Wealth & Money Quote by Keith Henson

Henson’s move is to puncture the comforting story that terrorism is simply “poverty breeding rage.” Saudi Arabia, he notes, is rich in absolute terms. The sting is in the pivot to per-capita decline: a society can get richer and still feel poorer, because what people experience is not national GDP but their slice of it. In one compact comparison, he reframes deprivation as relative, demographic, and forward-looking.

The intent is almost clinical: identify a material pressure that can coexist with oil wealth and still produce political volatility. “Rapid population growth” functions as the quiet engine of the argument, implying crowded labor markets, youth bulges, and status competition. “Fallen by about half in a generation” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting: it’s not a slow drift but a sudden recalibration of expectations. A young person raised on a narrative of prosperity meets a job market and housing market that can’t cash the same promises. That gap between entitlement and reality is where grievance metastasizes.

Subtext: ideology doesn’t float free of conditions. Henson isn’t excusing violence; he’s relocating part of its fuel supply from theology to arithmetic. The emphasis on Saudi origin also gestures at the post-9/11 puzzle Americans wrestled with: why perpetrators came from an allied, affluent state, not the poorest corners of the world. In that context, his line reads like a scientist’s correction to a moralistic debate: if you want to understand radicalization, track demographics and declining opportunity, not just slogans and sermons.