ISIS foreign fighters are not driven by economic deprivation or inequality. In What Explains the Flow of Foreign Fighters to ISIS? (NBER Working Paper No. 22190),Efraim Benmelech
and Esteban F. Klor found that many foreign fighters come from countries with high levels of economic development, low income inequality, and highly developed political institutions.
Foreign ISIS recruits come largely from prosperous, ethnically and linguistically homogeneous countries. As Alan Krueger explains in a discussion of terrorism is an occupational choice:
One of the conclusions from the work of Laurence Iannaccone—whose paper, “The Market for Martyrs,” is supported by my own research—is that it is very difficult to effect change on the supply side.
People who are willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause have diverse motivations. Some are motivated by nationalism, some by religious fanaticism, some by historical grievances, and so on. If we address one motivation and thus reduce one source on the supply side, there remain other motivations that will incite other people to terror.
Malcontents join the jihadists today for the same reasons they joined the Red Brigade, the Japanese Red Army Faction and Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s and 1980s. Plenty of young people were attracted to communism in previous generations as a way of sticking it to the man.
Now as then economic conditions were good as were political freedoms. Italy, Japan and Germany were all at the peak of recoveries from war. Japanese incomes are doubled in the previous decade. Germany and Italy were rich countries. As Alan Krueger explains:
Despite these pronouncements, however, the available evidence is nearly unanimous in rejecting either material deprivation or inadequate education as important causes of support for terrorism or participation in terrorist activities. Such explanations have been embraced almost entirely on faith, not scientific evidence.
Each generation has its defining oppositional identity. Radical Islam is the oppositional identity of choice for today’s angry young men and women. Mind you, they have to buy Islam for dummies to understand what they’re signing up for.
In previous generations, it was communism, weird Christian sects, eco-terrorism, animal liberationist terrorism and a variety of domestic terrorists of the left and right with conspiratorial motivations. Look at the level of diversity of the angry young men and women on the domestic terrorists list of the FBI.
One jihadists when interviewed said that 30 years ago he would probably have become a Communist as his vehicle for venting his frustrations.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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