I’m in Washington, DC for a roundtable on climate change and conflict at the Woodrow Wilson today, so I thought I should discuss this article in last week’s issue of The Economist which discusses food prices in the Middle East and North Africa:
It is sadly appropriate that Mohamad Bouazizi, the Tunisian whose self-immolation triggered the first protest of the Arab spring, should have been a street vendor, selling food. From the start, food has played a bigger role in the upheavals than most people realise. Now, the Arab spring is making food problems worse.
They start with a peculiarity of the region: the Middle East and North Africa depend more on imported food than anywhere else. Most Arab countries buy half of what they eat from abroad and between 2007 and 2010, cereal imports to the region rose 13 percent, to 66 million tons. Because they import so much, Arab countries suck in food inflation when world prices rise. In 2007-08, they spiked, with some staple crops doubling in price. In Egypt local food prices rose 37 percent in 2008-10.
Unsurprisingly, the spike triggered a wave of bread riots. Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt and Morocco saw demonstrations about food in 2008. They all suffered political uprisings three years later. The Arab spring was obviously about much more than food. But it played a role.
The article then goes on to discuss the foolishness of food subsidies in several countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The problem is that the removal of those subsidies is fraught with danger — people come to take those subsidies for granted, and they tend to riot at the slightest hint of the subsidies’ removal.
I also wanted to share one of the background documents which was sent to today’s roundtable participants, a USAID report titled “Climate Change, Adaptation, and Conflict” (link opens a .pdf document), as it is a very useful review of the issues one needs to consider when thinking about the climate change–conflict nexus.
03
Oct 12
Everybody’s an Expert
Columbia University historian Mark Lilla does a short Q&A in this week’s New York Times book review.
[T]here’s another factor, I think, and that is the centrality of economic policy to our politics today, and its inherent complexity. Though wars are complicated things, it’s not hard to develop a defensible position about their legitimacy or illegitimacy. But you need to know a fair amount about finance to make any sense, for example, of the bank collapses and bailouts of 2008-9 and the stimulus that followed. Very few people have that, but in a democracy everyone is supposed to have an opinion about everything. Everyone’s opinion is supposed to matter; you shouldn’t need higher education to chime in. But on economic policy you do. This opens the field to charlatans who demonize educated elites and reassure people that “it’s really all very simple.”
The emphasis is mine.
Though I agree that there certainly are many charlatans who demonize educated elites and have simple (and almost surely mistaken) answers to complex questions, I find that, on matters of social science, many people think they know more than they actually do (because hey, they live in society!) and are prone to dismiss experts as ideological hacks. Continue reading →