...and this is how we amuse ourselves!

Economists that is...

attended a seminar on the financial and economic factors in Terrorism..and it ended up being a micro lec on maximising a terrorist leader's profit maximising function which had elements like the value of his life which is taken as a discounted value of future streams of income and even had the probablity of being caught!

The function was subject to a budget constraint that had income of the outfit constrained by the number of followers or some such thing...

The wonders of using Mathematical functions to reduce ever human aspect to an equation will never cease to amaze me.
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on a more serious note...
the presenter made a statement to the effect that women have been found to have a sobering effect on men..hence the more educated the women in a society, the lesser the chances for terrorism.

just by the way...that is changing..Gujarat saw hordes of educated middle class families happily participating in the massive raiding and looting of shops that took place when the pogrom took place in 2002. These included women who helped their men stack their cars with consumer durables and gleefully goaded them on even as thousands of Muslims being hacked in their neghbourhoods.

as a witness told me, " even as one part of Ahmedabad burned, Hindu families were happily eating at the newly opened branch of McDonalds!"

Some sobering effect that was...

another thing...
Regressions don't necessarily imply causality...hence by fitting in regressions and stating that educated women have have a negative impact on terrorism...doesen't make much sense. it's equivalent to making spurious correlations.
we need to desist from making generalisations like "All women have maternal instincts", "Women by nature are more peace loving", etc etc.
which brings forth another tangential point to my mind...Gandhi was accused by the Hindu Mahasabha and his assassins of "effiminating" the national movement, a passive (which shouldn't be confused for a non active response)response to violence was seen as emasculating the struggle. Hence the whole idea of even seeing the nation as a motherland (females seen as weak and seekers of male protection) and the need for its sons to protect its honour, which adds to the jingoism and pathological nationalism that prevails amidst several NRIs.