The six things that’ll change when I rule the world

But why did the food [in England] stay so bad after refrigerated ships, frozen foods and eventually air-freight deliveries of fresh fish and vegetables had become available? … The answer is surely that by the time it became possible for urban Britons to eat decently, they no longer knew the difference. [Since] your typical Englishman, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn’t demand one. And because consumers didn’t demand good food, they didn’t get it. Even then there were surely some people who would have liked better, just not enough to provide a critical mass.

The history of English food suggests that… a free-market economy can get trapped for an extended period in a bad equilibrium in which good things are not demanded because they have never been supplied, and are not supplied because not enough people demand them.

This is the economist Paul Krugman in an article from the late 1990s called ‘Supply, Demand and English Food’.