Rationing was necessary because pricing laws stopped prices from climbing. So demand was higher than supply.
Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile.
This is exactly the approach taken during, and after, the pandemic. It's simpler to let people complain about shortages and prices, and the rich can get whatever they like, as much as they like.
Look at the varied response to "stay home and mask up" - actions which are literally trivial to follow. No sane US govt would attempt "rationing" - the population would simply ignore them.
is that what happened during covid for masks and toilet paper?
Retailers mostly didn't raise prices even when they could have, because it wouldn't have been worth the bad optics.
Some people skirted the rules, bought out store shelves and set up their own at higher prices, but they were pretty thoroughly shunned and some were later taken to court.
we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.
Or maybe we learnt that there’s no common good.
Look at how money flows (and flew right after WW2 and kept flowing) and concentrates at a certain section of pyramid - yes even in developed countries, in fact especially there.
On the other hand, go look into the history of cannon fodder soldiers from colonies in both of the “great” wars of the West and look at what happened to those nations right after and even until now. In fact somewhere told “tough luck, we still feel like keeping you enslaved little more”.
Well that’d happening inside nation's now. Differently - the name could be exploitation or something else.
I think the world has finally had enough of recorded history to learn the exact “common and communal good”!
A century ago, old people would have made sacrifices so that young people could live their lives. Baby boomers are too self absorbed for that, far too selfish. I gave them two months, which is more than I should have. Give an inch and they'll try to take a mile. If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.
From what I remember it was the boomers who were the loudest voices against “shelter in place” during the pandemic. Young people were the ones happily following what ever order the authorities demanded.
Just like arguments to “think of the children” are almost never made by children themselves.
Success was quite the moving target back then and to be cranky that two weeks lead to two years drastically underestimates the difficulty of the problem. Paxlovid, Boosters, knowledge on how to treat AND THE FACT that the ones that were susceptible are DEAD... (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...)
Your take on it is tone deaf and lacking in empathy.
There’s emergent behavior that came out of well known scientific behavior in trying to contain a global phenomenon that we didn’t fully understand when it hit.
But with the 'rona it wasn't presented as such; there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away, that they were suffering, etc.
People’s freedoms were, literally, being taken away. Whether the extent to which freedoms were curtailed was worth the extent to which doing so helped slow the spread of the virus is a subjective question that reasonable people can debate. It’s unfair to dismiss either side of that debate as “propaganda”.
Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. How people did not see beyond this is beyond comprehension. What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
Yes, obviously, but that wasn't the choice. It was probabilistic: sitting around at home vs. some chance of dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.
> What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
Everything? I don't know if I even understand the question. Why do you think people don't like going to prison for example?
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EDIT to explain further:
Let me give a hypothetical extreme example. Now I'm not claiming that the tradeoff in the case of COVID is this lopsided, but I'm just trying to illustrate the framework for thinking about these kinds of question. Imagine you are given two options:
OPTION A: You go to prison for 10 years. Separately, much later, you die at age 83.
OPTION B: You don't go to prison. There's a 99% chance that nothing happens (you stil dies at 83). There's a 1% chance that you die a year earlier, at 82.
In this extreme example, obviously, everyone would pick Option B.
Because of our self-preservation instinct, we don't like to think about the fact that we're inevitably going to die someday, so human moral intuition tends to think of saving a life as having infinite value. But that's not the case: the point of this reductio ad absurdum is that there is no such thing as saving a life, only extending it for some finite amount of time.
If you make V people's lives worse by W% for X time, to extend Y people's lives by Z time, whether it is "worth it" depends on the values of all the variables involved. Reasonable people can debate whether this was the case for the Covid lockdowns, and that is properly a political question, not a scientific one (though science can help inform it).
You wouldn’t have a picnic in the middle of a forest fire, just like you shouldn’t go out into some me-first in the middle of a pandemic. If you did, you’re going suffer consequences and use up resources of those that were caught up by a accident. Both can wait.
This Kantian mindset has to go.
Firstly, there is the issue of hindsight bias. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had limited knowledge about the potential impact of the virus. Our understanding was primarily based on previous outbreaks like SARS and MERS, which had mortality rates as high as 50%, and alarming outbreaks on cruise ships and in apartment complexes which suggested fast spread of the virus through contaminated surfaces as well as through the air. The rapid global spread of the virus, facilitated by increased air travel, compounded these concerns.
Authorities were acutely aware that regions with less advanced healthcare systems would be particularly vulnerable. Even in countries with robust healthcare infrastructures, there was a significant risk that ICU units could be overwhelmed by the influx of severely ill COVID-19 patients requiring extended duration intensive care, with high-flow oxygen therapy often followed by intubation and a prolonged period of induced coma. This situation threatened to reduce the availability of intensive care for other critical cases.
Moreover, there was an initial shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and oxygen supplies, exemplified by the oxygen shortages in India.
Finally, there was a real concern about the emergence of more lethal variants of the virus, particularly given the rapidly increasing number of infections and the vulnerability of immunocompromised individuals as potential incubators for new variants.
All these factors contributed to fears of a devastating societal and economic impact, as seen in the mass migrations of unemployed individuals in India returning to their hometowns and villages to support their families.
In my opinion, these considerations underscore why many measures taken during the pandemic were deemed necessary at the time.
How much runway do you think the average service industry business has?
How much runway do you think the people it employs has?
My favorite Chinese buffet is now an armed forces recruiting center. The adjacent movie theater is unoccupied. I can go on.
I'm not saying it should have been business as usual but to ignore that many parties lost big because of what was done is to be misleading at best.
The US government realized they needed people to staff munitions factories more than they needed fresh recruits.
So the US government abolished voluntary enlistment, drafted new recruits, and told everyone else to get a job.
It did not go over well. People don’t like being told there is a crisis, but they should “stay home and do nothing.” Even if “do nothing” is building tanks.
So the government wisely fudged. The Coast Guard and Merchant Marine began recruiting. Paramilitary agencies were created. Proganda began pushing the importance of the “common man.”
People in the 1940s didn’t like being told to stay home and “mask up” any more than we do.
(Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the least grateful that we collectively saved them from dying at the same rates experienced in most of the world? No.
Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).
> Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).
That's a huge caveat you just snuck in there. I'm totally with you on the first part about largely having gotten through lockdowns, though it wasn't without some damage and suicide and crime rates did go up for example.
We simply don't have data about how many boomer parents in rural areas were saved from dying. For one thing the virus mortality rate was much less than it could have been. For another we never actually ran randomized control studies testing efficacy against death.
Given that you singled out boomers in rural areas, I also assuming that they either didn't get vaccinated or were somehow saved by those younger people in cities that did choose to get the shots. How do you assume that? The vaccines didn't prove out to be very good at preventing transmission, and preventing transmission between populated cities and rural areas is pretty well handled by geography.
I'd be curious to see rates by country by BMI and infection date. There were definitely lessons learned from Italy's early surge that helped other countries in the early days.
Nobody is going to be grateful for something that didn't happen, why would people be grateful for dying less as a population, if they in fact did not die less? Also there were lockdowns all over the world, not just in the US.
For example, the "US death rate" is somewhat meaningless because it encompasses multiple communities which adopted multiple strategies, with multiple levels of diligence, and covers both large concentrated populations and small distributed populations.
US deaths were not evenly spread, so there was certainly some variety of outcome with variety of mitigation.
Overall, the US death rate though is high, which suggests that it's very high in some areas. The correlation between strategy, compliance and outcome will feed researchers for a long time.
So to conclude the complete opposite of what the current data shows, dirty or not, is wrong. To then be upset at it is misguided.
Besides that? I live in an extremely low-density area, it was pretty much business as usual. Restaurants were takeout only, when parks weren't mostly deserted, people spaced themselves out. I remember meeting a couple of my wife's friends in a park and we all just sat in a giant circle. Lockdown was more a minor irritation than anything.
I think a lot about victory gardens since I moved to rural Virginia. Commercial agriculture is big here and some I've spoken with assume that because so much of the land is farmed, that individuals have gardens or know how to grow fruit and vegetables. But this is just not true. There is a huge difference between commercial agriculture and home gardens.
I haven't looked into it enough to determine if people don't know how to garden, rent so can't create a garden, or what. But I'll keep taking about it and maybe someone will do something about it.
Why not two clubs with 1 permanent member each, with one person swinging between them? Why not one club with 2 or 3 people? Why not 3 "clubs"?
Why must it be as you describe?
Fundamentally a Victory garden is small scale soil managment at its very best. Thanks Gabe.
We're the weirdos around here with a small herd of dairy cows, pigs, and chickens along with a small-ish garden for ourselves.
The series itself is a spinoff of the weirdly charming The Victorian Kitchen Garden which reenacted a year of growing in a victorian walled kitchen garden for a great house with a master gardener who learned his trade before WWII. It’s rather soothing, as the New Yorker noted at the start of the pandemic: https://archive.is/iAGgr
(Findable on Dailymotion)
What would you like to happen?
Where I live there are multiple allotments within walking distance from me. These are basically enclosed gardens where people can rent small plots to grow vegetables on. It is a nice hobby. You are outside a lot, have a nice comunal feel to it, you get produce you can feel proud of. But it is not really going to replace grocery stores for anyone. (Nor is it meant to.)
I can imagine scenairos where skills obtained from it would help resiliency and survival. But i can also imagine lot of other scenairos where other hobbies would do the same. Why is it growing small scale vegetable gardens is the skill to concentrate on?
Reminder that a significant portion of the American public opposed participation in WW2 until the US Navy got attacked by Japan and Germany subsequently declared war as well.
(And before anybody says it, refusing to sell oil to Japan so their armies could take over Asia wasn't America declaring war on Japan, nor did it give Japan a legitimate or rational cause to attack America. Japan caused war for themselves by their own imperialist ambitions.)
The development of synthetic gunpowder via the Haber-Bosch process, which fueled Germany through two world wars, but only became available to the allies after WW2, means this particular form of rationing is a thing of the past.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/reluctant...
Nitroglycerin was used as a component of smokeless powder -- propellant for bullets, mortar shells, and artillery.
The Haber-Bosch process was used by all belligerents in World War II. Germany was the only operator of the process during World War I, but it rapidly spread throughout the world between the wars.
For the USA at least. The UK was a different issue, as they were actively being bombed and therefore experienced direct shortages.
The US and other countries also used synthetic Haber process ammonia to make nitric acid and explosives from it during World War II.
Here's a 1946 report about American chemical plants and facilities built to support the war effort:
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001108531
From pages 2 and 3 of the report:
The Government has invested more than $200 million in 10 synthetic ammonia plants, having a combined design capacity of about 800,000 tons of fixed nitrogen per year. These include eight ordnance plants, of which six have been declared surplus, one Defense Plant Corporation plant and one belonging to the Tennessee Valley Authority. Four plants have facilities for producing ammonium nitrate solutions. The nitric acid facilities located in the explosives plants of (2), and the ammonium nitrate graining facilities found in the ammunition loading plants of of (1) have a definite relationship to the ammonia plants.
I did write this!
Also you have no idea if there will be no shortage of gunpowder. Rationing gets applied where the shortages are, and the shortages are many times difficult to anticipate or predict. I get your point and agree it's more likely to be new items, but that's just a gut feeling. In reality shortages can happen on basic products that are easy to manufacture but which a country doesn't manufacture anymore, for example if it's not very profitable.
Nitrate is NO3. It is produced 100% from the air, by a process which is exothermic. So it’s (almost) free, at the margin, or would be if not for the need of pure input gasses.
A Haber-Bosch plant is a factory the size of a city that produces all the fertilizer or explosives you’d ever want, using nothing but air, water, and electricity as input.
We can confidently say that this particular shortage won’t be an issue anymore.
Resources like aluminum, copper, rubber, pharmaceuticals, chips and rare earth elements.