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In general, Krueger found, “terrorists tend to be drawn from well-educated, middle-class or high-income families.” Despite a few exceptions—the Irish Republican Army and perhaps the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka (there isn’t enough evidence to say)—the trend holds true around the world, from Latin American terrorist groups to the al Qaeda members who carried out the September 11 attacks in the United States.

How can this be explained?

It may be that when you’re hungry, you’ve got better things to worry about than blowing yourself up. It may be that terrorist leaders place a high value on competence, since a terrorist attack requires more orchestration than a typical crime.

Furthermore, as Krueger points out, crime is primarily driven by personal gain, whereas terrorism is fundamentally a political act. In his analysis, the kind of person most likely to become a terrorist is similar to the kind of person most likely to…vote. Think of terrorism as civic passion on steroids.

Anyone who has read some history will recognize that Krueger’s terrorist profile sounds quite a bit like the typical revolutionary. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Mohandas Gandhi, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, Simón Bolívar, and Maximilien Robespierre—you won’t find a single lower-class, uneducated lad among them.

But a revolutionary and a terrorist have different goals. Revolutionaries want to overthrow and replace a government. Terrorists want to—well, it isn’t always clear. As one sociologist puts it, they might wish to remake the world in their own dystopian image; religious terrorists may want to cripple the secular institutions they despise. Krueger cites more than one hundred different scholarly definitions of terrorism. “At a conference in 2002,” he writes, “foreign ministers from over 50 Islamic states agreed to condemn terrorism but could not agree on a definition of what it was that they had condemned.”

What makes terrorism particularly maddening is that killing isn’t even the main point. Rather, it is a means by which to scare the pants off the living and fracture their normal lives. Terrorism is therefore devilishly efficient, exerting far more leverage than an equal amount of non-terrorist violence.

In October 2002, the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area experienced fifty murders, a fairly typical number. But ten of these murders were different. Rather than the typical domestic disputes or gang killings, these were random and inexplicable shootings. Ordinary people minding their own business were shot while pumping gas or leaving the store or mowing the lawn. After the first few killings, panic set in. As they continued, the region was virtually paralyzed. Schools were closed, outdoor events canceled, and many people wouldn’t leave their homes at all.

What kind of sophisticated and well-funded organization had wrought such terror?

Just two people, it turned out: a forty-one-year-old man and his teenage accomplice, firing a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle from an old Chevy sedan, its roomy trunk converted into a sniper’s nest. So simple, so cheap, and so effective: that is the leverage of terror. Imagine that the nineteen hijackers from September 11, rather than going to the trouble of hijacking airplanes and flying them into buildings, had instead spread themselves around the country, nineteen men with nineteen rifles in nineteen cars, each of them driving to a new spot every day and shooting random people at gas stations and schools and restaurants. Had the nineteen of them synchronized their actions, they would have effectively set off a nationwide time bomb every day. They would have been hard to catch, and even if one of them was caught, the other eighteen would carry on. The entire country would have been brought to its knees.

Terrorism is effective because it imposes costs on everyone, not just its direct victims. The most substantial of these indirect costs is fear of a future attack, even though such fear is grossly misplaced. The probability that an average American