Employment is not a cure for violence

Does giving a man a job stop him from becoming a political insurgent? The generally accepted wisdom is that it does. In fact, the U.S. and other western powers have distributed millions of dollars of foreign aid in the hopes of reducing political violence and instability. But a new working paper from Eli Berman, Joseph Felter, and Jacob Shapiro ... [found] that unemployment is actually negatively correlated with attacks against the government and statistically unrelated to insurgent attacks against civilians.

- Excerpted from Freakonomics