Politicians have long told the poor that

they’re not doing poverty right

Historical tales of scarcity, from toilet paper to men

May 23rd 2022

Share
By Matthew Sweet

Scarcity 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. At the same time in Hollywood, a shortage of film
stock produced a new, dark, spare form of cinema that the French called film noir. In
Leningrad they would have boiled the celluloid down for soup.

When a governor of the Bank of England talks about “apocalyptic” price rises, we hope that
this is the hyperbole of privilege; that he’s imagining outbreaks of frugality, not
cannibalism. But then we may think of record fuel bills, the many parents in Britain
skipping meals, all those Ukrainian wheat fields sown with Russian landmines, and
conclude that this crisis could be the biggest economic challenge of our lifetimes.

In tough times, how do we know whether what we have is enough? Officials, even well-
meaning ones, have a history of tin-eared pronouncements in this area, which often
amount to telling the poor that they’re not doing poverty right. In 1931, when the Means
Test was introduced to assess who should be eligible for state unemployment benefit, the
British press rang with what George Orwell called “a disgusting public wrangle about the
minimum weekly sum on which a human being could keep alive”. Someone else, though,
had already worked out a formula.

Alexander Konüs, a Russian mathematician, remains an obscure figure. His delicate lines of
algebra, developed in the 1920s from the principles of “Das Kapital”, didn’t make it into an
English-language journal until 1939. But his cost-of-living calculations are the foundation
of the figures produced both by the Office for National Statistics ( ons) in Britain and
the us Bureau of Labour Statistics that tell us how much income a person requires to get by.

Perhaps this explains why these estimates now seem such a blunt instrument. Jack Monroe,
an anti-poverty campaigner, calculated in January that British supermarkets had quietly
raised the prices of their cheapest staples by amounts resembling inter-war hyperinflation
(344% on rice in a year). Bad headlines spurred stores to reverse course and the ons to
announce an overhaul of its methodology. “We won’t just include one apple in a shop,
picked to be representative based on shelf space and market intelligence,” explained its
spokesperson, “but how much every apple costs, and how many of each type were
purchased, in many more shops in every area of the country.” These are the granular
details of economic life in our new inflationary environment – doomed to be submerged,
now, beneath a double-digit tide of inflation.

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. Most of us have assumed that we
inhabit a world of finite resources, from Thomas Malthus to the tragedy of the commons to
“The Limits of Growth”, a publication of the Club of Rome (a group of businesspeople and
academics) in 1972, which predicted an imminent “sudden and uncontrollable decline in
both population and industrial capacity”.

That prediction proved wide of the mark. A lively current in contemporary futurology asks
us to conceive a 22nd century in which every home has a solar-powered nanotechnological
production unit that weaves raw atoms into any object we desire. This, suggests James
Burke, a British historian of science, could be the biggest shift our species has experienced
since the birth of agriculture. In such a post-scarcity world, the cost of living would be
reduced to almost zero – along with our reasons to go to work.

Marx never envisaged it. But the movies did. In “Star Trek”, Captain Picard simply says the
word and the replicator in his cabin assembles random molecules into a cup of hot Earl
Grey tea. Yet, you may recall, he remains the captain of “Enterprise”.

Flour power Our daily bread

Flour, water and yeast. The difference between peace and strife. If we had a time machine
we could take a tour and watch one tip into the other. Observe, perhaps, the Women’s
March on Versailles of 1789, when between 6,000 and 10,000 protesters went to inform
Louis XVI about the price of a loaf. Or the moment during the Richmond bread riots of 1863
when the Confederate president Jefferson Davis flipped open his pocket watch and told a
starving crowd (women, again) that they had five minutes to go back home. (They did, at
gunpoint.) Or the Poznan riots of June 1956, in which 30,000 Poles demanded bread and
freedom, and received bullets in return.

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” (1963), 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. A sudden lurch upwards in price; a sudden scarcity,
possibly caused by a government that thought exports more valuable than the comfortable
survival of its citizens, might be objectionable because it disrupted a well-established
status quo. It might also suggest that the status quo should be overturned. This, wrote
Thompson, was “the moral economy of the poor”.

The eyes of the world are now fixed upon a nation the tsars regarded as the breadbasket of
Russia. Their successor does not mention this in his calculations: for Vladimir Putin,
Ukraine is both a place of unacceptable tyranny and unacceptable liberty, a contradiction
that reveals the insincerity of his position. But the war is already telling the story. Ukraine
and Russia account for nearly 30% of the global wheat trade and are major suppliers to
Asia and north Africa. That supply has now halted, causing the price of wheat traded in
Chicago – the international benchmark – to leap by more than 60%. That places economies
under stress. Moral ones, as well as monetary.
Grand designs The 20th-century piano
The first generation of Freudians were keen to punish their 19th-century forebears – to the
extent of propagating the myth that the Victorians covered their piano legs for decency’s
sake. But Freud might offer us a useful reading of a related phenomenon: the piano-
smashing competition.

These contests, a common sight at rag weeks and village fêtes in Britain from the 1950s to
the 1980s, required little skill. You just needed a strong hammer arm and sufficient alacrity
to avoid the flying springs and splinters. But they revealed an important cultural and
economic turn: the evolution of the upright piano from an expensive object of desire to the
symbol of a Victorian past that required exorcism.

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”.
These were luxury items. Even Collard & Collard’s “piano for the people” had a 30-guinea
price tag. In the following two decades, however, the cost of a new instrument collapsed. In
1887, D’Almaine & Co announced a 12-guinea model available on “easy terms”. At the peak
of production in the 1920s, Camden Town in London was home to around 100 small-scale
factories and workshops, employing 6,000 people. (America’s centre of production was in
New York.)

A piano, particularly a cheap one of this period, has a finite musical life. But it is a difficult
object to dump. In the past four decades, usurped by electronic rivals, sales of new models
in Britain have fallen from 30,000 a year to 5,000. But those old carcasses remain,
unscrappable, unsaleable, gathering dust on Gumtree and eBay, free to anyone willing to
carry them away – with nobody even to delight in their destruction.

Equality knocks Women in China

You could call it a boast: in 2006, the Chinese government estimated that its one-child
policy had prevented 400m births. Wrong in more ways than one, it seems. In 1979, when
the policy was instituted, China’s birth rate was already falling. In 1960, the average
Chinese mother had 6.1 children. By 1970 that figure had already shrunk to 4.7; by 1980 it
was 2.7. The historical low of 1.5 reached in the year 2000 was consistent with trends
already in place, which were probably caused by the usual forces that pull down birth
rates: increased prosperity and education. If the policy had never been pursued, the
Chinese population might be roughly the same size as it is today. Except in one important
respect: there would be more women.

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.

This is a story with three acts, all of them tragedies. At first, Western demographers tried to
calculate the number of girls “missing” from China, sometimes coming up with a figure of
30m-60m. But in 2016, a study by the University of Kansas and Shaanxi Normal University
suggested that, despite forced abortions and infanticide, Chinese mothers might have
managed to keep 25m baby girls off the books. (The researchers developed their theory
after interviewing a villager who referred to his younger daughter as “the non-existent
one”.) More recent work has revised this figure down again, to 7m or thereabouts. Leaving
us with what? Cascades of melancholy numbers charting the effects of authoritarian
government, parental desire, social and economic survival strategies.
A few good men The burrnesha of Albania
There is no nation in the world where female births outnumber male. In China it’s raining
men. What’s the weather like in the Balkans? Pretty heavy. Albania is one of the 12
countries where the demographic bias towards boys can’t be explained by biology. That
chilling fact obscures a more unusual phenomenon. In Albania’s mountainous north, a
practice survives that exerts a small pressure in the other direction: the business of
becoming a burrnesha, a woman who takes an oath of virginity and lives the social life of a
man, with all the privileges and responsibilities afforded by an intensely patriarchal
society.
The archaic tradition was thought to have been extinguished by Albania’s isolationist
dictator Enver Hoxha (along with the political opposition and most of the intelligentsia).
But the practice survived, and by some accounts, underwent a revival in the 1990s,
possibly as a response to the 11,000 men who died in the Kosovan war.

Anthropologists disagree on how many burrnesha exist today – estimates vary from 40 to
200. The mechanism used to create them is available in many Albanian bookstores: the
“Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit”, a remarkably tenacious body of customary laws thought to date
from the 15th century that covers, most notoriously, the etiquette of blood feuding, and,
more obscurely, whether you can enter another person’s land to retrieve your escaped bee
colony.

Some girls are assigned burrnesha status at birth by parents without male children, others
adopt it in order to retain their economic independence or escape an undesirable arranged
marriage. Under Albania’s customary laws, women have no property rights. “A woman is a
sack”, decrees Article 29, “made to endure as long as she lives in her husband’s house.”
Becoming a burrnesha offers an escape from this dehumanisation without challenging the
rules of the culture. Perhaps it’s more of a challenge to prevailing Western views on the
nature of gender. For the burrnesha, maleness is less an expression of an individual’s
interior life, more a socio-economic role subject to the rules of supply and demand.
On a roll The covid-era toilet-paper crisis
It was the sign that plague was on its way. Customers staggered out of supermarkets with
rolls of Andrex under their arms, as if they thought diarrhoea was the principal symptom of
covid-19. Stores imposed four-pack buying limits, shelves once stacked with bales of soft
three-ply paper were empty, and stories emerged of knives pulled in arguments between
desperate paper-hunters.

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. The result? In Sydney #toiletpapergate and
#toiletpapercrisis were the hashtags of early March 2020 and rolls became the star prizes
on radio phone-ins.

A case from late December 1973 might help to explain the phenomenon. Johnny Carson, an
American chat-show host, made a gag about an “acute shortage” of toilet paper. “We gotta
quit writing on it,” he told his 20m viewers, from somewhere behind his psychedelic brown
kipper tie, before spinning a story about a woman who comes home from the grocery store
to meet a friend who says: “Forget the coffee, just give me the shopping bag.” Almost
immediately, supermarkets reported customers bringing toilet rolls to the cashier, ten at a
time. Some stores increased prices to reduce demand. The strategy failed. From his desk
at cbs News, Walter Cronkite urged calm.

Carson’s gag had a source: a press release by Harold Froehlich, a Republican congressman
from the eighth district of Wisconsin, who, in that gloomy year of the fuel crisis, speculated
that local pulp-paper producers might be avoiding federal taxes by exporting a higher
proportion of their product overseas. His fears came to nothing. Why were they so
seductive? Perhaps because toilet paper is a marker of modern capitalist comfort and
convenience. (The ussr didn’t get its first toilet-paper factory until 1969.) And, in the case of
recent panics, maybe it stirred something in the cultural memory: those 1980s “Protect and
Survive” leaflets, for instance, that told us to take toilet paper into the nuclear shelter, along
with tinned potatoes and strong disinfectant. Only two rolls were illustrated.

Flying pigs How to feed China’s demand for pork

Before she became Britain’s foreign secretary, the most popular memes about Liz Truss
were drawn from her speech at the Conservative Party conference in 2014, delivered with
attitude. “In December I’ll be in Beijing”, she grinned, “opening up new pork markets!” The
audience clapped uncertainly, possibly to encourage her to stop waggling her shoulders
and move on to her next point.
But maybe, rather than drugs or a hostage situation, Truss was giddy with a vision of the
future. China’s appetite for pork is immense. The average Chinese person eats about 30kg
of pork a year – which, given the size of its population, amounts to roughly half the world’s
output. At the beginning of the last decade, 99% of this meat came from domestic sources,
mostly in small backyard farms. But from August 2018, African swine fever wiped out
roughly half of China’s pig population, some 200m animals. That sucked $14.5bn from the
domestic economy and the global price of pork rose sharply – by 125% between July and
November 2019 – and China’s imports surged, along with its inflation rate and Xi Jinping’s
desire to regain porcine self-sufficiency. (His current ambition is 95% by 2025.)

Britain is playing its part in that plan. In April 2021, over 1,000 pigs were dispatched on a
7,000-mile journey from Bridge House Farm in Northamptonshire to Sichuan province by
Boeing 747. Today, the Chinese herd is almost rebuilt. Meat imports have fallen by a third
since last year. This self-reliance is also reflected in output figures for corn and wheat,
which may protect it from the worst economic effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine –
the biggest problem now on Truss’s plate.

Miner complications The importance of lithium

In late November 2021 the Royal Court Theatre in London held the premiere of a play for
which it had been apologising for weeks and is still apologising now. “Rare Earth Mettle”
was about a greedy, grasping billionaire plotting to take control of the lithium deposits of
Bolivia. The character satirised Elon Musk (the lithium was needed for his new generation
of electric cars), but neither the theatre nor the playwright, Al Smith, realised that his name
– Hershel Fink – sounded distinctly Jewish. Making him “Henry Finn” in time for opening
night did not undo the damage. The theatre’s report into the affair came out this March: its
staff are to receive “specialist training on antisemitism”.

One aspect of the kerfuffle attracted a lot less comment. In a Guardian interview Al Smith
said he was inspired to write his play after reading about the Lithium Triangle, a region of
the Andes that is thought to hold more than half of the planet’s reserves of the element. It’s
increasingly important in a world with aspirations to reduce carbon emissions. Lithium is
the lightest metal in the periodic table, and a perfect medium to carry the energy required
by our phones, laptops and next-generation vehicles. In 2021 the total demand for lithium
was 330,000 tonnes. This year demand is predicted to rise by more than 40%.

But what was Smith reading? Perhaps some of the rather fanciful articles that suggested
that a lithium-hungry Musk might have been mixed up in the sudden resignation in
November 2019 of Bolivia’s socialist President Evo Morales. This is a conspiracy theory.
Morales’s departure from power was triggered by accusations of electoral fraud. That,
however, hasn’t stopped the former president polishing up his narrative about a “lithium
coup” – a story that acquired more shine in July 202o when Musk himself tweeted about it.
“We will coup whoever we want!” wrote the boss of Tesla. “Deal with it.” Probably one of
his characteristically tin-eared jokes, but taken as a confession by commentators already
signed up to the theory. The story now has an energy that seems impossible to dissipate.

Matthew Sweet is a regular contributor to 1843 magazine, and a writer and broadcaster in
London

IMAGES: GETTY, HIROJI KUBOTA/MAGNUM PHOTOS, THOMAS DWORZAK/MAGNUM

PHOTOS, BRIDGEMAN IMAGES, DOUGIE WALLACE

Share
Reuse this content

More from 1843 magazine

With her PlayStation and her pet rat: how one member of Pussy Riot fled Russia
Lusya Shtein describes her daring escape to Lithuania

The lithium curse: why Bolivia has failed to turn minerals into gold

Bolivians thought green energy would make them richer. Now locals worry they’ll be
exploited again
Collaborators, demonstrators, soldiers, spies: life under Russian occupation

In Kherson, Ukrainians find it hard to judge the acceptable limits of resistance and co-
operation

 Subscribe
 Group subscriptions
 Reuse our content
 The Trust Project
 Help and contact us

Keep updated







Published since September 1843 to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence,
which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”

The Economist
 About
  Advertise
 Press centre
 Store

The Economist Group

 The Economist Group
 Economist Intelligence
 Economist Impact
 Economist Events
 Working Here
 Economist Education Courses
 Which MBA?
 Executive Jobs
 Executive Education Navigator
 Terms of Use
 Privacy
 Cookie Policy
 Manage Cookies
 Accessibility
 Modern Slavery Statement
 Do Not Sell My Personal Information

Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2022. All rights reserved.