I was struck by an NPR story this morning where they talked to a pathologist in Afghanistan. He conducts the autopsies on the remains of suicide bombers there.

The doctor argues that a great many of them had mental or physical disabilities:

Dr. Yusuf Yadgari, a forensics instructor at Kabul Medical University, says 60% of the bombers they've examined had a physical ailment or disability. When you factor in mental problems, Yadgari says the number grows to include more than 80% of all suicide attackers in Afghanistan.

He says these "outcasts" may become suicide bombers because it's a way to make money for their families.

Earlier this year, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported that the dead suicide bombers who passed through Yadgari's morgue were suffering from blindness, muscular dystrophy, amputations and skin diseases. The latest NPR report says others had cancer and one had leprosy.

There are a couple of things that I think about that:

1) It provides evidence for the "too many, too sick, and too poor young men" argument for the causes of terrorism. If there are large numbers of out of work young men in countries where there is high mortality anyway and little possibility for advancement, these men are going to make a "rational" cost-benefit analysis that fighting the infidel is a better option. If this is true then the only means to stop them is to change the cost-benefit analysis, meaning that we have to help develop these countries. Richer countries would not be producing suicide bombers in the numbers that they are now.

(Yes, I recognize that this argument has flaws. Many suicide bombers are rich or come from rich countries.)

Incidentally, I know that there are some female suicide bombers, but I am not certain whether this research applies to them. It wasn't mentioned in the story. It may be that they have a completely different cost-benefit analysis.

2) I have been reading this book Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark. I mentioned an article about it before here.

Now I haven't finished the book yet, and I am still very skeptical of his argument for the genetic inheritance of a tendency towards capitalism. However, one of the arguments that he makes is that the majority of societies were Malthusian in nature before 1800 and a great many still are today.

In a Malthusian society, because the population is growth is essentially stationary the birth rate has to equal the death rate. Any increase in the population has to be associated with a greater division of wealth and hence a lower standard of living for all. He marshalls a lot of evidence for this trying to show that there was essentially no increase in the standard of living in preindustrial societies from antiquity to the Industrial revolution. I will let you read the book to see if you buy that aspect.

Anyway, one of the things that he shows was that because Malthusian societies divide wealth and an increase in population implies a decrease in the standard of living, they have created a numerous mechanisms to keep the population down. It does not appear that these mechanisms were conscious; they just evolved over time.

For example, Europe had a significantly higher standard of living than Asia during the Black plague because the plague lowered the total population. Asia on the other hand had better sanitation but practiced widespread female infanticide which not only lowered the population but changed the sex-ratio to make many men unmarried.

Now here is my speculation with respect to suicide bombers. Clark argues that many societies today are still in a Malthusian demographic framework. I think you could argue that Afghanistan is one of them because of their high birth and mortality rate and because of the still widespread practice of female infanticide.

Is male suicide bombing an example of a population suppression in a Malthusian society to raise the standard of living? If it is, what remedies would be effective at stopping suicide bombing?

I am really curious to hear what people have to say about this, particularly people who have finished Clark's book.