Egypt's Spring Revolution (2011-2013)

[Fuchs]

Isn't 2/3rds of a country not remembering a time when they were free to speak their mind in public a good enough reason?

Maybe it was the contrast between the overt corruption of the Egyptian establishment and public servants on one side and the world as shown by Al Jazeera on the other side?


Food price inflation between 22 and 24% may have contributed, but only as a microeconomic issue, not as a macroecoonomic issue. The country as a whole was easily able to afford its nutrition.
A suppression of strikes and the resulting freeze of wages in combination with some other factors (insufficient effectiveness of food subsidies, for example) might be blamed if private food costs were really the issue.
I do somehow doubt that being hungry for lack of money and being a political activist with internet access fit together, though.


A usual suspect - income inequality - doesn't stand a basic test as a primary or even sole reason for the revolution. Many countries have a more appalling income distribution (including Turkey, most of both Americas and South Africa as examples).

Yet another usual suspect - unemployment and underemployment - doesn't stand a basic (superficial) test either (private sector employment grew by about 3% for several years, indicating no significantly deteriorating situation (or at least no deterioration below the state of about 2000).


Maybe - just maybe - the question should be directed at an Egyptian, not at a German. Just a thought.

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?

As a professional economist, I differentiate between microeconomics and macroeconomics.
Population growth is a macroeconomic thing.
A family patron being working poor and unable to feed his family is a microeconomic thing.
Egypt was quite fine in the macroeconomic level (except for the trade balance deficit, of course - but that was not an immediate shock because they still got credit). Economic growth was higher than population growth. Population growth - the macroeconomic property - was thus not the immediate reason behind the revolution.
Things were likely really ugly at the microeconomic level for a large share of the urban population (rural populations rarely count in sudden revolutions - and they were probably profiteering in the last years anyway).
Here you can argue about bread price inflation and stagnant wages, but that's a completely different thing than population growth and world marked wheat prices.

In other words; population growth and wheat prices are far away behind several corners, while suppression of strikes and the resulting wage stagnation coupled with food price inflation are probably just around a single corner.