Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

By Ed Conway, 2024, Penguin Books, 512 pages, ISBN 9780753559178

Reviewer: Arno Hantzsche

In our daily lives, how often do we contemplate the materials that the world around us is made of: gadgets, buildings, infrastructure? As economists, how much attention do we pay to raw materials and their extraction? The answer is often very little – too little – as we take for granted the material underpinnings in our services dominated economy.

In the book ‘Material World’, Ed Conway sets out to tackle our ignorance. Through the lens of six fundamental substances – sand, salt, iron, copper, crude oil and lithium – Conway highlights the complexity of current mining and production networks. He takes a journalistic approach in doing so which makes ‘Material World’ a fantastically rich collection of extremely interesting stories and illuminating anecdotes. The reader is taken back far in history when meteors struck the desert compressing sand into glass, to vast mines and salt lakes that, over millennia, collected precious materials, islands on which bird droppings turned to valuable fertiliser, and into hyper clean micro chip factories.

Some key lessons stand out. While small relative to global economic output and often out of people’s mind, contemporary mining and processing of key raw materials is unbelievably large - both in absolute terms and compared to what humankind has dug out of the ground throughout history until very recently. This, amongst other things, comes with considerable environmental and human rights impacts. Most of the products and infrastructure that define modern society depend on materials changing shape through highly complex global supply chains. Key intermediate inputs are often produced by only a small number of super specialised manufacturers worldwide. This system requires there to be as few frictions to trade as possible.

Two main questions are implied but remain open. I discuss them with the author in the podcast.

First, what can we do as economists to better understand supply networks, in particular risks that emanate from the links in supply chains breaking?

The second question relates to economic policy. In a world with increasing trade frictions alongside political and economic powers rolling back globalisation, how can policymakers manage our reliance on the material world?

‘Material World’ provides food for thought on numerous issues around raw material extraction, production networks, globalisation, and net zero. It is a gripping and worthwhile read.

Arno Hantzsche