Fritz
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The RIOT Index; cynical - maybe !
« on: 2011-08-15 16:07:48 » |
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Well this little "Gem" should garner a response from out there  ... though as I enter 'curmudgeon mode' my little voice goes "sure why not, let them eat cake." So what happened to Hockey or Football as a motivator to rioting ?
Cheers
Fritz
What happened in London? Just an adjustment of the Riot Index
source: The Globe and Mail
Author: John Barber
Date: 2011.08.15
I was shocked when some young acquaintances riding the bulls on Bay Street first explained to me the theory of government that prevailed among their set, based on something they called the Riot Index.
Too many riots were bad for business, they allowed, but so were too few – a sign that government had become soft and inefficient. Prudent government squeezed until the mob rebelled, then increased spending just enough to prevent extensive property damage. Optimal social policy was a matter of dialling in the appropriate frequency of riots.
That was a long time ago, and I can't say my shock lasted. In light of the impotent moral outrage that has welled up in the wake of this week's events in England, the cynicism of the Riot Index now seems downright refreshing. It is surely more informative than the theories about bad parenting, “over-entitlement” and psychotic consumerism that many Britons are advancing to explain the disorder.
What the cynic notices is the rhetorical overload. The rioters are called feral youth, sometimes feral scum, vermin, wild beasts or street jackals. Aligned with that is an equally fierce denial of any political dimension to their violence.
“These are pure-and-simple criminals running wild tonight,” senior Manchester police official Garry Shewan said at the height of it. “They have nothing to protest against. There has been no spark. This has been senseless on a scale I have never witnessed before in my career.”
It is more than understandable for respectable people to affirm their own values in the face of such mayhem, and to stand solidly against its perpetrators, perhaps even to the extent of reflexively condemning them as subhuman. But as any cynical believer in the Riot Index will affirm, calling their activity “senseless” misses the point disastrously.
The lack of an immediately apparent cause for the English riots does seem to set them apart from similar, ongoing disturbances in Greece and Spain, which are clearly intended as protests against government austerity. And so they have invited all manner of speculative interpretation, providing pundits of every stripe with ample proof of their own prejudices.
“Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare-dependent, brutalized youngsters,” the Daily Mail said in a typical example, going on to say that liberalism “denies the underclass the discipline – tough love – which alone might enable some of its members to escape from the swamp of dependency in which they live.”
Many leftists were no less dismayed. “I believe in the politics of the street,” one Labour councillor from North London told The Guardian this week. “But to me that means Tiananmen Square; not some kids smashing in HMV. This is bullshit.” Even avowed anarchists condemned the violence.
The Riot Index permits no adjustment for ideology or morality. It seeks no causes and is indifferent to explanations. What it does do, however, is to accept without question that liberal social policies quell social unrest.
According to its logic, the fact that Britons are now struggling to make sense of good old-fashioned mob violence only proves that liberalism has gone too far – that the mob has been a stranger too long. The conclusion may be distasteful, but the underlying premise – that austerity causes riots and spending forestalls them – is well supported by historical evidence.
In that respect, the most telling commentary on the English riots to emerge this week was an econometric study by academics Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Titled “Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009,” the study assembled masses of data on historic protests, riots, assassinations and revolutions, and uncovered what the authors called “a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability.”
Economic downturns in themselves are not enough to spark riots, they found. The tinder box is government fiscal retrenchment, and its relation to social eruption is causal. “Once you cut expenditure by more than 2 per cent of GDP, instability increases rapidly in all dimensions, and especially in terms of riots and demonstrations,” Prof. Voth wrote on his blog this week.
When former London mayor Ken Livingstone made the same point this week, linking the riots to the Cameron government's sweeping and determined program of fiscal austerity, he was attacked by Tory MP Patrick Mercer as “hugely crass.” Misplaced moralism trumped common sense.
Others say it is too soon to measure the effects of the ongoing British austerity program, even though it was announced more than a year ago and key measures – including a hefty increase in sales tax to 20 per cent – are well in place. Last February, in an attempt to explain away the country's economic stagnation by saying it was too soon to blame austerity, The Economist noted that “the bulk of the spending cuts and further tax increases come in April.”
Followed, right on schedule, by mob violence. The vehemence with which government ministers deny the link only makes it more obvious. One of the most incredible events in a week of dread, with police still reeling from the assault, was Prime Minister David Cameron's reaffirmation of his commitment to cut police budgets.
The Riot Index may be cynical, but at least it's not stupid.
Here’s how the pundits explain the British riots
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/heres-how-the-pundits-explain-the-british-riots/article2128515/
Infographic: Why London rioters like to use BlackBerry smartphones
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/infographic-why-london-rioters-like-to-use-blackberry-smartphones/article2127416/?from=2128515
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