What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable
motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty,
oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than
any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single
factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce
or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in
Cambridge, and it makes sense.
In a 2011 paper,
researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that
accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in
2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was
soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for
global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.
The MIT Technology Review
explains how CSI’s model works: “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.”
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