Alan B. Krueger (1960–2019)

One of the critical mistakes we can make in the current war on terror is to assume terrorists are poor, uneducated people duped or talked into doing the things they do. Krueger's work sets out to show in a statistical fashion who these people really are. In fact, his analysis shows that terrorists from a wide range of organizations tend to me middle class with higher education, and that our government, at least, has made a number of errors and deliberate misstatements about terrorists and what to do to prevent people from becoming terrorists.

What Makes A Terrorist? is based on a set of lectures given by Krueger, and isn't as deep as I'd like, but it does offer a real statistical analysis of the situation. He's honest about the limitations of his data gathering, and his statistical analysis seems correct to me (although I'm an informed layman rather than an expert in statistical analysis). In addition, the transcribed lecture format seems terse. Nonetheless, it's a good book.… (mere)

Professor Audrey Kurth Cronin has chosen to discuss What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism by Alan B Krueger on FiveBooks as one of the top five on her subject - Terrorism, saying that:



“…Alan Krueger’s book is written to be very understandable but it is also full of statistics and good hard data about what motivates and makes terrorists, and shoots down the received wisdom of many pundits. For example, he shows that neither poverty nor lack of education causes terrorism. …”



The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/audrey-kurth-cronin-on-terrorism… (mere)