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Life is a short few trips around the sun, then eternal annihilation.
If you really want to ascribe "value" to it: prosperity tends to create chill attitudes. You see this in individuals (nepotism) and in societies. It's just evolutionary economics: genes, ideas, species spend in times of plenty, save in times of drought.
“The dead should not rule the living" —- Thomas Jefferson
It's perfectly fair to criticize modern Iran. Particularly when it comes to mis-allocating its skilled population and history.
Look at it from the perspective of fitness: if Iran had let these women study and work freely, and had invested its resources in growing its economy instead of a dud of a nuclear programme, might it–not Israel–be the region's hegemon?
> That's why developing countries have many STEM graduates
Number of scientists and engineers per capita is directly propotional to GDP per capita [1].
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/GDP-per-capita-vs-number...
I meant the fraction. Do you have a plot of number of college gradutates on the same axes? I am sure it will be a steeper line.
Decent hypothesis, but not substantiated.
In 2020 the fraction of graduates who were STEM in China was 41%, Russia 37%, Germany 36%, Iran 33%, India 30%, and France 26% [1]. If we take the eleven countries in that article's GDP per capita, we find no statistically-significant relationship.
[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/the-global-distribution-...
It would be interesting to contrast how much of them are STEM vs other "real world degrees" that get a job (accounting, hotel management or whatever) vs the "liberal arts" degrees.
> The WEF report identified China, India, the United States, Russia, Iran, Indonesia, and Japan as the top seven STEM graduate-producing countries in the world.
I think the US (and probably Germany too) is an outlier here because of the number of immigrants who arrive to study STEM degrees.
"About 30 percent of STEM degree holders living in the United States are immigrants" [1].
So sigificant as a fraction of immigrants. But not particularly meaningful to the trend. (I suspected the effect you hypothesise might exist within countries. But alas, higher-income households produce more STEM graduates [2].)
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/stem-immigration-diversity-gaps#:~...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/economic-inequalities-amo...
It got torn up, which is a shame. That said, Tehran made the choices to (a) resume work on a nuclear weapon, (b) endorse Hamas and the October 7 attacks, (c) half ass their negotiations in Geneva and now (d) attack all of their neighbors.
Those were major miscalculations. Layered on top of lots of little ones, e.g. ordering Hezbollah to blow its armory on symbolic rocket attacks. The JCPoA was a good deal. That doesn't make the current regime in Iran a smart actor.
If they negotiate, the deal gets torn up at best, or they get attacked during negotiations at worst. If they maintain any sort of self-defense capability, that's seen as a threat to Israel.
If they shoot back after we bomb 150 schoolgirls, they're the aggressor.
Sort of. Israel is the Middle East's regional hegemon. And America is a superpower. Picking both as national enemies was and remains a strategic blunder.
> If they negotiate, the deal gets torn up at best, or they get attacked during negotiations at worst
Again, the deal getting torn up is sad. But it's within the context of decades of antagonism towards powerful enemies. And nobody serious (other than Iran and Oman) seem to be claiming that Iran was open to giving up its nuclear ambitions in Geneva.
> If they maintain any sort of self-defense capability, that's seen as a threat to Israel
They literally chant death to Israel and fund the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah who want to eradicate it. (Weapons aren't inherently offensive or defensive, though they can tend to be more useful as one versus another. Ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs are closer to inherently offensive than inherently defensive.)
> If they shoot back after we bomb 150 schoolgirls, they're the aggressor
Nobody serious claims this. What they are doing by shooting back (and not surrendering) is continuing a losing cycle of violence.
The only thing looser than America's theory of victory in this war is Iran's.
Note: when Iran started shooting at Bahrain, Oman and Azerbaijan, it was the aggressor. Someone shooting at you doesn't mean carte blanche for blowing up non-belligerants.
Would you do this for Ukraine also? Maybe they should have pre-emptively submitted and disarmed to prevent war?