Across four of the world's most consequential societies — China, India, the United States, and Europe — the first years of the second decade of the 21st century brought wave after wave of social unrest. The forms varied: Occupy protests, Arab Spring reverberations, Anna Hazare's anti-corruption movement, labor strikes in China's coastal factories, austerity riots in Greece and Spain. The underlying causes had important commonalities.

Economic inequality was the most visible thread. In the United States, the Occupy movement's "99 percent" framing captured a genuine and measurable trend: the concentration of income and wealth at the top had accelerated dramatically since the 1980s, and the 2008 financial crisis had widened the gap further while the architects of the crisis largely escaped consequence.

In India, the Anna Hazare movement tapped into something similar but distinctly local: rage at systemic corruption that extracted rents from ordinary citizens at every level of civic life, enriching officials and political networks while degrading public services. The movement's galvanizing moment was the demand for a strong Lokpal — an independent anti-corruption body with real teeth.

In China, the ferment was less visible internationally but no less real. Workers in the export manufacturing belt were increasingly willing to strike for better wages and conditions, and a generation of younger workers who had grown up with rising expectations was less deferential to factory management and local authorities than their parents had been.

In Europe, the austerity programs imposed in response to sovereign debt crises generated protests of genuine scale and passion, particularly in Greece, Spain, and Portugal. The human costs of fiscal adjustment — unemployment, cuts to pensions and social services — were falling hardest on those least responsible for the conditions that made adjustment necessary.

What connected these movements was a fundamental question about the social contract: was the system rigged, and if so, by whom, and for whom?