The strongest supporters of social and economic rights contested the flexibility of the ‘standard of living’, arguing that the state should take responsibility for welfare functions that had previously been relegated to the home. The Chinese delegate P. C. Chang and the Soviet delegate Alexei Pavlov fought hardest to ensure that rights to food, clothing, housing and medical care in Article 25 were not subsumed under a right to a standard of living, but were turned into obligations on the state. When the UK delegate objected to these rights, Chang responded that he ‘did not see what possible objection there could be to that phrase when millions of people throughout the world were deprived of food and clothing’.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 196