By Brian Merchant / Motherboard 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 ti