Modeling Middle East Turmoil
By Aaron Mannes
The other day Slate posted a data visualization to help understand “Which Middle Eastern countries are most susceptible to revolution?”
The visualization was neat, because it cleverly brought in four different factors (unemployment, median age, GDP per capita, and oil exporter or not.) But it also did not provide much of an obvious pattern. Libya had, by far the highest unemployment while Tunisia and Egypt (although this seems low) were more towards the middle of the pack. Tunisia has one of the highest median ages, while Egypt and Libya are again in the middle. As for GDP per capita, Libya is a substantially higher then Egypt and Tunisia (although lower then Bahrain). In short, the graphic does not point to an obvious next domino, although it does indicate that almost everyone in the region is a possible candidate.
But knowing that the nations in the Middle East are ripe for turmoil is hardly news, but the critical questions are when, where, and why. To model that problem requires a lot more variables. In one of my own efforts to model terrorist group behavior I cited Tolstoy who stated:
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
The same goes for troubles nations (and is there any other kind.) Since I work on this sort of thing for my
bread and butter, I thought I’d kick in some thoughts on the kinds of variables needed.
Read the full post here.
