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Social Unrest
On February 24, 2010 Greek police fired tear-gas and clashed with
demonstrators in central Athens after a march organized by unions to oppose the
government’s program to cut the European Union’s biggest budget deficit. The
president of a large union stated, “People on the street will send a strong
message to the government but mainly to the European Union, the markets and
our partners in Europe that people and their needs must be above the demands
of markets. We didn’t create the crisis.” Later, air-traffic controllers, customs
and tax officials, train drivers, doctors at state-run hospitals and school teachers
walked off the job to protest government spending cuts. Journalists joined into
the strikes as well, creating a media blackout.
On the surface, these types of civil disturbances give the appearance of arising
out of the public’s discontent with their government over high unemployment,
rising food prices, lack of housing, and other such necessities of everyday life.
But such explanations are facile and superficial, failing to address the “root”
cause of the societal collapse. The real culprit resides much deeper in the social
system. It is a widening “complexity gap” between the government and its
citizens, revolution breaking out when that gap can no longer be bridged.
Complexity Mismatches
Some years back, American archaeologist Joseph Tainter put forth the idea that
societies respond to crises by adding complexity in order to solve problems they
encounter. But each unit of resource the society adds―energy or money,
usually―yields less return than the previous unit. So the additional layers of
complexity bought by this expenditure consume resources with no
corresponding return until the marginal return on investment in social
complexity turns negative. But since the society knows how to solve problems
only by adding complexity, it then begins to collapse under its own weight.
In Egypt (and now Libya) the added complexity is not just any sort of
complexity, but as noted by futurist Ramez Naam it is a very special type:
parasitism. This is one of the worst forms of complexity, as it consumes more
and more of society’s resources without producing any value at all.
But modern communication and social networking services like Twitter and
Facebook do act to dramatically increase the social complexity―but the
increase is in the complexity of the population, at-large, not an increase in the
complexity of the government. This is why governments routinely act to shut
off these services when they’re under attack, as more voices are heard and more
and more highly-connected social networks are formed.
At some point the complexity gap between the stagnant level of government
complexity and the growing level of general-public complexity becomes too
great to be sustained. Result: Ouster of the Mubarak regime, and the likely
downfall of the Qaddafi government as well.
This type of complexity gap is not confined just to the political and
governmental domains either, as evidenced by the ongoing social unrest in
Japan arising out of the radiation spewing forth from the reactors damaged by
the March 11 earthquake. The ultimate cause of this unrest is a “design basis
accident,” in which the tsunami overflowed retaining walls designed to keep the
water out. The overflow then damaged backup electrical generators intended to
supply emergency power for pumping water to cool the reactor’s nuclear fuel
rods. This is a two-fold problem: First, the designer’s planned the height of the
walls for a magnitude 8.3 quake, the largest that Japan had previously
experienced, not considering that a quake might someday exceed that level, and
what’s even worse, (2) they placed the generators on low ground where any
overflow would short them out. So everything ultimately depended on the
retaining walls doing their job―which they didn’t! This is a case of too little
complexity in the control system (the combination of the height of the wall and
the generator location) being overwhelmed by too much complexity in the
system to be controlled (the magnitude of the tsunami).
Who’s Next?
What can we expect to over the next year or two? A good guess is that as people
lose confidence in the ability of their governments to solve the financial crises
and experience other social stresses that increase the government-public
complexity gap, they’ll break out into violent protests and/or assaults on those
they see as responsible for their misery. This group will certainly encompass
government officials and bankers, but may well also include immigrants, ethnic
and religious minorities, landlords, and even corporate managers and bosses.
If you want to be grimly impressed, start putting pins on a map where such
violence has already broken out. Cities like Athens, Sofia (Bulgaria), Port-au-
Prince, Riga (Latvia) and Vilnius (Lithuania) are on the map, and even much
larger cities like Moscow, Rome, Paris and Dublin have seen huge protests over
rising unemployment and declining wages. But security police in these cities
have managed to keep the protests orderly, if not peaceful (so far). While it’s
very likely such societal disruptions will be confined to specific locales, we
cannot entirely discount the possibility that as the global economic situation
worsens, some of these localized incidents will overrun national borders and
become far more widespread and long-lasting events. Armed rebellions, military
coups, and even wars between states over access to resources cannot be
excluded.
Early-Warning Indicators
All civil disturbances have the same general two-part structure: a lack of
confidence in the ability of established institutions to solve the problems at
hand, and fear of the future. So any methodology purporting to provide early-
warning signals of social unrest will have to embrace these two factors. It turns
out that a theoretical foundation for just such a theory was put forth by
American political scientist James C. Davies more than fifty years ago.
Like all great insights, Davies big idea is simple: Social unrest takes place
when a society’s rising expectations are suddenly dashed. In other words, a
society’s mood, how they regard the future, grows increasingly positive as the
society gets richer. But when the rug is pulled out from under citizen’s hopes for
a brighter future, things turn ugly―fast. And as the gap between expectations
and reality widens, the mood of the population moves deeper into negative
territory until it finally erupts into violence and revolution.
To illustrate Davies thesis, let’s take an item from the “It Can’t Happen Here”
department. In a recent article in Vanity Fair magazine, Nobel-winning
economist Joseph Stiglitz noted that in terms of income inequality, the United
States today lags behind every country in Europe, ranking down with Russia
and its oligarchs and Iran in the category of countries where the top 1% of the
population control 40 percent or more of the nation’s wealth. As with the
situations in the North African and Arab lands today, there are again two
systems in conflict. But in the developed countries like the USA, the systems
are not the government and the public; rather, they are the “haves” and the
“have nots.”
In a society like the USA that is sharply divided in terms of wealth, the rich lead
a high-complexity style of life that doesn’t rely on government to supply
common needs like parks, education, security or medical care. The “haves” can
supply all these things for themselves. In fact, this high-complexity life-style
strata of society is one that worries a lot about strong government, especially a
government that would reduce its complexity by doing things like raising taxes.
This attitude ultimately leads the have-nots to see the already low complexity of
their lives become even lower, as a sense of living in an unjust system with
shrinking opportunities creates feelings of alienation. Does this sound familiar?
Rising food prices, growing youth unemployment and lack of adequate housing
and education are exactly the surface causes of the revolutions taking place
today in Africa and the Middle East. Question: When will it come to America?
We’d like to be able to develop procedures for anticipating when that gap
between the rich (read: high complexity lifestyles) and the not-so-rich (low
complexity lives) will widen to an unsustainable level. How to do that?
The first step in identifying the “danger zone” where the gap between
expectations and reality is reaching a critical level is to measure the society’s
expectations, what we might term its “social mood”. This is the view the society
holds about its future, optimistic (positive) or pessimistic (negative) on various
time scales, weeks, months, years, or more. We then look for the turning points
in this mood as an indicator of where society will move from one overall
psychological mindset to another. Of course, the danger zone is the point at
which the social mood begins to roll over from positive to negative, since that’s
the point at which the society can “tip” from hope to despair. This is precisely
where Davies’ theory suggests a civil disturbance becomes much more likely
than not.