Summer reading for Gordon

Matt notes in his report on Brown’s US trip this that Gordon Brown has, thankfully, abandoned the intellectual lazy assumption that poverty causes terrorism. But Brown should still get hold of a copy of What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism by the Princeton professor Alan B. Krueger before he heads off to Dorset on holiday.

Krueger through a careful analysis of the statistics debunks the notion that poverty and terrorism go hand in hand. Indeed, it is amazing how this idea—which has no evidentiary support—has become the received wisdom.  

The link that Krueger finds is not between terrorism and poverty but terrorism and an absence of political freedom. All of which suggests, and whisper this quietly, that the neo-cons may have be onto something after all.