How Dangerous Is Todays Political Unrest?
The difficulty of measuring so vague a concept as “unrest” – to say nothing of statistically correlating unrest to something like the “probability of systemic political change” – would understandably give any social scientist pause. It has, therefore, been common for economics professors to suggest that while the other harms of unemployment show up to varying degrees even at low rates of unemployment, social unrest would only arise if the economy experienced an epoch-making disaster. Because such disasters are impossible to predict and (by definition) rare, it is usually safe to focus students’ attention on lost economic output, suicides, burglaries, and so on as the costs of unemployment – and to put the potential harm of social unrest aside. But is today different? We could not have predicted even two years ago that the economy would suffer such an extreme and prolonged period of pain. Even so, here we are. The economy is unlikely to expand rapidly any time soon, and the political fi
