"After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed"
About this Quote
A technocrat’s warning dressed up as plain economics: the crisis after World War I wasn’t that factories couldn’t make enough, it’s that capitalism couldn’t figure out how to move what it made. Boyd Orr flips the usual scarcity story on its head. Production, the great industrial brag of the early 20th century, had outpaced the public’s ability to buy. That’s not a celebration of abundance; it’s a diagnosis of mismatch and potential instability.
The intent is pointedly political. By framing the “economic problem” as markets and distribution, Orr is nudging readers away from comforting solutions like “work harder” or “build more” and toward the awkward question of who has purchasing power and who doesn’t. The subtext: if people are hungry while warehouses are full, the issue isn’t nature or effort, it’s policy and structure. That logic underwrites the emerging welfare-state argument: raise incomes, stabilize prices, feed people, and you’re not doing charity; you’re preventing systemic breakdown.
Context does a lot of the heavy lifting. Postwar Europe faced demobilization, debt, disrupted trade routes, and agricultural shocks. At the same time, mass production kept humming, and governments were learning that economic life could be managed at scale during wartime, then abruptly “left to the market” in peace. Orr’s line reads like an early critique of demand failure that would later become common sense after the Great Depression: modern economies can choke not from lack of goods, but from lack of organized consumption.
The intent is pointedly political. By framing the “economic problem” as markets and distribution, Orr is nudging readers away from comforting solutions like “work harder” or “build more” and toward the awkward question of who has purchasing power and who doesn’t. The subtext: if people are hungry while warehouses are full, the issue isn’t nature or effort, it’s policy and structure. That logic underwrites the emerging welfare-state argument: raise incomes, stabilize prices, feed people, and you’re not doing charity; you’re preventing systemic breakdown.
Context does a lot of the heavy lifting. Postwar Europe faced demobilization, debt, disrupted trade routes, and agricultural shocks. At the same time, mass production kept humming, and governments were learning that economic life could be managed at scale during wartime, then abruptly “left to the market” in peace. Orr’s line reads like an early critique of demand failure that would later become common sense after the Great Depression: modern economies can choke not from lack of goods, but from lack of organized consumption.
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| Topic | Marketing |
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