Like everyone else, I've spent most of the past week glued to news of the riots.

In my case though, many reports have carried a tingle of nostalgia. You see, I grew up not far from the ground zero of the disturbances – in Edmonton, just north of where this week's violence began in Tottenham – and so the updates on looting and destruction have also summoned up memories of school trips, bus rides and teenage work experience.

"Ah, yes," I would think while the radio burbled away over the weekend, "I know that (now burnt-out) carpet shop." Or: "Aren't there always boarded-up shops on Fore Street?"

I wouldn't presume to offer an expert's view on what triggered the riots. It's been ages since I moved out of Edmonton; and a few recent flying visits to the retail parks of Tottenham Hale do not a sociologist make.

Instead, permit me an observation: in the intervening years, whenever telling other journalists or people in government about my childhood home, I might as well have been describing a tribal settlement in the hills of Orissa. Not that I blamed my audience. Edmonton and Tottenham may be parts of the capital, but they aren't central or glamorous or promising punts in the property market; for most Londoners, they're just bits you drive through to get to Ikea or the M25.

Until, that is, this week. Now, when members of this same media-political complex have pitched up in the past few days to explain what's going on, they seem to know all about N9, N17, EN1 and all those other overlooked postcodes. For Paul Routledge in the Mirror yesterday, these disturbances have a common cause: "The broadcasting of poisonous rap." On an attempt to decipher Max Hastings in the Mail, it's all to do with one-parent families and a dependency on benefits: "They are essentially wild beasts."

You might hope that senior frontbenchers would have a more nuanced view. You would hope wrong. On Tuesday's Newsnight, the former leader of the Labour opposition Harriet Harman took on the education secretary, Michael Gove. Harman began by quoting Ed Miliband to the effect that the violence spreading across England was "complex" in cause – before trotting out a list of reasons: "The trebling of tuition fees; the taking away of the education maintenance allowance; the cuts …

"Fatuous!" cried Gove with such hyperventilating fury one wondered when Gavin Esler would reach over and hand him an inhaler.

Right there on a late-night BBC2 debate you caught a glimpse of how this week's mayhem would be used by the political classes: as a kind of grand Rorschach test in which members of right and left would peer into smouldering suburbs and shopping streets – and see precisely what they wanted to see.

If you're a leftwinger, the causes of the violence and looting are straightforward: they're the result of monstrous inequality and historic spending cuts; while the youth running amok through branches of JD Sports are what happens when you offer a generation plastic consumerism rather than meaningful jobs.

For the right, explaining the violence is even simpler – because any attempt at understanding is tantamount to condoning it. Better by far to talk of a society with a sense of over-entitlement; or to do what the prime minister did and simply dismiss "pockets of our society that are not just broken but, frankly, sick". You can expect to hear more of the same rhetoric in today's debate in parliament, especially from backbenchers on either side.

And then there are the thinktankers and policy entrepreneurs who must scan the daily headlines for hobby horses. At a conference on Wednesday on wellbeing, in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, Lord Richard Layard opined that the British rioters were "unhappy". In case you didn't know, Layard is the author of a book called Happiness (a new edition is just out).

Offering up a single explanation for the violence and looting that began in one London borough on Saturday and has since spread as far as Birmingham and Salford must be a nonsense. But there are certain things we can say about outbreaks of violence from decades of previous experience.

Many economists have spent the past few days passing around a paper on the Hindu-Muslim riots in India in the 80s and 90s. Written by Anjali Thomas Bohlken and Ernest John Sergeant in 2010, it finds that "just a 1% increase in the [economic] growth rate decreases the expected number of riots by over 5%". Recessions are good for riots: perhaps no surprise, there. What matters, they argue, is when people suffer abrupt drops in living standards – and that goes for Hackney as well as Athens.

That point is rammed home by a new paper from the economists Jacopo Ponticelli and Hans-Joachim Voth. Titled "Austerity and Anarchy", it should be essential reading for all those who want an academic take on what spending cuts made in Whitehall might mean on their local high streets. Ponticelli and Voth look at social unrest across Europe from 1919 to the present – and find a clear link between "fiscal retrenchment and instability" that goes beyond the misery caused by recession.

Those are two important, if general points. Add to them these observation by Rob Berkeley, director of the race-relations thinktank the Runnymede Trust. He points out that the Brixton riots of 1981 were triggered by the police stopping young black men under the infamous "sus" laws.

Thirty years on, that situation isn't much improved: black men are still eight times more likely to be stopped and searched than white men. And in Hackney, some of this week's violence appears to have been triggered by rumours of youngsters being unfairly hassled by the police (full disclosure: I am a trustee of Runnymede Trust).

But London in the early 80s was marked out by a generation of black and Asian politicians who were able to serve as interlocutors for their communities. Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng and others were not Labour frontbenchers and often to the left of Michael Foot and the party leadership: they were able to serve as credible representatives of areas in turmoil. David Lammy is an admirable MP, but he does not have the same heft.

Which is partly why this week's disorder has often seemed so apolitical. The riots in Tottenham on Saturday had at root a real grievance: the apparent police killing of Mark Duggan. That same anger cannot have travelled all the way up the M62 to Salford on Tuesday.

The student protests of last autumn had placards and slogans, but these outbreaks have been more shocking and often politically silent. That makes it easier for professional commentators and politicians to project their own hypotheses on to them – but it also makes them more unpredictable and destabilising. It is easier to negotiate with community leaders with a clear set of demands than a bunch of looters. Yet as Claire Alexander, a sociologist of race at the LSE, points out that political representation has been "decimated by the cuts to local community services."

When I speak to Katrina Navickas, she's in the archives in North Yorkshire researching a book on popular protest. "Historians wouldn't even classify much of this week's events as riots," she tells me. "In academic terms, a riot has a political programme." Or a common enemy: think of the Captain Swing riots of the 1830s by southern peasants against exploitative landowners.

This week's lawlessness doesn't have that – yet. But rather than listen to the grievances of Tottenham or Handsworth or, yes, Edmonton, the metropolitan know-it-alls are riding in on their own hobby horses.

Yet the locals have their own stories to tell. Take Alan Sitkin,a Labour councillor from Edmonton, who's spent most of the past two days looking out from his bedroom window at "plumes of smoke" coming from a factory that looters set on fire. Sitkin can reel off local factors that have made the disturbances worse, such as a lack of jobs and cuts in the number of police. "Look, I'm a lefty; I believe in redistribution. I believe in the politics of the street. But to me that means Tiananmen Square; not some kids smashing in HMV. This is bullshit."