The moral economy of severe scarcity: how considerations of deservingness shape cloth mask distribution practices in the midst of a global health crisis

Ya-Ching Huang and Alya Guseva

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2025, vol. 18, issue 4, 475-495

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented scarcity of face masks and spurred massive home-based cloth mask-making across the U.S. In the context of severe shortages, mask-makers had to consider the idea of deservingness when deciding who should get their masks, and who should bear their cost. Based on the data from a private Facebook group dedicated to sewing and thirty-one in-depth interviews with mask-makers in Massachusetts, we argue that in response to pandemic-induced scarcity, mask-makers created a distinct moral economy with numerous distributional practices ranging from gift-giving and altruistic donations to sales. The choices among these alternatives depended on how mask-makers perceived their own vulnerabilities and deservingness vis-a-vis those of intended mask recipients. The same mask-makers sometimes engaged in multiple types of distributional practices or shifted between them over time, while justifying these choices in moral terms. Thus, the scarcity of masks resulted in a complex moral economy governed by multiple and sometimes contradictory logics of deservingness. Our study adds to a growing body of work that examines how considerations of deservingness factor into allocative decisions, while also providing a rare insight into how extremely scarce life-saving goods are allocated in the context of a global pandemic.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2024.2370279

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