Between 1970 and 1975, European steel industry built blast furnaces dimensioned for 180 million tons of steel per year. Effective demand peaked at 120 million. The gap is not a forecasting error, it is a constraint imposed on the future.
The blast furnace's fixed costs do not distinguish between existing market and invented market. Below the threshold, bankruptcy. Steel mills cannot wait for demand: they must construct one.
European automobiles of the 1980s consume 40% more steel per vehicle than their Japanese equivalent. This difference reflects neither aesthetic preference nor technical constraint, it absorbs overdimensioned steel capacity. The chassis becomes heavier because the steel mill must run.
The infrastructure does not adapt to the market. It summons it.
Doctrine
What economics calls a market is sometimes the scar of an infrastructure. Supply does not anticipate demand, it prescribes it, then erases the traces of this prescription.
Vecteur ouvert
An army without war generates the conditions of a conflict to justify its deployment. An oversized judicial apparatus produces definable criminality to fill its courts. Does every institution endowed with excess capacity structurally generate the object that justifies it, and if so, at what point does the threat cease to be the cause of the institution to become its product?
