[MUSIC: Julian Scott, “Sad Tones”] DUBNER: Like Robert Pape, Mia Bloom, the U-Mass professor of security studies, also thinks a lot about terrorism before it happens. BLOOM: So one of my main approaches is to look at how terrorist groups change and innovate, how they learn from each other. And looking at, for example, changing operatives from males who were suicide bombers to looking at women terrorists and to increasingly moving to the future, looking at children who engage in political violence. For example, we see children in Boko Haram and ISIS Cubs and we’re seeing more and more children who are militarized across the world. DUBNER: Bloom takes what you might call an environmental approach to understanding terrorism: BLOOM: If you have an environment in which young people think that there is nothing for them to lose, and if they’ve got nothing to lose, becoming a martyr isn’t really a high cost. That is a very different environment than if you have a society in which you have very capable young people who think that they have a bright future ahead of them. The push factors are the structural conditions of poverty, lack of education, perhaps occupation. But the pull factors are also things that the terrorist groups are able to offer the individual. So for instance, many people think it’s cool to be a terrorist. There’s this Jihadi cool associated with being a young person who might travel either to Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia or now increasingly, to Syria. DUBNER: To that end, Mia Bloom says the Internet can tamp down the cool factor as much as it might build it up: [MUSIC: Vunt Foom, “Grease” (from Sub Valve Release)] BLOOM: We have some of these Jihadis on social media from the U.K. complaining that, you know, they went to Syria thinking that they were going to be a hero and all they’re doing is cleaning toilets. DUBNER: Bloom also likes the idea of patrolling the Internet: BLOOM: We need to make sure that the Internet is a safe place for young people, so inasmuch as we police for sexual predators, we should be looking for these Jihadi predators. We need to have community policing that is very successful, as well as outreach and supporting communities. DUBNER: We should note, however, that Robert Pape’s research does not give much credence to Bloom’s contention that poverty and lack of education are what push someone toward terrorism. PAPE: I did the largest demographic profile of suicide attackers that we have. I was able to collect socioeconomic data on 462 suicide attackers, about half of them from Middle Eastern countries. That is the populations we most want to know about. It really shows quite strikingly that the impression we have in the media that suicide attackers are these loners, dregs of the earth, they’re uneducated, all religious, are simply not the case, even in the Middle East. In fact most of them come from quite normal backgrounds and are mobilized by the political anger and the political problems. It’s kind of political activism gone wrong. [MUSIC: Crushed Stars, “You in Frost” (from Obsolescence)] DUBNER: In any case, Mia Bloom’s view of terrorism contains a personal strand … BLOOM: Within about three years of starting my research in terrorism, a friend of mine from school who was someone I’d grown up with, had gone to Israel and joined the military. And in 1993, he was kidnapped and tortured and eventually killed by Hamas. And so part of my interest was to try to understand what motivated individuals to perpetrate terrorist attacks. But I also felt that the reaction to Jason’s death was very disquieting. It caused a lot of people to say, ‘Oh, we should just kill everyone who’s in the Territories,’ or the reaction was very negative against all Palestinians, even though at the time Hamas was a fringe movement. Of course, that’s no longer the case. But I thought it was important to have an approach to studying terrorism that was one, to try to understand the motivations and as well as the political context, the environment in which we see terrorism; and to look at terrorism in a global perspective and not just, for example, looking at terrorism in the Middle East. [MUSIC: Color Radio, “Ideas Splitting Atoms” (from Architects)] DUBNER: Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: what are the motivations, and what should be done about it? Also: do we—and by “we,” I mean “Americans”—do we make too big a deal out of terrorism? LEVITT: Terrorism, you know, in America is not something to worry about. DUBNER: And: if you do want to worry about terrorism – could it be that we’re worried about completely the wrong kind of terrorism? MYHRVOLD: For example, a bioterror attack on the United States could easily kill, in all simulations in the studies done so far, it could kill 100,000 to a million Americans. [UNDERWRITING] ANNOUNCER: From WNYC: This is FREAKONOMICS RADIO. Here’s your host, Stephen Dubner. [MUSIC: Judson Lee, “Little Cheap Euro Romance”] DUBNER: Today we’re hosting a Freakonomics summit to gather ideas to pass along to an upcoming White House summit on fighting extreme violence in the Middle East, in Europe, in the U.S., and elsewhere. We’ve been talking with people like the security scholar Mia Bloom—who, since we interviewed her, has been invited to join the White House summit. So maybe President Obama and the others there will hear a story like this one, about a would-be homegrown terrorist: