AFTER two decades of stable growth and mostly quiet streets the rich world has become an unruly place. Hundreds of protesters have been camped in New York's financial district since September, inspiring similar movements in large cities around the world. In Rome the protests turned violent as demonstrators set cars alight and hurled rocks at police. Greek workers demonstrated again this week against yet another set of austerity measures. Public anger is clearly fuelled by economic troubles, but the link between economic conditions and unrest is complex. Instability is often blamed on creeping austerity. After the riots in London in August, Ken Livingstone, a former mayor, declared that "the economic stagnation and cuts being imposed by the Tory government inevitably create social division." A recent paper by Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth of Barcelona's Universitat Pompeu Fabra suggests he may have a point. They assemble a data set of chaotic episodes in Europe between 1919 and 2009—a mix of protests, strikes, assassinations and attempted revolutions-and find a tight relationship between fiscal austerity and unrest. Episodes of instability occur twice as often when spending cuts reach 5% of gdp as when expenditure is rising.
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