Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

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The other issue was that Britain felt it needed to retain the sovereign decision on how much it might devalue sterling in the future to help British industry regain competitiveness in the postwar world. One can see that the Americans were correct in not letting these British concerns overly shape the design of the new IMF; broad international goals could not be subverted by parochial British interests. Churchill in particularly still clung to the hope that Britain would be able to keep and sustain its vast empire after the war—but literally Britain’s own sterling debts to the empire argued for breakup. In Material World, Ed Conway travels the globe - from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe, to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan, to the eerie green pools where lithium originates - to uncover a secret world we rarely see. Revealing the true marvel of these substances, he follows the mind-boggling journeys, miraculous processes and little-known companies that turn the raw materials we all need into products of astonishing complexity. Keynes, of course, came to the summit with unparalleled intellectual credentials. He was, after all, the author of two widely influential economic books: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and The Economic Consequences of the Peace. But Keynes dominant intellectual force at the conference did not stop him from losing many of the crucial political battles to his American counterpart, Harry Dexter White. In doing so we have created a new kind of instability. The more advanced our technology becomes, the more specialised the facilities needed to produce it, such that there now exists a small number of mines, factories and labs on which the whole teetering edifice of modern capitalism depends. Choke points, as they are known in the supply-chain world, are everywhere: each one carries the risk of disruption, inflation and recession. Some are geopolitical in nature: Taiwan, where TSMC creates the world’s semiconductors, considers itself an independent territory, but China, which is years behind on chip-making, disagrees. Goes straight on the ‘must-read’ list . . .Conway is one of the most adroit commentators on economics and business of our time.” ― City AM

Fascinating and forensic in equal measure . . . Reveals the web of mining and manufacturing that underpins the lives of everyone on the planet.” —Mark Miodownik, author of Stuff Matters A stunning book that will transform the way you think about economics and life. Brilliantly written.” —Matthew Syed, author of Rebel Ideas Expansive, erudite, and edifying. A stunning insight into the materials that shaped our history and built the modern world -- Prof. Lewis Dartnell, author of 'BEING HUMAN: How our Biology shaped World History' It is not only in the semiconductor chain that these choke points exist: as Conway explores the significance of salt, he visits a room in Runcorn in which equipment that uses as much electricity as the city of Liverpool dismantles salt molecules to create, among other things, almost all of the hypochlorite used in Britain’s purification systems. Were this one facility to go offline, an engineer tells Conway, the country would have to begin rationing drinking water within a week. Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshopsThe delegates to the summit were 730 representing 44 countries. But among the delegates, two economics bigwigs stood out. They are John Maynard Keynes of Britain and the American Harry Dexter White. A] masterful exploration of the materials that underpin civilization . . . Like Bill Bryson, Conway delights in facts . . . What distinguishes Material World is his access. Although he is very well informed, this is not a remote, academic analysis: he has been to the salt mines beneath the North Sea, the mineral railway of the Atacama Desert, the Chilean town being swallowed by the world’s demand for copper, and as a TV journalist he conveys a vivid sense of these places.”— Will Dunn, The New Statesman The book also offers a sobering look at the consequences of our consumption patterns, which is a topic of increasing concern in today's world. It encourages readers to contemplate the sustainability of our lifestyles and the need for responsible resource management. I am, as you read these very words, working away at a new book. It's going to be called Material World and I am quite honestly fizzing with excitement about it. This is a surprisingly easy read, despite the book having so much factual information, statistics, depressing stories about mining, and pessimistic prognostications! The author has researched extensively and seems to know what he's talking about; and has travelled extensively to the world's various mines, lakes, refineries, ports, experimental labs etc to give vivid first-hand descriptions of the gargantuan scale of human activity that has led us to our present position. Each section of the book covers one of the six materials regarded (by the author) as the most important in this development, starting with sand, and ending with lithium. You get to know about different types of sand, how it is used and transported around the world, including quite a detailed account of the journey quartzite makes from being blasted out of the ground near Santiago de Compostela, Spain, to being purified to 99.99999999% purity silicon at Burghausen in Germany to becoming crystal boules at Portland, Oregon to being cut into wafers at Tainan, Taiwan and then, using 100-million dollar machines made by the Dutch company ASML, actually making the 'chips' used in electronic devices worldwide.

A must-read - something I don't say lightly - to understand the modern world. Perhaps best summed up as "Capitalism, eh? Mental." A highly engaging and important look at the key materials powering our modern world, and how we feed our insatiable appetite for them -- Professor Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics at Harvard University and ex-Chief Economist of the IMFThere are two possible responses to the end of war: one is revenge and the other is to rebuild the economies and societies for everyone’s benefit. With regard to rebuilding, success demands that both victor and vanquished be rebuilt. The job can’t be half done. They are two sides of the same coin. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 went the first way and got it wrong. The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 went the second way and midwifed decades of worldwide economic progress. A side observation is that the Bush administration in the wake of its 2003 Iraq invasion got it all wrong all over again, not even understanding that meaningful economic growth was even relevant to the Middle East when its absence had been a driver of much of the misery in the region for decades. Sharing the below from another review because it was accurate and I felt similarly. High level, this was an interesting story of pre, during, and post-summit international monetary/economics. Monetary systems have evolved over time, from true gold standards, to the pseudo standard of BW (US linked to gold, other currencies linked to US), to true floating currencies. The book didn't go into great detail on this, but perhaps if the US hadn't spent so much in Vietnam (bad decisions) or instituted such significant social programs under Kennedy and Johnson (some good, some bad), the gold standard wouldn't have been problematic for the US, and BW may have survived because Nixon wouldn't have had to close the gold window. History is always interesting. The other nugget detailed at length in the book but not mentioned in the other review is about how the World Bank and IMF were both born out of BW, and how Keynes and White let the charge on their formation and intentions, even if those intentions changed from what those institutions ultimately became. Overall, an interesting read. I may have liked a bit more detail on why the currency/monetary systems needed to change over time, but the personality driven narrative was a good way to keep interest for the reader. I enjoyed listening to the audiobook " The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944: J.M.Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy" for it's historical perspective. I'd heard of Bretton Woods before, but wouldn't have been able to describe it's details to anyone. So learning a little more about the economic conference, it's purpose, the key players, especially British Economist John Maynard Keynes and American Harry Dexter White, was worthwhile. I also hadn't realized that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were founded at Bretton Woods. Ed Conway is a great thinker… Material World is an engrossing study of the basic substances on which we all depend. Anyone who cares about the resources which built our world and where mankind is heading must read this vital book.” —Adam Boulton, Times Radio

Edmund Conway's "Material World" is a compelling and thought-provoking examination of the fundamental raw materials that underpin our modern civilization. In a world where the supply and demand for resources are critical to global economies, this book sheds light on the importance of six key materials: concrete, steel, oil, gold, food, and water. The emergence of the American Dollar as the world's currency was not by accident. Prior to the three-week intense negotiations to set up the IMF and the World Bank to oversee an envisaged postwar world economy in 1944, the U.S. had established itself as the world's economic superpower. The emergence of the IMF and the World Bank which are jointly referred to as Bretton Woods institutions, however, formally finalises the Dollar's status as the preferred international currency of exchange. The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information—what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world”—our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material.

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Shot throughout the book is the issue of the climate and environmental emergency and the urgent question of the survival of our global interconnected civilization, or even human life in general. All being well, the book should be out in mid-2023. In the meantime here is something from when the book deal was announced. Here is something I wrote in the Sunday Times which touches ever so briefly on some of these topics - at least in relation to renewables policy. He also tells us about the global interdependence related to extraction, processing, reprocessing and manufacturing from all this stuff, and the fragility and interconnectedness of supply lines. This is a good companion piece to the more geo-political books by Tim Marshall. A masterful exploration of how materials shape our world more than ever - economically, geopolitically and environmentally -- Diane Coyle CBE, Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge