I posted some time back about sexual frustration under Islam as a source of inspiration for terrorism. Gary Becker has argued that sexually-frustrated nobodies whose lives are going nowhere are a primary source of terrorist supply.
In poor Islamic societies – this NYT report documents the situation in Egypt - youth are turning to religious devotion as their possibilities for a decent career and marriage disappear. A youthful bulge in the population pyramid is causing an amplified religious bulge as frustrated youth drag their parents and governments with them toward fanaticism as a response to their hopeless economic situations and consequent low marriage prospects.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
Of course sexually frustrated young men are fodder for all sorts of extremism - that's why we should be worrying about those gender imbalances in India and China.
Testosterone poisoning is a real problem, and it hardly takes one of those ingenious models of Becker's to understand that.
When I was young I used to carefully explain this problem to young women of my acquaintance, but distressingly few of them offered me the antidote ...
derrida derider, I suffered from the same youthful affliction though I think it was a dimendsion less severe than that currently prevailing in Egypt.
Post a Comment