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Complex Systems Theorists Predict We're About One Year From Global Food Riots
pigrabbitbear writes with conjecture on what triggers global unrest. Quoting the article: "In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest."
Malthus? Is that you?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
In a 2011 paper ... explained why ... in 2008 and 2011
It's easy to make a model that correctly accounts for the past. Before I read the article, I was hoping that it was a model they created earlier, and just released last year. It wasn't. From the article:
We extrapolate these trends and identify a crossing point ... in 2012-2013
Yeah, because just what the world needs is a ton of old people supported by only a few young people?
Last I knew, those "experts" were pretty much on target -- vast swathes of humanity have been starving to death since there were vast swathes of humanity. Malthus totally got it right except for two developments he couldn't foresee. The first (the Green Revolution) is only a temporary fix-- all it ultimately did was to increase the carrying capacity of the planet, not to change the basics of Malthusian economics. The second factor (effective birth control) is the only reason you can remain ignorant enough to call Malthus wrong.
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
Exactly. So many "wins" for the predator class.
Manipulate global commodity markets for foodstuffs - WIN!
Chaos to justify re-ordering "democratic" societies - WIN!
And then? Reorganising municipalities into "Charter Cities", run by enterprise - WIN!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The sad, self-indulgent wankers over at CNN like to claim that the so-called 'Arab Spring', came about because of Twitter, Facebook and smartphones.
The reality, according to people in the know, is that the Angry Arab Jamboree of 2011/2012 was caused by severe financial pressure caused by food poverty on already badly-run middle-eastern Muslim countries. The people who run these countries like to keep their people illiterate, corrupt, religious and poor so they can maintain control; unfortunately for them, it gives them VERY little margin for error when a few harvests fail, especially when even in good times, 70% of the country is quite literally on the breadline.
I have little sympathy for anybody here. It's self inflicted -- people dumb enough to wait until they're starving -- and spending 70% of their incomes on bread -- before they hold their governments accountable probably deserve the kicking they're getting.
People seem to forget models don't prove SHIT. Models model. So they are only as useful as their predictive ability. However you can't know that until you've released a model, and see what happens. If your model repeatedly makes correct predictions (and fails to make incorrect ones) then you can say it is a good model.
It doesn't mean shit if everything is historical. Yes, yes, you tweaked it until it modeled history accurately. Of course, that's a good first step. However that could just mean you made a model that generates a line in the right shape, rather than actually models anything useful. You have to wait and see how it does at predicting reality before you go and claim it is useful.
This also seems like a good case of "correlation isn't causation." So there's a correlation. Great, that means fuck-all. Another explanation for a bunch of riots would be things like the Arab Spring concept in that people see their neighbors rise up against their oppressors and say "Hey, we should do that too!"
but beyond that any claim of a food shortage just seems silly.,
I hear that argued by the religious right anytime the subject of overpopulation comes up, even though the math is pretty simple.
We have a planet with a comfortable capacity of 5 billion and a population of 7 billion. Apparently all that extra food and resources are going to magically rain down out of the sky.
From the article: For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, itâ(TM)s like 15%).
I put the people who downplay the potential for mass starvation in the same category as people who deny climate change. They're both whistling past the graveyard so they don't have to make any sacrifices in terms of changing their lifestyle.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"Experts" have been incorrectly predicting that vast swaths of humanity would startve to death at least since Malthus. How can claims like this still be taken seriously?
Because they're not claiming sensationalistic Malthusian version of "we're doomed, there are too many people" and instead merely pointing out that people revolt when they don't make enough to feed their family.
The WHO warns about similar numbers of people facing obesity problems as they do starvation problems.
That's an entirely different topic. Obesity is above all related to sugar consumption -- or more specifically, fructose consumption -- if recent developments in nutrition are anything to go by. If we distribute snack bars, sweet water and fruit juice in Japan, China or Africa, we'll start seeing rampant obesity there too. Make that since we do, actually.
Yes, there will always be governments that withhold food as a weapon against their own citizens, but beyond that any claim of a food shortage just seems silly.
You've the wrong culprit there.
Even accounting for the occasional drought such as this year in the US, we indeed currently produce more that enough food to feed everyone on the planet and more. The primary withholders of food, however, are the major food exporters. Chief among them, the USA and the EU, so as to keep food prices high enough to sustain farmers -- which makes sense, when you scratch the surface, since the last thing you want in case of total war is to depend on food imports.
At any rate, and contrary to what you're suggesting, no government in its right mind willfully withholds food from its population. Food shortage is the surest path to revolts and uprising. Because when you've nothing to lose, you basically lose it.
It would help if major religions would say "Go forth and multiply, check, done" too.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
We have a planet with a comfortable capacity of 5 billion
[citation needed]
Last I knew, those "experts" were pretty much on target -- vast swathes of humanity have been starving to death since there were vast swathes of humanity.
Which makes such a prediction pretty useless. What those experts are predicting is a massive uptick in starvation rates. And yes, they have been consistently wrong. In modern times, there has never been a global, sustained, starvation die-off in the vein of a Malthusian Catastrophe.
Malthus totally got it right except for two developments he couldn't foresee.
In other words, he got it wrong.
The second factor (effective birth control) is the only reason you can remain ignorant enough to call Malthus wrong.
It's more than just birth control; it's a whole slew of factors that contribute to demographic transition. And yes, it's the primary reason Malthus was wrong. One of his fundamental assumptions was:
"That population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase"
Demographic transition has demonstrated that this is false. Human population growth is not limited solely by the availability of subsistence; it self-limits given the presence of other factors that tend to occur as prosperity increases.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
In Romania, 5-6 years after the Revolution of 1989, food cost still was almost 40% of the average family income. Not imported, and not the prepackaged/treated stuff you find today.
Things have improved, but poor politics keep the agriculture down, and import costs up (artificially).
If there will be riots, foot will be the cited reason, not the real one.
Remember: Pillage, then Burn!
Nonononono. Rape. Then pillage. THEN burn.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
The "comfortable capacity" of the planet is redefined every generation by alarmists to a bit less that whatever the population happens to be. Funny how that works.
Spending 80% on food is still a step up from subsistance farming. It's a step in the right direction (better than 100%) for a great many people. More steps will come.
It never fails to amaze me how many /. posters seem not to understand that technology makes us more efficient with the same resources. "Technology" doesn't mean the latest Apple product - it's every step forward in allowing more people to live "comfortably" on the same resources. Thinking the world has some fixed population limit that we've passed is thinkingthat technologicl advancement has stopped. Not likely.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Sadly, the San Joaquin Valley faces continuing pressure due to salinization. Every drop of water that irrigates the SJ desert contains a bit of salt, and when those drops evaporate, that salt is left behind, slowly increasing the toxicity of the soil. Worse, as the richness of the soil degrades due to the farming, its ability to handle saline conditions further declines.
This valley will work for now, but it's really only a short-term solution unless we work out. The only way we could go longer term would be to introduce the permaculture concepts put forward by the likes of Geoff Lawton which emphasizes long term sustainability and enhancing biodiversity alongside your crops.
BTW, this technology is gaining traction in India where the already-poor soil was boosted by fertilizers only for a short time. Now, the cost of the fertilizers has grown sky high since more is needed every year to achieve similar performance, permaculture offers similar yield performance without any of the costs of various chemicals.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
You are talking about removing food, as opposed to continued denial of food. African warlords know that if the people have enough energy to stand, they will oppose the warlord, so he makes sure that the people starve. International aid is seized and resold on the black market. It gets the warlord income and helps keep control.
What do you do when you have nothing to lose, but so little caloric intake that you can't even lift your own head?
Learn to love Alaska
It's misguided because the farmland used to produce that grain could have produced food for human consumption, correct?
Does your argument apply to any scarce resource diverted from food production, including the petroleum that could have been used to power tractors and other farm equipment but we instead put into our automobiles?
What about farmland used directly or indirectly for meat production, a very inefficient way to produce food for humans?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
As they say there are two places to see a real genuine communist these days: 1. A theme park in Poland, 2. A western university humanities department.
I thought the Republican convention was on the list. Communism is where the leaders own everything (well, theoretically, the people do, but the people, in practice, have no say). Republicanism is where the business owners own the government, thus the leaders to own everything.
Learn to love Alaska
And by the "Bush administration" you mean "the 16th century markets from which modern commodity market derive". There has never been a commodity market where buying and selling without taking possession wasn't the norm.
You're expressing a strong opinion about a highly technical subject that you know nothing about. It will only be karma when your boss does the same.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Libertarians have about as much interest in history as they do in economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, or pretty much any other body of knowledge. Their's is an imaginary utopia where temples are raised to the Unseen Hand Of The Unregulated Free Market, and the rich are free to enjoy their wealth unfettered by any necessity beyond purely voluntary noblesse oblige and the poor have won the freedom to starve without the horrible fear of the evils of state intervention to prevent their downward spiral, and the working classes are free to pick the master that they shall be wage slaves to, or if they choose, to join the poor and fight for the kindly alms of the rich.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Wrong! You know why? Bill Gates, Richard Murdoch and Donald Trump on a grand scale eat about the same amout of food as you do. Also, even with food taken out of the equation if their net worth is somewhere in the realm of $3 billion and your net worth is something like 100,000, they're not buying 30,000 times as many taxable goods as you.
This is why income tax is a good thing.
Much of the "green revolution" occurred because of extra energy input in the form of oil. Cheap oil allowed for the expansion of nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and mechanical harvesting. While the last two don't use an enormous amount of oil, the first does. As fossil fuels become more expensive, so does nitrogen based fertilizer.
So there is likely a limit to the ability of said revolution to feed the planet. And I'm ignoring other potential limiters such as water, salinization of croplands and many others.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"Alarmist" is an "alarmist". Whether or not it is a neo Malthusian predicting ruin of civilization via environmental cataclysm or a neo conservative predicting national ruin because of progressive/left wing policymaking.
An "alarmist" is anyone who irrationally clings to a conviction of ruin and fails to acknowledge the presense evidence that contradicts their position.
Nice try, trying to characterize your ideological opponents as rabble rousers.
The derivatives market is worth $800,000,000,000,000.00.
That's eight hundred trillion with a "T". It doesn't represent equity in any company, or commodity. It's not for business expansion or for building new factories or for putting new seed in the ground.
It's $800 trillion in real money that's used on a big monopoly board by extremely wealthy individuals and corporations. Remember, this is not the stock market, it is not shares in companies or bars of gold or bushels of corn. It's part of a big game of Texas Hold 'Em where if you lose, you send the bill to the taxpayers of some country or other.
It also happens to represent more than TEN TIMES the gross domestic products of all countries in the world. The derivatives market is worth several times that of the entire world. Possibly disruptive, no?
More than 3 BILLION people (50% of the world population, give or take) exist on less than $2/day.
There are about 1100 billionaires in the world and about 10 million millionaires (0.15%). About 25% of the world population is unemployed.
There is a whole lot of research that shows replicable, reliable correlation between growing wealth and income disparity and growth in every single negative metric of human society, from disease, to violence, to mental illness and back again. Not one bit of research that shows a positive effect of growing disparity of income and wealth.
In arguably the most prosperous of nations, the US, 40% of the population has a net worth of zero. The average person over 55 will retire with enough wealth to live for about 2.5 years. And much of the rest of the world only dreams about this kind of prosperity.
"Food riots?" Yah think? But just remember, it's not because there's not enough wealth to go around. You come up with a solution, because I'm going back down to the bunker.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Wow. Where to begin? I would assert that Malthus has not (yet) been proven wrong, even though he lived too early to see effective birth control and the Green Revolution. I will believe that he has been shown to be wrong and the "demographic transitionists" proven right once the population of the planet has actually stabilized at a sustainable level. It hasn't. We have some reason for hope because the world's population is not increasing in relative terms as fast as it once was and because we have areas of local stabilization; unfortunately in absolute terms the population is increasing about as fast as it ever has (though I acknowledge the predictions say this will change soon), and demonstrated areas of local stabilization are not guarantees that the planet as a whole will be able to that's not the same as proving that the world as a whole will get there without a major catastrophe caused by overpopulation. The Green Revolution *has* given humanity a reprieve, as we have vastly increased the carrying capacity of our planet. This is not the same as a pardon, as it yet remains to be seen whether or not this is sustainable in the long run. And by the way, Malthus was even right about the Green Revolution as well, despite not having foreseen it- human population exploded as a result of the increased availability of food, and in areas where we've not yet had a 'demographic transition', the population of the poor has continued to expand to meet the available means of subsistence, except to the extent it is "kept in check by misery and vice." I totally hear what you're saying about human progress and absolute numbers of scientists, and I even buy into that argument to a point. Your argument still presumes that there will always be a light at the end of the tunnel and that mankind will continue to be able to build telescopes powerful enough to always keep seeing such light, and that wealth and power will be distributed evenly enough such that the vast mass of humanity will benefit from future 'progress'. I'd like to think all of those things will be true, but wishful thinking isn't always an appropriate method to make prognostications.
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
My current net worth is about $600,000 and I have this in my basement. I'm pretty sure I don't have to worry.
Yes you do. Now we know we can raid your basement for food.
I'm not sure why this was modded as funny because it's true.
The problem with being more prepared than your neighbors for a disaster is that when they get hungry and notice that you and your family are not, then they'll be busting down your door to take your food. No matter how well armed you are, if you have something worth stealing, there will always be someone better armed than you and enough desperate people with nothing left to lose to overwhelm your defenses.
Thinking the world has some fixed population limit that we've passed is thinkingthat technologicl advancement has stopped. Not likely.
That's not the reality that I'm afraid of. The reality I'm afraid of is the absolute truth that every biological system on earth is in decline right now. How does your technology return the ability of our biological systems to support more life? How are you going to replace all of the world's collapsed fisheries or herd populations? How is technology going to make crop yields grow when you don't have enough oil to create fertilizer, or transport fertilizer, or power earth moving equipment, harvesting equipment, or get the food back to the cities where it's needed before it rots?
The earth is a closed system, and really isn't any different from a very large spaceship. Every indicator points to our life support systems being on the downward slope, and with the addition of the change in climate, all of our current models are getting less and less useful and certainly less predictable.
Since our largest economies are now based on speculative models, you're forcing people with virtually no money to compete with people who have virtually unlimited amounts of money. This will lead to huge price fluctuations which will cause societies on the edge of subsistence to collapse, and that's what, two billion people right now? When one third of the world doesn't have enough food to eat, or doesn't know how much bread will cost tomorrow or the day after, you can guarantee that instability will be a problem.
The earth will regain balance eventually, and our population, as a result of physics, will return to a sustainable size. The question is whether our civilizations will survive with the planet.
While I'm sure brains can be useful in gaining wealth, I don't think they are necessary. Inherited wealth, for instance, doesn't require a brain at all, and a thousand Einstein's could live and die never having achieved their potential because the resources were unavailable to sufficiently educate them.
I'm sure all those little lordlings hanging around the court of Louis XVI thought themselves quite clever for living a life of privilege while the peasants, scullery maids and all the other lesser classes lived in or near poverty. That is until Madame Guillotine rid them of those misconceptions... and everything else.
I think a wise man does not brag that he is rich, and a fool does, and if it ever came to food shortages, a fool will lose his head significantly faster than a wise man.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Let's hope it doesn't become an instruction manual like 1984.
Ever since the novel "1984" was published, back in 1949, the world has been actively "prepared" for the fruition
Do you know that the world population more than double, - almost triple - since 1949?
Back in the 1950's, global population of human being was around 2,556,000,000
Now, 7,000,000,000 and rising, by the second !!
With that many more mouths to feed, and the planet ain't getting any bigger, it sure is a recipe for disasters, big disasters
And with big disasters come big opportunities, for some
I won't be surprised at another global calamity 10 to 30 years in the future - and by then, blood may flow like rivers and corpse may pile up like hills and mountains - it would apocalypse, in every sense of the term
And I hope I will be dead before that happen
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
My grandparents and my oldest aunts (all in their late 70s now) picked blue berries by the ton for cash during the Depression, and when no work could be found, it was a garden, trade and my grandfather's rifle that kept the family going. My grandfather, his brother and his male in-laws all had trap lines to earn cash. This was in eastern British Columbia. They actually felt themselves quite lucky at that, and heard tough stories from their own kin in the Dakotas (my grandfather's parents actually rode a wagon train from the Dakotas into Alberta, and then his father moved the family across the Rockies a few years later).
While I remember my grandparents telling some fond stories of the times, mainly because the only way folks survived was to stick together, but they also said times were very tough, and families in the area were quite often only a meal or two from starvation, and any kind of disaster; a house fire or even a barn fire, was enough to see families go under. Children given to relatives while parents went looking for what work they could find.
Maybe not as many people starved in North America as some places, but a lot of people came damned close to it, far closer I think than most of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren realize.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The solution to these problems is to pit them against one another.
Simply cultivate a quantity of desperate people with nothing to lose who are willing to shoot pesky trespassers in exchange for a small cut of your food. Getting the implementation just right can be tricky, but this(along with appeals to the authority of the invisible friends of the powers that be) has been a fundamental part of human civilization for pretty much all of human history...
Like it has in the USA for the last 30 years you mean ? Where ever decreasing taxes have resulted in worker's wages going nowhere while productivity (and corporate profits) has skyrocketed ?
I like theories that agree with reality. Yours doesn't.
It's not the amount of food that's the problem (there's more than enough food for twice the wold population already), but the distribution.
Basically the population is decreasing (save for immigration) in the areas with surplus food production and increasing in areas that's already a long way past a sustainable food production.
So I doubt we'll see true food riots. We might see food mass migrations and we might see riots using food as an excuse, but not the hungry masses rising up.
I have no doubt that food will be an excuse for some riots. Usually riots seems to originate with groups of habitual criminals offended that the police are doing their job, and using either stupidities committed by the police or unsubstantiated rumors to cause a widespread reaction and turn it into a full riot and thus a free for all crime spree, complete with looting, arson and massive vandalism.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Try honey. It's probably the longest-lasting foodstuff you'll find naturally. Unfiltered honey, properly stored, has a shelf life measured in millenia. Bees have been co-evolving with bacteria and fungi for millions of years in a battle to make a microbe-proof honey. The bees won.
Rape. Then pillage. THEN burn.
I can't find that button. What's the keyboard shortcut?
G+O+P at the same time should do it.
What's your alternative "solution".
Society.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
"Too Many People."
Personally I had a vasectomy once I'd had two children - that's one each to replace me and my partner. Me fathering any more would be irresponsible.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
A government is an entity which has a local monopoly on the use of force. The "competitive market" for governments is called warfare. In reducing government, you are both eliminating economies of scale, and creating a power vacuum: If you do not grant a government the right to use force against business entities, you are de facto granting those business entities that right. If you want to know what this looks like, there is a plenitude of historical examples: any time a first-world business interest encounters a third-world resource the pattern repeats. The British East India Company (India), the Dole Fruit Company (Hawai'i), the United Fruit Company (Central America) all enjoyed that libertarian ideal of being more powerful than local governments.
It has been a recognized principle that governments derive their right to use force from the consent of the governed. This is not a business transaction, nor should it be. The market is not a solution for everything -- it fails spectacularly in the case of natural monopolies. It should be perfectly obvious that government is a natural monopoly. If you want to open that market to competition, then you're frankly insane, but I will promise you that I will make every effort to out-compete you.
Individual rights are not worthless, nor is it wrong to champion them. Governments exist in balance with liberty; they should be resisted at every step, but to dispute their necessity is to eradicate the basis of democracy. Ultimately libertarianism dictates that man is only answerable to himself, and for himself. It would certainly be a better world if men were islands of virtuous selfdom. However, the strongest basis for virtue is that which perpetuates the species; unless you're willing to tell that to go hang, you must acknowledge that at some level the rights of society trump the rights of the individual. From there we differ only in degrees as to what other rights have preeminence.
If you have determined that your rights outweigh the rest of society or the species, one hopes that you will exempt yourself from the demands of society in whichever way is least detrimental to others -- I may recommend suicide -- and do be so good as to not reproduce while you're at it.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I don't think Standard Oil got monstrous because of any sort of government interference. Government interference is what brought it down to size. Simply put, you cannot demonstrate anywhere at any time where a market has behaved in the way you claim, and the historical evidence suggests that unregulated markets tend towards very large conglomerates, or towards large competitors who will create what amounts to a treaty to divvy the market up (what we like to call collusion). That's why the Sherman Act and various other related acts through the industrialized world were created to begin with, because left to their own devices, large interests became ever larger.
If you can show me any example of a market producing the phenomenon you claim above, I would gladly consider it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.