Monday, August 04, 2014

Here's one theory you don't want to know about Gaza

Classic Vox journalism from Matt Yglesias at Vox about Gaza: apparently one reason there are lots of child casualties from the Israeli assault is that ... Gaza has lots of kids! He claims to be presenting the demographic background to something others have noted, but all he does is present a chart showing the percentage of the population that is young people. The much more edgy yet data-driven approach would have been to ask why Gaza has such a skewed population structure. But that would get into some very touchy areas for Israel, the Palestinians, and even the United Nations -- if for example one delves into the theories of Gunnar Heinsohn. We think there's a lot more going on than in Heinsohn's approach, but isn't this the kind of thing that Vox was going to help sort out?