Thread: Austerity And Runaway Inequality Lead to Violence / Instabil

Austerity And Runaway Inequality Lead to Violence And Instability

Saturday, August 13, 2011
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Video at the link:

Study Shows That Austerity Leads to Violence And Instability
A study this month by economists Hans-Joachim Voth and Jacopo Ponticelli shows that - from 1919 to the present - austerity has increased the risk of violence and instability:

Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? From the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s to anti-government demonstrations in Greece in 2010-11, austerity has tended to go hand in hand with politically motivated violence and social instability. In this paper, we assemble cross-country evidence for the period 1919 to the present, and examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. We test if the relationship simply reflects economic downturns, and conclude that this is not the key factor. We also analyse interactions with various economic and political variables. While autocracies and democracies show a broadly similar responses to budget cuts, countries with more constraints on the executive are less likely to see unrest as a result of austerity measures.

As CNN notes:

Studying instances of austerity and unrest in Europe between 1919 to 2009, Ponticelli and Voth conclude that there is a “clear link between the magnitude of expenditure cutbacks and increases in social unrest. With every additional percentage point of GDP in spending cuts, the risk of unrest increases.â€

The cause is the nanny state benefits from cradle to grave. Give people something for nothing and they have a temper tantrum when you take it away. The young people rioting in Great Britain are products of a socialist system in which someone else pays their rent, their food, their clothing, pretty much anything they want.