"During the last war when there was a market for everything that could be produced, the production capacity of Canada and the United States, which were outside the battle area, increased one hundred percent"
About this Quote
War, in Boyd Orr's telling, is the most brutal kind of economic stimulus: a moment when scarcity is manufactured, demand is guaranteed, and moral questions get waved away as logistics. His line looks like a clean statistic about production, but it’s really an indictment of how quickly “capacity” becomes a euphemism for mobilized industry - and how prosperity can be geographically selective.
The phrasing “market for everything that could be produced” is doing sly work. It’s not celebrating entrepreneurial vigor; it’s pointing to an abnormal condition where waste disappears because governments will buy anything that keeps the machine moving. That kind of market doesn’t reward innovation so much as it rewards throughput. The subtext: if we can double output under the pressure of destruction, then peacetime shortages, hunger, and “budget constraints” start to look less like inevitabilities and more like political choices.
His emphasis on Canada and the United States being “outside the battle area” sharpens the moral contrast. These were societies insulated from bombing and occupation, able to convert war demand into domestic expansion rather than rubble. Orr is inviting the reader to notice the asymmetry: war devastates where it’s fought, but it can fatten the ledger where it isn’t.
Context matters: Orr, a nutritionist-turned-politician and later the first head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, spent his public life arguing that hunger was a problem of distribution and policy, not planetary limits. This quote sits squarely in that agenda - exposing the uncomfortable truth that modern states can summon abundance instantly, just not always for feeding people.
The phrasing “market for everything that could be produced” is doing sly work. It’s not celebrating entrepreneurial vigor; it’s pointing to an abnormal condition where waste disappears because governments will buy anything that keeps the machine moving. That kind of market doesn’t reward innovation so much as it rewards throughput. The subtext: if we can double output under the pressure of destruction, then peacetime shortages, hunger, and “budget constraints” start to look less like inevitabilities and more like political choices.
His emphasis on Canada and the United States being “outside the battle area” sharpens the moral contrast. These were societies insulated from bombing and occupation, able to convert war demand into domestic expansion rather than rubble. Orr is inviting the reader to notice the asymmetry: war devastates where it’s fought, but it can fatten the ledger where it isn’t.
Context matters: Orr, a nutritionist-turned-politician and later the first head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, spent his public life arguing that hunger was a problem of distribution and policy, not planetary limits. This quote sits squarely in that agenda - exposing the uncomfortable truth that modern states can summon abundance instantly, just not always for feeding people.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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