196. Is There a Better Way to Fight Terrorism?

The White House is hosting an anti-terror summit next week. Summits being what they are, we try to offer some useful advice.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:33Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:04Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:54Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Next week, the White House is planning to host a summit on countering violent extremism. It was originally scheduled for last year but got delayed and then put back on the calendar after the Paris terrorist attacks in January. What should we expect from a summit like this?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Alas, very little of a positive nature. I view this principally as a media event. I hope I'm wrong.

• 3:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just in case the summit does turn out to be primarily a media event, we thought we'd take this podcast, which technically is a media event, and turn it into a terrorism summit. We'll talk about what's known and what's not known about terrorism. We'll talk about what's working and what's not to prevent it, and what we should be thinking about but aren't. Now, how do we accomplish this? Basically, we asked some people who know a lot about terrorism to tell us what they'd say if they had the ear of President Obama and other world leaders.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Many people might think that we couldn't make the problem worse. Oh, yes, we can make it much worse very quickly, as we saw with Iraq.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  The problem is, we can never get rid of terrorism 100% in the same way that we can't get rid of school shooters 100%. So we have to be resilient as a country to be able to recognize that the outlier attack doesn't mean that it's doomsday.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  Leadership is taking people to a place they wouldn't have gotten to already. You know, if you see a parade going down the street and you run up in front of it, they're not actually following you.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  If you want some bad guys killed, I'm your guy. But what I would like to see is some logic attendant to what our tactical moves are, and I don't see any of that yet.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 4:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He teaches economics at the University of Chicago. Hey, Levitt, how you doing?

• 4:58Speaker 06

  I'm doing great. How about you?

• 5:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm all right. So you may have heard the White House is putting together an international summit to address terrorism. Have you been invited?

• 5:07Speaker 06

  Maybe my invitation got lost in the mail, but I don't think so.

• 5:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt admits that his discipline doesn't necessarily have much to offer on the topic of terrorism.

• 5:17Speaker 06

  If you turn to economics and what economics has to say about fighting terrorism, it's a hard problem because economics really centers around incentives. And the kind of incentives we tend to use are things like prices or punishment in prison or whatnot. But when people are willing to pay the ultimate price in the form of suicide to reach a goal, they're not the kind of folks that we're used to incentivizing and motivating.

• 5:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  So rather than rely on economists for our UnSummit, we reached out to a different set of folks, like Mia Bloom.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  So I'm a professor at the University of Massachusetts on the Lowell campus. I'm a professor of security studies.

• 6:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  And...

• 6:03Speaker 02

  My name is Robert Pape. I'm a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  I am Nathan Myhrvold. I'm a CEO at Intellectual Ventures, and I'm very interested in catastrophic risks to the planet.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  I'm Jack Jacobs, Colonel, U.S. Army, retired.

• 6:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Jacobs turns up on TV pretty regularly these days commenting on national security issues. It was Jacobs you heard earlier saying he doesn't expect much from this White House summit.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  If the government is convening a conference about this subject, perhaps the government may be amenable to coughing up some resources to solve some of the major problems attendant to it. But I mean, that's a scant hope. In actual fact, what you need is leadership in order to solve problems about national security, both domestic terrorism and terrorism from abroad. And it requires a great deal of effort and organization. And if the government is good at things, it's, I can tell you this, they're not good at this.

• 7:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so maybe we can lend a hand. A good place to start is what we know and don't know about the root causes of terrorism. It's natural to react to immediate events, to the emotions and headlines that accompany them, but let's try to go a bit deeper. We'll start with Robert Pape. Even though he is a political scientist, a field that most of us associate with theoretical work, Pape is a hardcore empiricist, a data freak.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Just as big data has come into our life in sports, our life in the media, so too can big data help to inform at least some of the assumptions and therefore policy prescriptions on national security affairs.

• 7:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Most of Pape's research has focused on suicide attacks.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  I collected the first complete database of all suicide attacks around the world shortly after 9/11. That data went from the early 1980s, when the modern phenomenon began, to just before the Iraq War, 2003. During that window of time, there were 343 completed suicide attacks where an individual killed himself or herself on a mission to kill others.

• 8:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so what can these data tell us?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Well, the main risk factor people think it's associated with suicide attack is Islamic fundamentalism, religion and specifically Islamic fundamentalism because they witnessed, they observed the attackers on 9/11 were Islamic fundamentalists. Many of the attackers in Iraq, ISIS is an Islamic fundamentalist group. Well, what this research found, really for the first time, is that religion is not as prominent a cause of suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader during that 24-year period was not an Islamic group. They were the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist group, a secular group, a Hindu group.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  The Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka did more suicide attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad. What over 95% of all suicide attacks have in common is not religion, but a specific strategic objective, to compel a democratic state to withdraw combat forces from territory the terrorists see as their homeland or prize. From Lebanon and the West Bank back then, to Iraq and Afghanistan today, this idea of military occupation is the leading risk factor, producing over 95% of the suicide attacks that we see even as we speak.

• 9:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so if occupation then is, I don't know if it's appropriate to call it the root cause of the majority?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  I think that's a great way to think about it, Stephen. Occupation is the root cause. There are additional enabling causes or secondary causes, so I don't mean to say that this is a monocausal explanation, but it's like smoking causing lung cancer is the root cause of much of the lung cancer that we observe. Military occupation is the root cause of suicide terrorism. And there are two types of military occupation. There is a foreign, very distant or external occupation, such as when the United States occupies Iraq.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  And then there can also be an internal occupation such as when one group occupies another group, such as in Iraq today, the Shia-dominated government is occupying the Sunni population in Iraq.

• 10:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  The reason we're talking now, the reason that the world has amped up its interest in preventing terrorism lately is because of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, which were not suicide attacks and were examples of religious extremism or fundamentalism. So that goes against the components of your research in a couple of ways, but I'm guessing you still have something to say.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I guess I'd like to just stop you there for a moment, Stephen, because there's no doubt that religion was part of the cocktail. But now that we know more about the biographies of the various attackers, and it's made possible because we, the French authorities arrested and prosecuted several of the attackers and actually knew quite a bit about them. So we have depositions about what's motivating them. And I would just point out that what we know about the Paris attackers, that they were powerfully motivated by the Iraq war, by the Abu Ghraib torture abuse. So this isn't just simply a matter of religion.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  This is a matter of individuals being motivated by seeing harm on kindred populations and wanting to do something to prevent that harm or to ameliorate the harm.

• 12:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  So considering that conclusion, how do you start to think about addressing the problem? Maybe it's not a problem we should talk about in terms of solving, because many problems never get solved. But considering that the root cause is based on an occupation of one kind or another, which has happened in the past, even if you've, you know, deoccupied.

• 12:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  The initial cause still exists in the minds of those who are agitated by it. How do you begin to think about dealing with the aftermath if you're the kind of country like us, or like France, or like Britain, that carries out its national security in the ways that it does, and perhaps inspires people to hold this kind of grudge?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  There's really two things that we need to do, Stephen. First is not make the problem worse. Before the invasion of Iraq, there were about 50 suicide attacks occurring around the world in 2001 and 2002, and only a handful of those were anti-American. Then we thought we'd fix the problem of terrorism by going into Iraq and essentially wringing the Islamic fundamentalism out of the Middle East by democratizing it. Well, what happened by 2007 is that there were over 500 suicide attacks that year,

• 13:50Speaker 02

  over 300 of them in Iraq, which had never experienced a suicide attack before. So we made the problem dramatically worse. And in fact, the roots of ISIS, and as I just told you, the Paris attack, go back to the American occupation, Fallujah, Abu Ghraib. These are the ingredients, the cocktail of what we're living with today. So if we were to then respond to the terrorism that we see by putting another massive army in either Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, these are very big countries, very big populations.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Many people might think that we couldn't make the problem worse. Oh, yes, we can make it much worse, very quickly, as we saw with Iraq. The second thing is we should be focusing on especially empowering moderates in local communities.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  To compete head to head with terrorists. We did this in Iraq, starting in 2000, late 2006 and 2007 and 2008, in the Sunni community, when we started to foment and foster and empower the Anbar Awakening. This was essentially 100,000 Sunnis, many of them connected with local Sunni tribes, where the United States paid individuals $300 a month to do just one thing: don't kill us, don't shoot at us. Some of these had been shooting us before. This was a controversial thing when the Bush administration did it.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  But this had a dramatic effect in weakening suicide terrorism, the most important effect of anything that we did. We should be doing this as we go forward in Iraq, we should be doing this as we go forward in Yemen, and in fact, from what I can see of the Obama administration, they are moving in this direction.

• 15:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Given what the US and others have spent on the war on terror, how would you characterize the ROI?

• 16:07Speaker 02

  I would say that unfortunately, it's quite negative. Harkening back to Rumsfeld in 2005, he had a famous line where he asked publicly, "Are we creating more terrorists than we're killing?" And the answer was, in 2005, we were. We not only had invaded and occupied Iraq, most of the public will know about Abu Ghraib and the torture scandal, but in addition to that, we were imprisoning thousands of Iraqis that we thought were connected with the insurgency that was growing. In 2004, the insurgency was estimated to be just 5,000.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  And then we started to imprison and arrest, and we ended up imprisoning almost 20,000 over the next year and a half. And then we started to kill insurgents. We ended up killing 18,000 over the next year and a half. So that what we did is, we thought we were going to go and stamp out the problem with toppling Saddam, changing the political system. When that didn't work, we thought we'd go and stamp out the problem with vicious behavior on sort of the hornet's nest of some of the insurgents like Fallujah. And what that, those policies did by 2005 is they just made the problem dramatically worse. Rumsfeld himself saw that.

• 17:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  And let me ask you the flip question then. How would you characterize the ROI for terrorists? And let's not limit this to Islamic fundamentalists in the last 10 or 15 years. Let's talk about terrorism generally. It seems as though they forced their enemies to spend billions, perhaps trillions of dollars. There are all kinds of less easily measured costs than dollars, all by investing a relative pittance of their own. I mean, it's hard for me to think of a movement or an activity that has a larger ROI, frankly, horribly, than terrorism. It works, doesn't it?

• 18:12Speaker 02

  You're exactly right, Stephen. So 9/11, by all estimates, including the 9/11 Commission, costs Al Qaeda less than a half million dollars. And it produced many billions of dollars of damage, not just in the loss of air traffic over the next year and a half, but in launching two major wars, one of which in Iraq turned out to be extremely expensive, extremely costly. And so there is absolutely no doubt that terrorists have an enormous return on their investment, that terrorists are doing terrorism because they think it pays, and there's evidence that it pays.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  But that wouldn't work if we wouldn't overreact and help terrorists increase their return on investment. We have smarter approaches to the problem than just simply reacting on the basis of fear and anger and hitting back.

• 19:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Give me an example of a government that you feel understands and handles, deals with terrorism well.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  I'll give you two examples. One is the Basque government. So we used to have in Spain a Basque terrorism problem. That terrorism problem has essentially gone away. It was a major problem for several decades in Europe. And in the early stages, like many governments, the government tries heavy-handed military force to try to deal with the issue. Publics, of course, are afraid and fearful. They like, the publics like to see tough talk and tough action. But that just made the problem worse. And then, basically, through a series of education and demographic policies, the Basque separatists, basically that political movement disappeared.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  And it disappeared because the Spanish government stopped treating the underlying Basque community as a separate community and started to have more integrationist and assimilationist policies. In the case of Northern Ireland with the IRA, the British had an enormous problem with the IRA that really was, you know, just awful. Thousands of people dying in the early 1970s. And the British at first tried to deal with this problem by being very tough. And Maggie Thatcher, who was a very conservative leader of Britain in the 1980s, was known as being

• 20:44Speaker 02

  a very tough woman. Well, she's the one who started the secret talks with the IRA leaders, which the public didn't know about at the time, but ended up leading to the Good Friday Accords in 1998 that essentially cut a deal for a tremendous amount of political autonomy for the local communities in Northern Ireland. Which effectively ended, virtually ended, I guess I would say, terrorism that had gone on for decades. So what we have seen is we've seen a pattern. And we've seen a pattern where states who face terrorism initially want to react with very heavy-handed force.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Some force, of course, is necessary, I'm not saying none, but often overreact, make the problem worse, and then over time, learn.

• 21:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Like Robert Pape, Mia Bloom, the UMass professor of security studies, also thinks a lot about terrorism before it happens.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  So one of my main approaches is to look at how terrorist groups change and innovate, how they learn from each other. And looking at, for example, changing operatives from males who were suicide bombers to looking at women terrorists, and to increasingly moving into the future, looking at children who engage in political violence. For example, we see children in Boko Haram and ISIS cubs, and we're seeing more and more children who are militarized across the world.

• 22:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bloom takes what you might call an environmental approach to understanding terrorism.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  If you have an environment in which the young people think that there is nothing for them to lose, and if they've got nothing to lose, becoming a martyr isn't really a high cost, that is a very different environment than if you have a society in which you have very capable young people who think that they have a bright future ahead of them. The push factors are the structural conditions of poverty, lack of education, perhaps occupation. But the pull factors are also things that the terrorist groups are able to offer the individual. So for instance, many people think it's cool to be a terrorist. There's this jihadi cool associated with being a young person who might travel either

• 23:10Speaker 03

  to Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, or now increasingly to Syria.

• 23:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  To that end, Mia Bloom says the internet can tamp down the cool factor as much as it might build it up.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  We have some of these jihadis on social media from the UK complaining that, you know, they went to Syria thinking that they were going to be a hero, and all they're doing is cleaning toilets.

• 23:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bloom also likes the idea of patrolling the Internet.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  We need to make sure that the Internet is a safe place for young people. So inasmuch as we police for sexual predators, we should be looking for these jihadi predators. We need to have community policing that is very successful, as well as outreach and supporting communities.

• 23:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  We should note, however, that Robert Pape's research doesn't give much credence to Bloom's contention that poverty and lack of education are what push someone toward terrorism.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  I did the largest demographic profile of suicide attackers that we have. I was able to collect socioeconomic data on 462 suicide attackers, about half of them from Middle Eastern countries. That is the populations we most want to know about. It really shows, quite strikingly, that the impression we have in the media that suicide attackers are these loners, drags of the earth, they're uneducated, all religious, are simply not the case, even in the Middle East. In fact, many of them come from quite normal backgrounds and are mobilized by the political anger and the political problems.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  It's kind of political activism gone wrong.

• 24:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  In any case, Mia Bloom's view of terrorism contains a personal strand.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Within about three years of starting my research in terrorism, a friend of mine from school, who was someone I'd grown up with, had gone to Israel and joined the military. And in 1993, he was kidnapped and tortured and eventually killed by Hamas. And so part of my interest was to try to understand what motivated individuals to perpetrate terrorist attacks. But I also felt that the reaction to Jason's death was very disquieting. It caused a lot of people to just say, oh, we should just kill everyone who's in the territories, or the reaction was very negative against all Palestinians, even though at the time Hamas was a fringe movement. Of course, that's no longer the case.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  But I thought it was important to have an approach to studying terrorism. That was one, to try to understand the motivations and as well as the political context, the environment in which we see terrorism, and to look at terrorism in a global perspective and not just, for example, looking at terrorism in the Middle East.

• 26:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, what are the motivations and what should be done about it? Also, are we, and by we, I mean Americans, are we making too big a deal out of terrorism?

• 26:22Speaker 06

  Terrorism in America is not something to worry about.

• 26:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  And if you do want to worry about terrorism, could it be that we're worrying about completely the wrong kind of terrorism?

• 26:34Speaker 04

  For example, a bioterror attack on the United States could easily kill, in all simulations and studies we've done so far, it could kill 100,000 to a million Americans.

• 27:03Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 28:05Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 28:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 29:27Speaker 05

  From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 29:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today, we're hosting a Freakonomics Summit to gather ideas to pass along to an upcoming White House summit on fighting extreme violence in the Middle East, in Europe, in the US, and elsewhere. We've been talking with people like the security scholar Mia Bloom, who, since we interviewed her, has been invited to join the White House summit. So, maybe President Obama and the others there will hear a story like this one about a would-be homegrown terrorist.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  I asked, for example, a close friend of mine, Mubin Sheikh, about his experiences because he ended up in an Al Qaeda training camp and in fact came back to North America with the intent to perpetrate terrorist attacks. And he eventually changed his mind and began to work as an undercover agent for the Canadian security services. But I asked him what appealed to him. You know, this was a middle-class kid who had grown up, you know, he didn't personally experience Islamophobia or hatred. He was well-integrated. And I asked Mubin how he was able to be convinced of the value of jihad. And he said, "Well, one of the things that they did was they distorted the Quran.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  So perhaps we need to make sure that people have a good Islamic education. It's not a secular education that is the solution, but it's to make sure that people have an education that is grounded in the Quran and doesn't skip chapters or verses, doesn't look at Surah Taubah and go from verse 5 in chapter 9 to verse 7, skipping 6, which, you know, talks about the Prophet provided free access or free exit for people who wanted to leave the battlefield and he protected them. So it's really important that, you know, perhaps when young people are studying the great books, one of the great books should be the Quran.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  Perhaps children in middle America in the middle of Nebraska should know what the Quran is about and demystify it, not just for Muslim communities so that they integrate and that they don't feel isolated, but also just to educate, you know, the country in general.

• 31:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  When it comes to educating the country in general about terrorism, some people think we need a different kind of education entirely.

• 31:58Speaker 04

  The world has turned a blind eye towards what I call strategic terrorism, the idea that a terrorist group could inflict damage of enormous consequences. And we just don't seem to be working on it.

• 32:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Nathan Myhrvold. He's a former Microsoft executive, now runs Intellectual Ventures. He writes about modernist cuisine. And a couple of years ago, he made some noise in national security circles by publishing a monograph called "Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action." Strategic terrorism is categorically different from what Myhrvold calls tactical terrorism.

• 32:35Speaker 04

  For example, a bioterror attack on the United States could easily kill, in all simulations and the studies we've done so far, it could kill 100,000 to a million Americans. Meanwhile, a suicide bomber at a mall could kill 10 people. Now, if you wanted to kill 100,000 people with suicide bombers, you would need 10,000 attacks. Frankly, that's not very likely. But it may be possible for a group to execute one attack that kills 100,000, or a million, or maybe even more.

• 33:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  What kind of a bioterror attack does Myhrvold envision?

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Smallpox is the one everyone talks about, because smallpox is a truly horrific disease. A huge part of the population was never immunized, because we drove smallpox extinct. Except, there's some labs that have it. And Russia actually produced weaponized smallpox that was probably a much more virulent strain than the wild one. They produced literally tons of it. Thousands and thousands of pounds of this deadly, deadly, transmissible thing. If a terrorist got their hands on that, or frankly, they got their hands on a natural thing like Ebola, you know, we saw the amount of terror that Ebola has struck.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  Ebola is actually fairly mild compared to many of these biological agents in terms of infectiousness. That's because Ebola requires you to get bodily fluids on you and in you. Smallpox transmits through the air. So just having a conversation with someone riding on a bus or a plane, you're gonna get it. To the degree you have a human-to-human transmissible disease like this, and you release it, you create a global pandemic that would shake the foundations of modern civilization. A skeptic could say, "Look, it hasn't happened yet, so maybe it won't happen." Or someone could say, "Well gee, terrorists are more interested in blowing people up

• 34:42Speaker 04

  at shopping centers, or flying airplanes into buildings than they are the things." And I call this the Blanche Dubois strategy, from A Streetcar Named Desire. I've always relied on the kindness of strangers. Well, this is relying on the kindness of terrorists. And it's true that most terrorism is low-tech. And it's true that most terrorism is about getting some misguided person to strap a suicide vest on and go to a crowded place. But the 9/11 attack showed enormous strategic intent. It showed tremendous planning. It showed operational discipline. Mohammed Atta, the leader of that attack, had a master's degree from a university in

• 35:27Speaker 04

  Germany in urban planning. If he'd had a master's degree in molecular biology instead, he could have done a lot more damage.

• 35:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  In Myhrvold's view, the US needs to put a lot more emphasis on strategic threats versus tactical threats, as it has done in the past.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I think the best example is that after World War II, with the advent of nuclear weapons, we split the Air Force and the Navy into both the strategic forces. So that is the Strategic Air Command in the case of the Air Force. It's the Nuclear Submarine Force in the case of the Navy. And those folks deal with missiles that have nuclear warheads that could frankly end the world. And they don't give a damn about anything else. They're about tanks. They're not about pistols or helicopters or all kinds of other weapons. They're about what are called strategic weapons. Meanwhile, the rest of the armed forces, they're the guys that carry guns and have

• 36:31Speaker 04

  tanks and ships and all of the other sorts of things that are focused on the tactical stuff.

• 36:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  So why do you think there's not more coordination, whether within the US or between countries, against strategic terrorism? Is it a resource allocation issue? Is it a probability misperception issue? Something else? All of the above?

• 36:52Speaker 04

  Well, I think it's a lack of top-down leadership. I think that many people in, at least in the US, in the military, in the FBI, in the intelligence agencies, many people recognize that this is a possibility. There are people who study it and who work on it. And they do so in their own little silos. And I believe that if there was an attack tomorrow, a future 9/11-like report written by the survivors... Would say, actually, well, we had this piece of intel on this and this people's intel on that. And we kind of put it together, but not fully. And then, oops, we didn't actually have any protective gear and we didn't know what to do.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  You know, there's this old truism that generals always are ready to fight the last war, not the one they have to fight. And it's human nature. It's the thing that we actually focus on are the novel, the things that are fresh in our minds, the lessons we think we learned from last time.

• 37:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right, but you could say that a lot of things that we do naturally, you know, they're human nature and therefore we accept them, we explain them, we rationalize them, whether it's something to do with how we, you know, treat our bodies, with something we do in society, how we treat the environment and so on. And yet, we work pretty hard to supersede that human nature in matters where the stakes are high enough. So, how do you do that here?

• 38:19Speaker 04

  And that's the definition of leadership. Leadership is taking people to a place they wouldn't have gotten to already. You know, if you see a parade going down the street and you run up in front of it, they're not actually following you. You're only leading if you take them to a place they wouldn't have gone to by the lonesome selves. And of course, we have lots of people trying to supply that leadership at many parts of the government. I don't mean to sell them all short, but I think that the fact that we haven't seen this kind of attack already deeply affects everyone's expectations.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  If you ask anybody at the top of the food chain in national security, he'll tell you exactly the same thing.

• 39:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Jack Jacobs, the retired Army Colonel. He is a Medal of Honor recipient for his heroism during the Vietnam War. He's now a military analyst for NBC and MSNBC.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  We really don't have any national strategy. But to be fair, trying to develop a national strategy in this kind of national security environment, where we're just getting started, is probably too much to ask. And in fact, what the National Command Authority, that includes the President of the United States and all the people who directly report to him, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and so on, what they're doing is solving tactical problems. They're making tactical decisions. In the circumstances, in the absence of an overarching strategy, that's probably all you can do. But I would like to see a summit convened, and not an open session either, by the way,

• 40:00Speaker 01

  that would determine what our national security objectives are and what are the specific goals we need in order to achieve them. Until we do that, we're going to be playing tactics and not strategy. We're going to be sending drones to blow up Guy A or Guy B without any idea about what the long-term positive strategy that achieves. I'm not averse to that. You know, if you want some bad guys killed, I'm your guy. I'm strongly in favor of that. But what I would like to see is some logic attendant to what our tactical moves are, and I don't see any of that yet.

• 40:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's the difference, Jack, in how politicians view terrorism compared to, let's say, military, law enforcement, intelligence?

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Well, I think politicians have a tendency to use the term terrorism to apply to anything that looks dangerous, and particularly those things that we don't seem to have any plans to deal with. It behooves them to categorize almost everything as terrorism. The result of that is that we've ignored some of the threats in which people don't directly get killed. And cybersecurity is one of them.

• 41:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, talk to me for a minute about that. If you were allocating resources to physical security and cybersecurity and whatever other kinds of security you might want, how might you, Colonel Jacobs, suggest we do things differently?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Well, I'd spend a lot more money, a lot more time, and a lot more other resources, including human resources, attempting to solve the problem of how we protect our data at rest. We're just now realizing that all of our data are at risk. I was talking to a friend of mine who runs a very large retail operation. We were talking about cybersecurity, and I said, "Well, what do you care? You're just like selling socks or Slurpees or something or other." He says, "You must be joking. We're a bank. We have everybody's credit card numbers, banking information, everybody's address or phone numbers, everything about them." So, every enterprise, every commercial enterprise is, has data at rest that needs to be protected,

• 42:11Speaker 01

  not just the Defense Department or the Energy Department. And so far, we've paid short shrift to that threat. Enemies of the United States, casual hackers, have no problem whatsoever, especially if they've got sophisticated computers, have no problem entering our systems. And the danger is real, and we are just now realizing that the danger is real. I would spend lots more money in that.

• 42:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, what sort of advice have we turned up today to pass along to the White House summit? As Mia Bloom and Robert Pape told us, "The root causes of terrorism are often not what we assume," and this obviously affects how you think about prevention. Jack Jacobs and Nathan Myhrvold warned us not to spend so many resources preventing old-fashioned physical terrorism, when the threats of bioterrorism and cyberterrorism may be much greater. Steve Levitt, meanwhile, my economist friend, he too thinks that Americans worry more than they should about the threat of physical terrorism.

• 43:19Speaker 06

  I think you just want to start with the basic idea that it is almost zero. That whether it's a little bit bigger now, or a little bit less now, terrorism for essentially forever, has been just a drop in the bucket of the ways that people can die. And if you compare it to any sort of health risk, like diabetes, or heart attacks, or cancer, or any sort of socially constructed risk, like dying in a car crash, or even accidents like falling downstairs, in general, terrorism in America is not something to worry about. Very different.

• 44:00Speaker 06

  If you live in Syria, or Iraq, or someplace like that, terrorism matters there, because terrorism is like a way of life. It's really terrorism and the fight for control of government, whether or not, are all kind of mixed together. But if you're American, and you don't want to be a victim of terror, if you basically stay in the United States, or anywhere other than places that are actively fighting for control of government, you're incredibly safe.

• 44:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Levitt doesn't think that he has that much to contribute to an anti-terrorism summit.

• 44:38Speaker 06

  To be honest, I think if someone wanted to use my services more effectively, I think I would be much less effective in Obama administration get-together, trying to fight terrorism, than actually working on the other side. I think it's much easier for economists to come up with good ideas about how to be terrorists, rather than how to fight terrorists, because how to be a good terrorist is about thinking, what are the things you can do to a society which is most disruptive, and most affects either the psychology, or the commerce of a country. And it's almost the economic question in reverse, that economists spend a lot of time thinking how to most efficiently make economies run. So I think we're actually pretty good at figuring out how to destroy economies, too. And so, not that I think any of us are actively engaged in that endeavor, but I do think

• 45:23Speaker 06

  we would be more useful on that side of the table.

• 45:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so after the anti-terrorism summit is over, if they hold a pro-terrorism summit, you'll volunteer for that?

• 45:32Speaker 06

  I'm not saying I would volunteer, but I would say that if ISIS wanted to be particularly effective, perhaps they should kidnap a bunch of economists, and treat us kindly.

• 45:45Speaker 06

  And trick us into believing in their mission and take advantage of our knowledge.

• 45:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Win-win, because then the economists go away, too.

• 46:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. On the next Freakonomics Radio, we have a great and far-ranging conversation with Jim Young Kim, the president of the World Bank. First question, how did someone who trained as an M.D. and an anthropologist become head of the World Bank? I started right off by saying, well, President Obama, have you read your mother's dissertation? And he sat back and looked at me and he said, well, yeah, I have. Kim is a different kind of World Bank president, and when it comes to fighting poverty, he is looking for a different set of solutions. Is he having a good time?

• 46:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, he's having a good time. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes Greg Rosalsky, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, and Chris Bannon, with help from Christopher Wirth, Anna Hyatt, Rick Kwan, David Herman, and Merritt Jacob. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 47:42Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 48:12Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 48:51Speaker 07

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• 49:36Speaker 07

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• 49:51Speaker 08

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