Who’s eating all the pies?

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An interesting debate in Davos about social inequality, inept leadership and future revolutions has thrown up some interesting predictions and sound bites.

Star economist Nouriel Roubini has likened global social unrest to undernourished people wanting a larger slice of the pie. The trouble is, the pie is shrinking in the face of a severe economic slowdown.

The world’s leadership is remarkably chaotic, he opines. “It doesn’t look like a G20 world, it looks like a G0 world.”

“Dr Doom” is predicting a collapse of the euro in the next three to five years, led by the exit of Greece inside 12 months and Portugal shortly afterwards. Oh, and the US economy will go down the pan and China will experience a hard landing.

With Roubini’s successful track record of Davos predictions in the past, who would be brave enough to bet against his latest “perfect storm” forecast for 2013?

So we can also expect more civil protest and uprisings then? Financial Times foreign affairs specialist Gideon Rachman is growing tired of all this talk about social media sparking off revolutions.

“You wonder how they managed to storm the gates of the Bastille without Twitter,” he sighs.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman then proves worthy of his Pulitzer Prize  by neatly articulating how he thinks the empires will strike back against the rowdy rabble.

“At the end of the day bang bang beats tweet tweet.”