From 19th-century bread riots to the covid-era toilet-paper crisis, DrMatthewSweet charts scarcity through history. From 1843 magazine
carcity kills. It’s also the mother of invention. In the zone of this paradox, we have perished and thrived. During the siege of Leningrad, the desperate population ate lipstick, tobacco, wallpaper paste and worse.
Is it possible to abolish scarcity? Even in Marx’s vision of a post-capitalist society, it was still a factor – one he regarded as inherent, necessary and constructive. Our needs, he argued, made personal and social progress possible.
It would be a mistake to think that we were watching some simple, unthinking process – hungry humans rising like dough near the radiator. E.P. Thompson, author of “The Making of the English Working Class” , had a warning about that assumption. Bread riots, he argued a little romantically, were the product of a collective decision informed by both conservative and radical opinion.
What a key-change. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, the British public marvelled at the models on display – a gilded piano by Lambert & Co, a gothic oak upright by Pugin, a grand by Schneider, an Austrian maker. Hector Berlioz, a French composer sent to London to represent his country’s minister of trade and agriculture, was dazzled by the craftsmanship and envisaged the piano as an instrument of empire, present in “every corner of the globe where civilisation has penetrated”.
The one-child policy was a 36-year experiment in the cultural and economic value of sex. Not a well-designed one – the rules were applied differently in the cities and countryside, and changed in the mid-1980s, when some couples could legally have a second child if the firstborn was a girl. The brutal results are recorded in the 2020 census: men aged 20-40 outnumbered women by 17.5m, meaning that there were 109 men for every 100 women.
Did the virus cause a genuine shortage of toilet paper? The answer is complicated. Lockdown pushed demand for sanitary paper in two directions: hardly anyone needed the commercial sort found in offices and public places, whereas domestic use rose by 40%. Panic buying wiped the aisles and warehouses of their two- or three-week supply of stock, which then took time to replenish.
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Scottish aid worker tells of devastating food poverty in ZimbabweThe Ukrainian conflict and climate change have exacerbated food security concerns around the world, according to aid worker Peter McGeachie.
Read more »
Meghan's sister says it's not true she's tried to contact dad after his strokeThe Duchess of Sussex’s half-sister claims Meghan has not spoken to her father since he suffered a major stroke, but the ‘door is wide open’. Thomas Markle, fell ill last week ahead of his planned trip to the UK for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.
Read more »