"Austerity as we know it today emerged after World War I as a method for preventing capitalism's collapse: economists in political positions used policy levers to make all classes of society more invested in private, capitalist production, even when these changes amounted to profound (if also involuntary) personal sacrifices. In the early 1920s, austerity functioned as a powerful counteroffensive to strikes and other forms of social unrest that exploded on an unprecedented scale after the war—a period traditionally, and oddly, overlooked by political and economic scholars who study austerity. The timing of austerity's invention reflects its animating motivations. Of greater importance than austerity's purported economic efficacy was its ability to guard catalyst relations of production during a time of unprecedented social organizing and public agitation from working classes."