Our material world, oil price shocks, and financial crisis risks rising
On the verge of a global economic crisis, Britain is badly exposed on energy and defence.
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If you haven’t read Ed Conway’s book Material World from a few years back, can I suggest that in the context of what just happened to oil prices amid the war in the Middle East you do so, immediately? The premise is simple, even if the text is rich in detail. Ed (who is economics editor for SkyNews) is fascinated by the way in which complacent Western societies take so much for granted and take so little interest in how the stuff of our daily lives works and is produced.
It wasn’t always this way. Quite recently, relatively speaking, when the heavy manufacturing side of our economies was more visible, most people had some sense of the means of production. This was an era of coal, steel, shipping, armaments production, heavy bits of metal, and dirty, hard work. The education system in Britain and elsewhere in Europe placed a great emphasis on the physical sciences, and even if this wasn’t part of your schooling you knew someone - perhaps your entire family - who owed their living in some way to manufacturing.
