From Ed Conway's Material World Substack, July 3:
If you're after a genuinely mind-shifting way of looking at the state of the world, consider the amount of metal we have in our lives
Sarah O’Connor has a great op-ed in this morning’s FT saying we need to be spending less time obsessing over conventional measures of economic development like gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and more time thinking about alternatives.
The one she particularly favours is life expectancy - and you can see why. While the US excels in terms of GDP per capita it’s way behind much of the rest of the G7 when it comes to life expectancy. Also unlike GDP, life expectancy statistics don’t have to be adjusted for stuff like exchange rates and purchasing power which is definitely a good thing.
The quest for a useful alternative for GDP has been going on pretty much since GDP was invented, and will continue long into the future. But may I mention one very useful comparative statistics which Sarah doesn’t - and which isn’t, as far as I know, mentioned in any of the mainstream dashboards of development and progress. That metric is steel per capita.
My contention - and yes to some extent I’m talking my book here but hear me out - is that looking at the amount of steel that exists in a given society gives you just as good (in some cases even better) an insight into that country’s level of progress. And happily, using this metric is far more intuitive (and less prone to things like purchasing power parity adjustments) than things like GDP per head.
The key thing to remember here is that there is steel everywhere. Your car has perhaps a tonne of steel in it. Your house is almost certainly held up with steel. The machines in your kitchen are made and encased in steel. When you travel in the subway, you are travelling in a steel tube along steel rails, using steel escalators and elevators to get up and down from the platform.....
....MUCH MORE
