Economics of Warfare 19 – 4

Continuing with a fourth and final posting on the nineteenth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

This lecture continues the discussion of terrorism, looking at whether poverty or poor education causes terrorism. The conventional wisdom, supported by a book by Alan Krueger, is that they do not. Dr. Spagat explores this in more depth and the data tends to support this theme, although there are exceptions.

On slide 39, Dr. Spagat leaves us with a gem of a quote. The data he had been looking at was responses to surveys about terrorism. As he notes: “It is one thing to voice support on a survey for terrorism or attacks–it is another matter entirely to strap on explosives and blow oneself up. In other words, suicide bombers have to be really committed individuals.”

He then goes to show Palestinian suicide bombers are generally less impoverished and better educated on average than the population they are drawn from. He sees a similar observation when looking at deceased Hezbollah militants (pages 39-41). This is not surprising if you are familiar with the history of revolutions and insurgencies.

The link to his lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%2019.pdf

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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2 Comments

  1. Hi. It’s interesting that you characterize the conventional wisdom as saying that it’s not the poor and poorly educated who are the most likely to turn to terrorism. At the time that Krueger and other people started writing the stuff I cite the conventional wisdom was the reverse. Even now it may be the reverse although the balance has shifted a lot.

    Also, the reality may even be shifting toward poorer, more poorly educated terrorists. Note sure.

    Mike Spagat

    • Well, my focus over the years has been on insurgencies, and they are often led by people who are not particularly downtrodden, often educated people with an upper middle class background (Lenin, Castro, etc.). Added to that some of the earliest quantitative studies on political violence (Gurr, Feierabend & Feierabend) show that political violence is more likely in developing nations than in nations that are truly basket cases. I also attempted at one point as an econometrics class project to do regressions comparing the Gini index to political violence, and got the null result. As I consider terrorism to simply be a tool of an insurgency (as opposed to a different form of warfare), then it has always been my understanding that insurgencies are not dominated by the poor and poorly educated. So I was not surprised by Krueger’s findings. It is what I would expect he would find.

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