Fascists in the faculty

We are, admittedly, not very big fans of the indignados movement that took over Madrid’s Puerta del Sol in the lead-up to May elections. We think that what we privately refer to as the 'Gravy Train Revolution' is making the ruinous decision to attempt to parlay a misdiagnosis of the malaise from which we currently suffer into a wholly inadequate cure. Nonetheless, we were impressed by the pacific and civic manner in which they expressed their grievances. So we’re going to do these people who were so quick to rightly dissociate themselves from the coincident violence that took place at the investiture of the new government of Catalonia a favour – and point out exactly how a recent, widely-circulated publication by two Pompeu Fabra economists describes their demonstrations as being equivalent to both riots and assassinations.

The piece, published in précis form last week by VoxEU (and since sleepily making the August rounds in the noise-o-sphere) and entitled ‘How much will they hate it? Unrest and budget cuts over the long run’, posits that a statistical analysis its writers have performed reveals a significant correlation between government cutbacks and social strife since the end of World War I. Penned by Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth, it’s a pretty curious piece of work.

At face value simply one of the millions of publish-or-perish studies that clog up the creative arteries of social science departments (Oops! We seem to be including economists) everywhere with attempts to render into numbers the comings and goings of the human parade, the article reveals a disconcerting ideological tendency.

A few quotes...

August 2011 has seen days of rioting in London and other cities in the UK. In Spain, demonstrators known as indignados recently occupied town squares and demanded a full-scale change of the political system.

What drives such outbursts of violence against property and people, leading to buildings and vehicles burned, confidence in civic institutions and the police severely dented, and ultimately lives lost?

We look at five different types of instability – anti-government demonstrations, riots, assassinations, general strikes, and attempted revolutions – in Europe over the period 1919-2009.

As expenditure cuts start to bite, the number of anti-government demonstrations, riots, general strikes, attempts to overthrow the established order, and political assassinations increases dramatically.

Are we the only ones to notice that two legally-guaranteed, democratic expressions of political will – the general strike and the demonstration - are thrown in the same insidious basket with armed rebellions, killings and incidents of mob rule?

Were Franco still alive, the generalísimo would be awarding these two authoritarian apologists a medal – not to mention tenure and a statue in some town square.

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When the piece first appeared on August 10, it contained a phrase indicating that the correlation had ceased to be significant from the early 1990's. It seems to have since disappeared, but as the writers note on page 17 of the full-study pdf:

The fall of the Berlin wall saw the spread of Western-style democracy
eastwards. The overall connection between austerity and social instability now
changes sign, and becomes in (sic) insignificant.

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