Is Terrorism Caused by Poverty and Lack of Education?

Alan Krueger, the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Princeton and adviser to the National Counterterrorism Center, has written a book on What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism. He has now published a paper, "What makes a Terrorist," based on his book and published in The American.

He proves that terrorism is not a product of poverty and lack of education as so many believe. For what causes it, I quote from the article's concluding paragraphs below:

Consistent with the work on international terrorist incidents, countries with fewer civil liberties and political rights were more likely to be the birthplaces of foreign insurgents. Distance also mattered, with most foreign insurgents coming from nearby nations. The model predicted that the largest number of insurgents—44 percent—would have emanated from Saudi Arabia, a nation not known for its protection of civil liberties but with a high GDP per capita.
The evidence suggests that terrorists care about influencing political outcomes. They are often motivated by geopolitical grievances. To understand who joins terrorist organizations, instead of asking who has a low salary and few opportunities, we should ask: Who holds strong political views and is confident enough to try to impose an extremist vision by violent means? Most terrorists are not so desperately poor that they have nothing to live for. Instead, they are people who care so fervently about a cause that they are willing to die for it.

Ah, yes, democracy again, the miracle cure for so much that ails us.