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Austerity = Anarchy

Submitted by Tjadendevries on Sun, 08/21/2011 - 4:42pm

Common sense, right? I guess notsomuch to our political "leadership." Two blogs that prove what we already know. One from the London Review of Books, and the other from MIT. The graph from the MIT blog shows a correlation between escalating food prices and social unrest


Austerity and Anarchy

Thomas Jones 10 August 2011

    Anyone who says the riots don’t have anything to do with the cuts should have a read of ‘Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe 1919-2009’,

    a discussion paper issued under the auspices of the Centre for Economic Policy Research’s international macroeconomics programme and currently doing the rounds on Twitter, which looks at the relationship between budget cuts and civil unrest across Europe since the end of the First World War:

    The results show a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. We test if the relationship simply reflects economic downturns, and conclude that this is not the key factor.

    So much for ‘criminality pure and simple’.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/08/10/thomas-jones/austerity-and-anarchy/


The Cause Of Riots And The Price of Food

If we don't reverse the current trend in food prices, we've got until August 2013 before social unrest sweeps the planet, say complexity theorists

    What causes riots? That's not a question you would expect to have a simple answer.

    But today, Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they've found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world.

    This single factor is the price of food. Lagi and co say that when it rises above a certain threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet.

    The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause. Both these sources are plotted on the same graph above.

    This clearly seems to show that when the food price index rises above a certain threshold, the result is trouble around the world.

    This isn't rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It's often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.

    But what's interesting about this analysis is that Lagi and co say that high food prices don't necessarily trigger riots themselves, they simply create the conditions in which social unrest can flourish. "These observations are consistent with a hypothesis that high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest," say Lagi and co.

    In other words, high food prices lead to a kind of tipping point when almost anything can trigger a riot, like a lighted match in a dry forest.

    On 13 December last year, the group wrote to the US government pointing out that global food prices were about to cross the threshold they had identified. Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in protest at government policies, an event that triggered a wave of social unrest that continues to spread throughout the middle east today.

    [...]

    Today, the food price index remains above the threshold but the long term trend is still below. But it is rising. Lagi and co say that if the trend continues, the index is likely to cross the threshold in August 2013.

    [...]

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27083/