Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
You may argue that Egyptian politics were not rational and thus the wheat stuff was still important - but the same could be said for the much bigger bills that stood behind the huge rest of the trade balance deficit.


It's fashionable and simple to single out well-known themes and suspect that they played a decisive role in Egypt and/or Tunisia; Malthusian trap, facebook, twitter - convenient and simple explanations.


Convenient and simple explanations are suspicious by definition in a complex world like ours. The typical ones applied to the Egyptian revolution don't pass simple tests and thus I reject them.
Fuchs, on the subject of convenient and simple explanations, I could not agree with you more. However, I never mentioned twitter, facebook or Malthus. On the contrary, I think that to find Malthus at work, you have to travel to Darfur, Rwanda or East Congo, not to Egypt.

However, when studying a revolution, it is obvious to analyze the issues that have to potential to mobilize large crowds. In Egypt, rising bread prices have been an incentive for social unrest on more than one occasion. This has been the case in 1977 and 2008. Actually, I do not understand why you are so adamant to reject the argument that someone's daily bread (literally) is a prime motivator for militant action. What simple tests allow you to do that?