Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

The striking thing is how rarely the price of such goods ever reflects their importance. Look at the national accounts of any large nation and it’s staggering to consider how much raw materials are reflected in national GDP. Staggering, because it is so minuscule. There is a clear and cogent economic logic to this: statistics like gross domestic product are ultimately measures of how much people will pay for a given item, and 99 times out of 100 raw materials—be they metal or mineral or food—are pretty cheap. But price is not the same thing as value, and occasionally, in extraordinary circumstances such as war—“supply shocks,” economists call them—you end up where the British and Germans ended up in 1915: prepared to trade critical goods with which the better to kill each other.