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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (32873)	6/22/2002 2:57:15 PM
From: tekboy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I also didn't think much of the piece, for three reasons. First, I thought the comparisons were idiotic. I mean, terrorism is so obviously more like political activism than like crime that I was amazed they started from that point. Second, like you, I thought the conclusions were totally banal. And third, I thought they were going after a straw man, because few serious people think foreign aid or education would have a direct or immediate effect on terrorism, or that counterterrorism is an important rationale for foreign aid or education programs. Actually, I think all three of my points are explained by the same thing--the authors' lack of serious engagement with the existing literature on the subject. That would explain why they started with a straw man (because they may not have realized how dumb the premise was); why they used inappropriate comparisons (because they drew on what they knew, rather than on what people in the field had already done); and why they ended up simply reinventing the wheel. The funny thing is, Krueger's a serious guy--a first-rate economist at Princeton who has done important work on a range of domestic labor-market-related topics. This was an example of the hubris of economists, I think, assuming that their abstract methods are a universal solvent for all intellectual problems, which is BS. He would be amused and annoyed if some Middle East expert dropped in to opine on minimum wage questions, but felt no compunction about declaiming loudly on terrorism. tb@R-E-S-P-E-C-Tfindoutwhatitmeanstome.com