Another Myth Bites the Dust

How many times have you heard that terrorism grows out of poverty? Well, not so fast cowboy.(HT: Little Green Footballs)

"In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty, but in fact when you look at the data, it's not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin," Abadie said.

Instead, Abadie detected a peculiar relationship between the levels of political freedom a nation affords and the severity of terrorism. Though terrorism declined among nations with high levels of political freedom, it was the intermediate nations that seemed most vulnerable.

This is from a research column published in the Harvard Gazette. You know what to do.