When I studied insurgency&#x2F;extremism more actively I would always hear the assertion, generally voiced in advocacy of increased foreign aid or nation building efforts, that extremists are generally recruited from the ranks of those left behind by the political and economic worlds and violence remains their only recourse. It&#x27;s a nice narrative because it feels intuitive and provides an addressable problem, the downside is that it&#x27;s not really true[0]. The 9&#x2F;11 hijackers were very well educated and not impoverished and while this work looks awesome (can&#x27;t wait to read it!), there has been previous work that showed that extremists do tend to be more educated than not.<p>My working hypothesis on why extremists tended to be more educated was (is at least until I read this book?) that educated people are just more likely than uneducated to do the unconventional in any sense, including extremism, since they&#x27;re aware of more options and know&#x2F;can learn how to pursue them.<p>It had occurred to me how it always seemed like the attackers had engineering masters degrees in their little [bios|obits] but I figured that for some reason I was just not noticing the social science degrees. It&#x27;s nice to see this book and data in general on the subject. I find it interesting the engineers are more likely to split towards right-wing extremism when the extremist ideology is highly likely to be religious or have religious pre-conditions. I generally get the impression that engineers are <i>less</i> religious than their liberal arts counterparts, perhaps the engineers that remain religious are more inclined to become more so?<p>[0] At least in expeditionary attacks and transnational orgs like AQ, generally attacks on targets in places not at war (i.e. 9&#x2F;11, Mumbai, London, Madrid etc.). I&#x27;m not 100% sure about insurgent attacks that could be termed terroristic so it might depend on the definition you&#x27;re using.