--- Brad DeLong <jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> and thus to teach every fanatic for the next
> century that large-scale terrorism is a really effective way of
> getting the world's attention, and has little downside, and so set
> the table for even more massive civilian casualties in the more
> distant future?
>
> I don't know the answer. One reason I do economics and not political
> science is that even thinking about such questions leaves me
> profoundly depressed...
>
I hate to say it, but your first paragraph renders your second otiose; it provides ample evidence that a) you are an economist and b) you find thinking about these matters unpleasant. You're working off a theory of the motivation of criminal fanatics which seems to be rooted in expected utility theory (the implied counterfactual is that if we can make the consequences for fanatics sufficiently unpleasant or lower the returns in publicity, the cost/benefit analysis will come out negative). That's known to be a bad theory of criminology, and is unlikely to be a better theory of fanaticism.
In the first place, mass terrorism *is* a really effective way of getting the world's attention, and there's not much that can be done about this fact. in the second, if one's prepared to become a suicide bomber, then it's clear that one is not the sort of person who is thinking about things in terms of "potential downside". We don't know at all whether bin Laden's group care about Afghan civilians, and I'd rather suspect that they don't. For God's sake if we're thinking of policy responses, let's design them for the world as it is and not how Gary Becker thinks it is.
dd
____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk or your free @yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie