"When war comes, two things happen - profits go way, way up and all perishables go way, way down. There becomes a market for them"
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Spielberg distills the cold arithmetic of wartime economies into a blunt observation about incentives and scarcity. War jolts demand for anything that feeds the conflict and the state apparatus around it, pushing profits up for those positioned to supply uniforms, weapons, transport, or bureaucratic needs. At the same time, it shatters distribution networks. Food, medicines, and other perishables often pile up in the wrong places and vanish from the right ones. Prices can collapse where goods cannot move and spike where desperation concentrates. That gap invites middlemen, fixers, and opportunists who create a market by bridging chaos. The result is a paradox: abundance and waste on one end, need and profit on the other.
The line carries a particular resonance with the moral terrain of Schindlers List. Oskar Schindler enters the war as a classic opportunist, recognizing that turmoil creates arbitrage. Contracts, cheap labor, surplus goods, and pliable officials become ingredients for profit if one learns the rules of a warped game. Spielberg understands that the machinery of atrocity runs not only on ideology but also on ledgers, invoices, bribes, and supply chains. Calling out perishables is a way of showing how human necessity becomes a commodity, and how markets reorganize themselves around urgency. It also hints at a darker echo: in regimes of annihilation, people are treated as perishable too, reduced to items on lists and quotas.
The remark is not an economic tutorial so much as an ethical warning. War generates markets that reward speed, access, and moral flexibility, and it does so by accelerating decay elsewhere. A few profit because many lose the time, stability, and safety that make goods and lives durable. Spielberg frames that reality to expose complicity and to give context to redemption: if the system is built to monetize perishability, then choosing to value what that system devalues becomes an act of resistance.
The line carries a particular resonance with the moral terrain of Schindlers List. Oskar Schindler enters the war as a classic opportunist, recognizing that turmoil creates arbitrage. Contracts, cheap labor, surplus goods, and pliable officials become ingredients for profit if one learns the rules of a warped game. Spielberg understands that the machinery of atrocity runs not only on ideology but also on ledgers, invoices, bribes, and supply chains. Calling out perishables is a way of showing how human necessity becomes a commodity, and how markets reorganize themselves around urgency. It also hints at a darker echo: in regimes of annihilation, people are treated as perishable too, reduced to items on lists and quotas.
The remark is not an economic tutorial so much as an ethical warning. War generates markets that reward speed, access, and moral flexibility, and it does so by accelerating decay elsewhere. A few profit because many lose the time, stability, and safety that make goods and lives durable. Spielberg frames that reality to expose complicity and to give context to redemption: if the system is built to monetize perishability, then choosing to value what that system devalues becomes an act of resistance.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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