He has a very personal reading of the riots in France. Philip Pilkington, an Irish economist, believes he has found the cause of the urban violence of recent days, after the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old boy killed in Nanterre by a policeman.
The specialist recalls that French food prices have increased by 22% since 2021. “The result of this increase in costs has been a drop in French food consumption of almost 17%, the largest national drop of this type since the beginning. data in the early 1980s”, observes the economist on the UK news site UnHerd. However, the higher a person’s income, the lower the share of the budget devoted to food.
An economic crisis that is hitting the working classes hard
“People in the top 25% of income spend about 7.6% of their income on food, while those in the bottom quartile spend more than 30%. It is this last group that is responsible for a large part of the drop in food consumption,” comments the researcher, who considers that the rise in prices is a direct consequence of the war in Ukraine.
For him, “rising food prices and falling food consumption are extremely effective predictors of riots and social unrest,” he concludes.