Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium are “the physical ingredients without which civilization would grind to a halt,” Sky News economics editor Ed Conway writes in “Material World” before proceeding to explore where they come from and why they’re so important. Construction professionals won’t need much convincing. Conway’s super six are the building blocks of steel, glass, concrete, fuel, electrical wiring, plastic and pretty much every other material in the project lifecycle. As this excerpt shows, “Material World” is more than anything a celebration of the built world:
For all that we are told we live in an increasingly dematerialized world, where ever more value lies in intangible items—apps and networks and online services—the physical world continues to underpin everything else. This is not especially evident when you glance at the balance sheets of our economies, which show that, for instance, four out of every five dollars generated in the U.S. can be traced back to the services sector and an ever-vanishing fraction is attributed to energy, mining and manufacturing. But pretty much everything from social networks to retail to financial services is wholly reliant upon the physical infrastructure that facilitates it and the energy that powers it. Without concrete, copper and fiber optics there would be no data centers, no electricity, no internet. The world, dare I say, would not end if Twitter or Instagram suddenly ceased to exist; if we ran out of steel or natural gas, however, that would be a very different story.
We all know this instinctively. And such principles are self-evident during periods of war, shortage or financial meltdown. Yet as far as all-important statistics like gross domestic product (GDP) are concerned a dollar is a dollar, whether it is spent on Facebook or on food. There is a logic and elegance to this, but it didn’t exactly answer my questions. It is all very well knowing the price of something, but price is not the same thing as importance.
