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The Cause Of Riots And The Price of Food
kfc, The Physics arXiv blog
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…
(11 Aug 2011)
How America Could Collapse
Matt Stoller, the Nation
A few months ago, a friend in the entertainment industry told me of a new business model in Hollywood: hoarding videotapes. Apparently, the earthquake in Japan knocked offline a Sony factory that makes certain types of tape. That factory was also in the tsunami zone, so now there’s a serious tape shortage threatening the television industry. The NBA scrambled to get enough tape to broadcast the NBA finals; one executive told the Hollywood Reporter, “It’s like a bank run.”
In the last few years, economists have spent a lot of time and energy thinking about bank runs. A bank run happens when depositors think a bank is weak and scramble to get their money out before it collapses. “Tight coupling” of financial institutions, like when banks are overly dependent on each other, can create a cascading series of problems for the system itself. We saw this with Lehman Brothers when it went bankrupt. Its AAA-rated debt instruments lost value unexpectedly; that caused money market funds that held those presumably safe bonds to suddenly lose value. A shadow bank run was the result, as investors rushed to withdraw from the money market funds.
Worryingly, there’s been very little consideration of how systemic collapses can happen in another, perhaps more dangerous realm—the industrial supply system that keeps us in everything from medicine to food to cars to, yes, videotape. In 2004, for instance, England closed one single factory, which caused the United States to lose half of its flu vaccine supply.
Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation has been studying industrial supply shocks since 1999, when he noticed that global computer chip production was concentrated in Taiwan. After a severe earthquake in that country, the global computer industry nearly shut down, crashing the stocks of large computer makers. This level of concentration of the production of key components in a globalized economy is a new phenomenon. Lynn’s work points to the highly dangerous side of globalization, the flip side of a hyper-efficient global supply chain. When one link in that chain is broken, there is no fallback.
Lynn has continued to study industrial supply shocks and says, “What I have found most interesting recently is the apparent role supply chain shocks played in triggering a synchronized slowdown of industrial economies in April—production down (in USA, China, Europe, Southeast Asia), jobs down, demand down, GDP numbers down—due almost entirely to the loss of a single factory that makes microcontroller chips for cars.”…
…There’s a good amount of grumbling about the state of American infrastructure—collapsing bridges, high-speed rail, etc. But American infrastructure is not just about public goods, it’s about how the corporations that enforce, inform and organize economic activity are themselves organized. Are they doing productive research? Are they spreading knowledge and know-how to people who will use it responsibly? Are they creating prosperity or extracting wealth using raw power? And most importantly, are they contributing to the robustness of our society, such that we can survive and thrive in the normal course of emergencies?…
(27 July 2011)
What looting has to do with trashing the planet
Harriet Williams, the ecologist
Recent riots and looting across the streets of England is a mini-tragedy of the commons, says Harriet Williams. If only some of the evironmental damage we cause everyday was as immediately visible and socially unacceptable
The only thing spreading faster than the riots last week was opinion on what dark forces are to blame. Who are these people? Why is this happening down my street?
True, the local conflagration here in east Bristol – a burnt-out moped in the Lidl car park – wasn’t exactly London burning. But the riots came close enough to Any Home, Any Town, that citizen-pundits everywhere were stirred to man their Twitter feeds deep into the febrile night.
Thugs, apologists, scum, thundered those of a right-ward disposition, making for great headlines. Those sitting to the left sought consolation in the grey shades of socioeconomic context. Making for better sense but not such great headlines.
True, true, hmmm, right enough, I murmured to my latte-sipping companion as we flicked through our preferred media provider (its not the Mail). Compelling stuff on theories of youth alienation, for sure, but what’s in it for an environmentalist like me? I just know an aggressive form of neo-liberalist capitalism predicated on voracious resource consumption is at the beating heart of this. But what’s my angle?
…Damn me, if it doesn’t all begin to look a bit like a mini-tragedy of the commons. This theory, posited by Garrett Hardin in 1968 and a bedrock of environmental policy ever since, has it that:
‘…individuals acting with self-interest will ultimately deplete a shared resource, when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen…’ (paraphrased from Wikipedia)
Nature’s great commons – the oceans, forests, atmosphere and minerals – are usually cheap or free at the point of use and available to everyone. Consumer goods – trainers, plasma screens, general bling – are usually kept under lock and key, accessible only to commoners paying cash or credit…
(15 Aug 2011)
