I did a Q&A last week with The Chronicle — the student newspaper here at Duke University, not the other Chronicle — on, among other things, the relationship between food prices and political unrest:
TC: What sort of relationship exists between food prices and political turmoil?
MB: I think the causal relationship flows mostly from high food prices leading to political unrest. I can’t make a definite causal statement. We can’t observe a world in which nothing would have changed except for food prices, because there are so many factors that cannot be controlled. In the summer of 2008, it is uncanny that during that period of high food prices we had revolt in Indonesia and East Africa. Likewise, we are experiencing high food prices, and we have unrest in the Mediterranean.
Read the whole thing here. As an erratum, note that whoever wrote the lede got my affiliation wrong: I am an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics, not an Assistant Professor of Economics.