented among terrorists.

See "Engineers of Jihad" by Diego Gambetta, Nuffield College and Steffen Hertog, University of Durham, in Sociology Working Papers Paper Number 2007-10, University of Oxford. Department of Sociology University of Oxford Manor Road Oxford OX1 3UQ (www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/swp.html)

The short story is that engineers tend to believe that problems can be solved -- and would be solved, if everyone else just followed the formula. Scientists, on the other hand, tend to be liberals who accept ambiguity and uncertainty in the never-ending quest for a better - but never final - truth.

Post 5

Thursday, April 30, 2015 - 10:48pm

Marotta has lined up with that old leftist chestnut that poverty is a root cause of terrorism, looting, rioting, crime... and now he is adding engineering. This is the kind of non-thinking that is much like racism itself - that is, the imputation of character deficiencies and bad acts to something that has nothing to do with ideas, personal choice or personal responsibility.

"...Palestinians, for instance, but also urban blacks in the USA, and also Catholics in Northern Ireland, all of whom are listed as economically worse off than their immediate neighbors..." - some people are in poverty, therefore, according to Marotta, are angry, and therefore this makes them engage in terrorism or riot or crime. Does anyone else here think that makes sense?

Anger is an emotion. It can arise out of rational or irrational values. It can be purely a psychological defense. It doesn't cause anyone kill or loot others.

There are whites who live in the same poverty in urban USA. But if they don't riot or engage in crime at the same percentages, then it isn't the poverty. It also isn't skin color. Liberals should be horrified at how racist their ideas are.

Crime is caused by choices that arise out values. Same with terrorism from the Palestinians, or from any Catholics in Northern Ireland. And it isn't the engineering ideas that drive jihad, it is the religious/political ideas.

Does that mean that those Imams who purposely work to create Islamic terrorists are more like engineers than scientists? I've listened to them and there is a real absence of a rational approach to problem solving going on in their twisted minds. Are the rioters and looters in Baltimore actually engineers during the day?

The vast majority of people who live in poverty relative to their neighbors are not criminals or terrorists. That's a simple fact.

(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 5/01, 9:12am)

Post 6

Saturday, May 2, 2015 - 11:32am

http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21613303-disturbing-study-link-between-incomes-and-criminal-behaviour-have-and

It is important to read the words on the page and not put different words of your own into those sentences. The discussion is about terrorism which is a political crime, that is, it is crime carried out with an explicit political motive. To enunciate a political motive requires a level of literacy and education that is atypical of poverty.

The fact remains that those who carry out the acts, well-off though they may be, point to the injustices suffered by others, including poverty and the lack of economic opportunity. That being as it may, different actors have different motives. The perpetators of the 9/11 attacks were more concerned with the cultural impact of US presence in Saudi Arabia in particular and the Middle East in general. Poverty is not a problem in Saudi Arabia - unless, maybe you are a Palestinian. Why poor Palestinians do not throw stones at Saudi tanks is an interesting question.

It is a well-established statistical fact that (with some notable exceptions) as the US economy has worsed since the Dot Com Meltdown, through 9/11, the new wars, the mortgage crisis, the wealth lost to General Motors, Chrysler, and other pet industries, street crime has gone down. Uncorrelated poverty is not a cause of crime. But poverty does correlate with other problems, such as lack of education and lack of family structure. Causality is a different problem, entirely. See these two popular accounts ...

... from The Economist

and from CBS News.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/crime-and-poverty/.

It is important to point out that even if urban youths could identify economic disparity as the source of their anger, they do not go into the suburbs to steal computers and cellphones in order to set up their own wifi hotspots to gain social capital in the information age. Instead, they just predate on their own neighborhoods. That is typical of criminals. One exception is female burglars. They tend to work outside of their own neighborhoods.

Another area of crime not addressed by The Economist or CBS News is white collar crime. White collar criminals are not disadvantaged. In fact, they tend to be wealthy, educated, white, and male. They are also planfully competent, not impulsive or reactive. They also are not politically motivated. No one embezzles a hundred thousand dollars to force equal rights for others.

But white collar crime does have a political aspect. We do not think of it as terrorism because corporations do not commit crimes in order to bring about political change. Rather, they harm people because the political structure of a mixed economy lets them get away with it.

Finally, it is important not to conflate poverty with the lack of economic opportunity. America historically always had poor people. How could it not? Historically, however, everyone pretty much had economic opportunity. We experienced unrest and even social strife, but we never situations such as Palestine or Northern Ireland where a captive population engaged in open warfare against the wider society, at least, not since Geronimo agreed to stop fighting ...

Post 7

Saturday, May 2, 2015 - 11:48am

http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jihad.pdf

Based on a varied sample of radical Islamic groups from the Muslim world, Hertog found that members of such radical Islamist groups were four times as likely to have upper-level education as the general population. Among those with higher education, engineers are three times as prevalent as other graduates if compared to the general population of the university-educated. Among the members of violent radical Islamist groups whose subject of study was known, about 44 percent had engineering backgrounds.
In comparing Islamist militant groups to non-Islamist ones, Hertog found violent right-wing conservative groups in the West to have a high representation of engineers in their ranks, though not as strongly as among Islamists. He found practically no engineers in extremist leftist groups, with the exception of some organizations in Turkey and Iran.

The link above in #4 to "Engineers of Jihad" is broken. Here is another place to find it:

Excepts and summaries here:

http://carnegieendowment.org/2009/09/01/engineers-of-jihad/1mnz

http://shc.stanford.edu/events/diego-gambetta-engineers-jihad

For instance, Dick Butler, the founder of Aryan Nation, was an aeronautical engineer and Wilhelm Schmitt, leader of the “Sheriff's Posse Comitatus” (a militant antigovernment group with an anti-tax agenda and extremist Christian views) before being sentenced to 26 years in prison was an engineer with Lockheed Martin (Smith and Morgan 1994).

In early September 2007 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – one of the country’s most radical politicians with a PhD on transport engineering from Teheran’s Science and Technology University and the author several of scientific papers – delivered a speech to Iranian academics, which exudes those features to such an extent that we cannot resist quoting him at length:

In some discussions I told them [those inside Iran pressing for compromise over fears the United States could launch a military strike because of the nuclear standoff with the West]: “I am an engineer and I am examining the issue. They do not dare wage war against us and I base this on a double proof’” […] [First] I tell them: “I am an engineer and I am a master in calculation and tabulation. I draw up tables. For hours, I write out different hypotheses. I reject, I reason. I reason with planning and I make a conclusion. They cannot make problems for Iran.” [Second] “I believe in what God says. God says that those who walk in the path of righteousness will be victorious. What reason can you have for believing God will not keep this promise?” (AFP, 3 September 2007).

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 5/02, 11:51am)

Post 8

Monday, May 4, 2015 - 10:34am

Marotta says:

The discussion is about terrorism which is a political crime, that is, it is crime carried out with an explicit political motive. To enunciate a political motive requires a level of literacy and education that is atypical of poverty.

Nonsense. Illiterate idiots can and have been talked into strapping bombs to their bodies. Very few of those people who are cutting off heads in the middle east are high on the scale of literacy and education.

There can be a very wide variation in the levels of literacy and education that come with an individual's political motivation.
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Post 9

Friday, July 17, 2015 - 6:06am

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1168137

Another engineer of jihad: Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, identified as the shooter by the Federal Bureau of Investigation ... According to a resume believed to have been posted online by Abdulazeez, he attended high school in a Chattanooga suburb and graduated from the University of Tennessee with an engineering degree.

"In comparing Islamist militant groups to non-Islamist ones, Hertog found violent right-wing conservative groups in the West to have a high representation of engineers in their ranks, though not as strongly as among Islamists. He found practically no engineers in extremist leftist groups, with the exception of some organizations in Turkey and Iran."

Engineers of Jihad by SteffenHertog and Diego Gambetta here http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jihad.pdf.

Also Christopher Boucek (Moderator), Steffen Hertog, and Marc Sagemen, "Engineers of Jihad" from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace here:

http://carnegieendowment.org/files/0901Carnegie-Engineers.pdf

Some disagree with the findings -- or at least dislike the facts...

"Jihad Study Roils Engineering" from EE Times here:

Considering the large number of engineers among us, it might be well to ask if Objectivism is a religion, at least to some of them?

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 7/17, 6:09am)

Post 10

Friday, July 17, 2015 - 7:55am

Whether American, Canadian or Islamic, and whether due to selection or field socialisation, a disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of “monism” – ‘why argue when there is one best solution’ – and of “simplism” – ‘if only people were rational, remedies would be simple’. (page 50)

The Carnegie survey reveals an even more surprising fact, hitherto unnoticed, that strengthens the suspicion that the engineers’ mindset plays a part in their proneness not only to radicalise to the right of the political spectrum but do so with a religious slant: engineers turn out to be by far the most religious group of all academics – 66.5 per cent, followed again by 61.7 in economics, 49.9 in sciences, 48.8 per cent of social scientists, 46.3 of doctors and 44.1 per cent of lawyers, the most sceptical of the lot. Engineers and economists are also those who oppose religion least (3.7% and 3.0%), and, together with the humanities, those who more strongly embrace it (Table 16). Diego Gambetta, Steffen Hertog, Sociology Working Papers Paper Number 2007-10 "Engineers of Jihad" Department of Sociology, University of Oxford.

Post 11

Friday, July 17, 2015 - 12:04pm

More Marotta nonsense....

Considering the large number of engineers among us, it might be well to ask if Objectivism is a religion, at least to some of them?

What is clear from that statement is that Marotta not only isn't an Objectivist, but he really doesn't grasp the nature of Objectivism.

That statement implies a bizarre understanding of identity (Objectivism might well, he says, be a religion because there are a "large number of engineers among us"!), or that Objectivism is a religion, "at least to some", because they are engineers? This last is an implied view of human nature that doesn't include choosing core values through the use of reason (at least not for those poor engineers who must be something other than choosing-human).
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Is Marotta's motivation here to take a swipe at Objectivism? Is it intended as a swipe at engineering? Is it intended as a swipe at those who chose to be engineers? It has a kind of passive-aggressive feel to it. Who knows what if any purpose it has... maybe not even Marotta.

My guess, and it is just a guess, is that Marotta, given his flighty, disconnected-from-reality form of reasoning and his fondness for floating abstractions, may well harbor a subconscious resentment for engineers who (whether by training or from prior inclination) work effectively to purposely connect the broadest of principles of hard science to a concrete expression in a finished product.

Post 12

Friday, July 17, 2015 - 7:43pm

[duplicate deleted]

(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 7/17, 7:47pm)

Post 13

Friday, July 17, 2015 - 9:33pm

Marotta quotes:

... a disproportionate share of engineers seems to have a mindset that inclines them to entertain the quintessential right-wing features of “monism” – ‘why argue when there is one best solution’..."

How is one to take a statement like that? Here is a defintion of monism:

"Monism is the metaphysical or theological view that all is one, that there are no fundamental divisions, and that a unified set of laws underlie all of nature."

Monism versus dualism/pluralism showed up in discussions of mind versus matter, consciousness versus brain, material versus spirit. And there are a number of other definitions and meanings but mostly arising out of religions (Pantheistic, the Abrahamic faiths, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. - you know, "God is all and all is God" sort of thing.)

Notice how none of that fits with "quintessential right-wing features of 'monism.'"

I'm not fully up to date on all of the tiny details of the various left-wing, academic, perseverations about the right-wing. Marotta will have to bring us up to date on what the quinttessential right-wing features of monism are.

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We know that those of us, like Ayn Rand, look quickly to the context as we attempt to grasp the meaning of a statement. Just as we know that an engineer would look at the design of bridge within the context of material properties, expected stresses, the normal laws of physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and so forth. Is that a 'monistic' context? Is that seen as an example of "quintessential right-wing features of “monism”? What would a 'dualistic' approach be? Are there 'quintessential left-wing features of monism... or of dualism'?

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Next Marotta gives us a quick philosophical tour of the history of uncertainty: "Immanuel Kant ... hallmarked as ... the beginning of the age of doubt. ...[that] new truths eclipse previous beliefs ... [is] offered as proof that nothing can be certain. The academic purveyors of doubt moved us from workable knowledge to paralyzing ignorance. That skepticism goes back 2500 years to the ancient Greeks. They began rightly questioning the assumptions of their social context but could not stop, quickly doubting even the possibility of knowledge."

And then he says, "So, it is cogent that Ayn Rand admitted proudly to 'questioning the cultural tradition of 2500 years.'" Well, what is he saying here? That Rand should not have been so bold, that she shouldn't have exhibited such certainty? Or is he saying that she swept away those old philosophical doubts of man's ability to acquire workable knowledge - rightly declaring that the philosophers of the past that he mentioned were wrong?

If it is that latter intention, then why mention them in this context where he is damning engineers for their 'monistic' insistence on finding one best solution?

If it is the former, than this is a very convoluted way to attack Rand's epistemology. (Which is what I suspect that he, or his subconcious, is trying to do - to say that we can't be certain of anything.)

(Try to keep this whole thing in context... if that's possible. It started as an assertion that engineers are more likely to become terrorists than other professions - according to this study he likes. And then he goes from there to a kind of attack on aspects of Rand's epistemology, and as you'll see in the following paragraphs, an attack on Objectivism as being much too prone to being held as a fanatic, fundamentalist religion. I'm thinking of it as a cross between a philosophical mystery and stream of consciousness.)

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The fact remains that without a penetrating investigation of principles and essentials, Ayn Rand's Objectivism too easily appears to give full evidence of the same fanaticism as fundamentalist religion: assurance of knowledge; and a desire to have everyone else in the world conform to that. It is clearly documented these past 50+ years that this allows Objectivism to serve the purpose of religion for many followers, adherents, and admirers.

We all know that there are True Believers of the Eric Hoffer stripe that arise out of any handy ideology - particularly if it is on the fringe of the culture of those individuals. It is a psychological occurrence where a need is met by adopting some ideology like a kind of neurotic shield and sword. We also know that there are fewer such believers to be found in Objectivism than other ideologies if for no other reason than it is so explicitly based upon reason and so explicitly set against faith. When Marotta trots out the allegations of "clearly documented ...50+ years [of the use of] Objectivism to serve the purpose of religion for many followers, adherents, and admirers" I don't buy it. I think that Marotta has a desire to stay attached to floating abstractions, and loose thinking, and if others point out the failures of logic, then they are being Objectivist fanatics, or right-wingers, and can only see things 'monistically' - unlike his ability to see all the nuances, subtleties, and 'dualities' less gifted people are blind to.

Marotta lists "assurance of knowledge and a desire to have everyone else in the world conform to that" as his key characteristics of fanatic fundamentalist religion. Hey, I want everyone in the world to understand and achieve higher levels of self-esteem - which I'm assured would be good for all, but that isn't a fanatic fundamentalist religious belief.

And again, how does "right-wing" get into this? When writing and thinking is as fuzzy as this one has a hard time worrying out meanings. We all know of those who cling to a "best" solution in the absence of confidence, because they feel insecure and try to make up for it with false confidence. But I think that the heart of the statement Marotta quoted is to condemn those who bring any certainty to the solution their mind finds. And it attaches a negative connotation to certainty and to engineers. Certainty can be a product of good engineering practices.

I think this is psychology not politics, not philosophy, and not sociology. I suspect that it was all born as a kind of subconsious attack by those who revel in using their minds to feel superior to those who they see as mundane intellectual plodders stuck in a world where they only see logical connections for evidenced reality, unlike themselves who are able to float about on unteathered abstractions where they make up reality out of clever words.

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Edit Note: It appears that Marotta deleted the post I was replying to. It wasn't a duplicate (as you can see from my quotes). Oh well, I had fun writing this.

(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 7/17, 9:37pm)

Post 14

Monday, July 20, 2015 - 6:41am

If you look at Post #12, you will see that I wrote it at 7:43 PM and deleted it four minutes later. I was not satisfied that I made any new argument. I said all of these things before and nothing I wrote then was going to cast any new light on the problem. The problem I was attempting to address was the differentiation between objective knowledge and claims of absolute knowledge. That distinction puts the statement quoted in #10 into a workable context. I failed to do that.

At some level, everyone is certain of their beliefs or, as David Kelley points out about the radical skeptics, they could not drive a car. As extended to the sociology of Objectivism, it is all too easy to find people who take the Law of Identity as an absolute (which it is) and extrapolate that to absolute claims about the gold standard and the aesthetic values of Charlies Angels.

Be all that as it may, it took me four minutes to write a post and decide that it was not worth sharing. Steve Wolfer then spent two hours replying to something from my wastebasket. He certainly gives me a lot of real estate in his head. I point out that he has no Gallery items, no Articles, no Ayn Rand Sightings, no News Items, no Movies, and no Books to his credit. In ten years, he has contributed nothing original to RoR.

Post 15

Monday, July 20, 2015 - 9:58am