Sometimes what Thomas Friedman writes makes a lot of sense, but his most recent piece, arguing that “there were actually three bubbles that burst at the beginning of the 21st century: a stock market bubble, a corporate ethics bubble and a terrorism bubble,” reminds me of precisely the qualities I don’t like about his writing: vast overgeneralization, shoddy economic theory applied to the political realm, and argument by aphorism. After all, a Maureen Dowd might get away with a turn of phrase like “moral creative accounting” because she’s seeking less to prove a specific analysis than to tap into the psychology of news coverage and policy marketing itself. Friedman is not - he wants to assert that terrorism functions like an economic bubble even though it does not. (There is a huge difference between Westerners who in his eyes are too relativistic when it comes to terrorism and investors who actively believe the market psychology.) His argument has to suppress examples that don’t fit his claims - terrorism before 1990s, terrorism directed at countries besides the US and Israel, terrorism aligned with non-Islamicist nationalism. He doesn’t address the one, large counterargument to his analysis - that terrorism, i.e. non-state attacks on civilians or property with the hope that media coverage will amplify its effect, by nature will become increasingly available to any disgruntled non-state actor. It’s impossible to predict what forms terrorism will assume in the future, but as Robert Wright argues, technological advance and the increase of global connectedness will make increasingly make terrorism easier and more likely, not less.
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