Wednesday, April 04, 2007
"Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Congo have all suffered horrors brought on by disastrous governance and violent conflict. But they, and many of Africa’s poorest countries, have something else in common: very young populations. While it is not clear exactly how the age of a population contributes to strife, research by Population Action International suggests that it is no simple coincidence that 80 percent of the civil conflicts that broke out in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s occurred in countries where at least 60 percent of the population was under 30, and that almost 9 of 10 such youthful countries had autocratic rulers or weak democracies." Why not make this more blatantly racist by saying that: countries that host dark skinned people are more prone to violence. Notice that this study ignores factors of history and economics and current international political realities. This is like other fallacies of causality: you can say that there is a high rate of people who die from respiratory illnesses in Arizona. You can draw from that that it would be fatal for people who suffer from respiratory illnesses to reside in Arizona, while the reverse is true. (thanks Laleh)