…paper by expert papyrus makers. In the second century before Christ, king [[Ptolemy the Fifth]] promptly ordered craftsman to stop exporting one of their national products. The reason was as simple and mundane as jealousy. A rivaling library in [[Pergamon]], then in Mysia an now in western Turkey, had gained enough traction to greatly annoy the king, who wanted to protect the fame and power of his Great [[Library of Alexandria]] at all costs. The sudden papyrus shortages did not stop Hellenic king Eumenes the Second from expanding the library in Pergamon. His hunger for literature was much, much bigger. The papyrus plant does not grow well in Mysia, and resorting to clay tablets greatly decreases the capacity of a single book. Instead of accepting defeat, Eumenes’ experts perfected the eastern art of writing on animal skin, a method that until then was only used locally and not highly regarded. Ptolemy’s masterstroke turned out to be a painful mistake. It was called [[parchment]]—pergameno in Latin—as a memory to the city where this technique was perfected, and it was parchment that made sure Ptolemy’s already crumbling Alexandria lost even more political power. Twenty-one centuries later, the…

Limit a thing and people learn to live without it.

Is this the opposite of the [[Jevons paradox]]?