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

These people were in utero during the “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918. It was a grisly plague, killing more than half a million Americans in just a few months—a casualty toll, as Almond notes, greater than all U.S. combat deaths during all the wars fought in the twentieth century

There’s