Why we fight

I've commented on this before, but here's another article about how a surplus of young men leads a country to violence. The numbers almost speak for themselves:

[W]hen 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The "causes" in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such "youth bulges" now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.

What's more, according to a new report by Population Action International, "between 1970 and 1999, 80 percent of the world’s civil conflicts occurred in countries where 60 percent or more of the population was under the age of thirty."

According to the authors of these articles, the notion that Islam is causing the current rash of global conflicts is a red herring. But both note that "of the twenty-seven nations with the largest populations of idle youth, thirteen are Muslim."

What do young men fight over? In the past, I've claimed it was sex. This author claims it's about "prestige and standing" that second, third, and fourth sons just can't claim. A third alternative might be that young men fight simply because of an overflow of aggression-inducing hormones. But whatever the reason, the correlation seems clear: Too many kids is an explosive situation.

That's why the most important policy for global security is population policy. We need to disseminate cheap and universal birth control to every woman in the developing world, and improve women's education so that women are empowered to plan their own families. The example of Iran, where fertility was successfully reduced from over 6 in the 1980s to 1.8 in 2006 is a shining beacon of encouragement - after all, this happened in one of the most aggressively conservative Islamic societies on Earth.