Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization
by Vaclav Smil · 16 Dec 2013 · 396pp · 117,897 words
5 Energy Cost of Materials 4.6 Life-Cycle Assessments 4.7 Recycling Chapter 5: Are We Dematerializing? 5.1 Apparent Dematerializations 5.2 Relative Dematerializations: Specific Weight Reductions 5.3 Consequences of Dematerialization 5.4 Relative Dematerialization in Modern Economies 5.5 Declining Energy Intensities 5.6 Decarbonization and Desulfurization Chapter 6: Material Outlook
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6.1 Natural Resources 6.2 Wasting Less 6.3 New Materials and Dematerialization 6.4 Chances of Fundamental Departures Appendix A: Units and Unit Multiples Units Used in the Text Unit Multiples Submultiples Appendix B: US Material Production
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the author shall be liable for any damages arising herefrom. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Smil, Vaclav. Making the modern world : materials and dematerialization / Vaclav Smil. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-119-94253-5 (pbk.) 1. Waste minimization. 2. Materials. 3. Raw materials. I. Title. TD793.
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extent is it possible to divorce economic growth and improvements in the average standard of living from increased material consumption? In other words, does relative dematerialization (reduced material use per unit of product or performance) lead to absolute decline in demand for materials? In order to answer these questions in
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of design and manufacturing, and (for those materials that can be recycled) the highest practical rates of recycling may not be enough to result in dematerialization rates great enough to negate the rising demand for materials generated by continuing population growth, rising standards of living, and the universal human preference for
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America's material intensities – that is material flows per unit of economic product – and their long-term trends in the next chapter dealing with apparent dematerialization of modern economies, but before leaving this section I will sketch some notable per capita consumption levels. In aggregate terms, the USGS accounts translate to
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provide precisely that kind of information but, as shown in the preceding chapter, such assessments should be used with caution. Similarly, two other measures of dematerialization – declining consumption of goods or lower use of energy per unit of economic product – face a number of intractable data challenges relating to the accounting
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for tracing both historical and recent changes of material consumption in growing economies. I will review, deconstruct, and assess all of these dematerialization measures. 5.1 Apparent Dematerializations When explaining dematerialization, the OED should have used the conversion from blueprints to computer-assisted design (CAD) as a far more consequential example of disappearing
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uses of paper than the replacement of printed stock certificates by electronic versions. That apparent dematerialization eliminated roomfuls of workers at their slanted drafting boards and replaced large numbers of paper blueprints filed in heavy storage steel cabinets with electronic graphics
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CAD, large and small sheets of paper are gone, as are drafting tables, chairs, and utensils, and large steel storage cabinets – but creating and preserving dematerialized blueprints requires extensive infrastructures of modern electronic computing, redundant mass data storage, and communication, ranging from specialized software (written by using other computers) to large
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current and transmitting it along HV and distribution lines to final consumers). Consequently, even in a case that appears to be the perfect example of dematerialization, the reality is nothing but a complex form of material substitution. Diffusion of CAD has reduced wood harvesting, production of pulp, paper, and drafting
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such exercises were much easier to conduct, there is little doubt that their results would have a wide range of outcomes. Microprocessors have helped to dematerialize an increasing assortment of products and services, from books (e-books accessible on computers and on numerous e-readers) and educational materials (on-line
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a system for reservation and e-ticketing by a large international airline. And it would be even trickier to account for the consequences of these dematerializations. Access to on-line reservations for every airline flying a particular route has created more competition, reduced prices, and contributed to increased frequency of
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virtual activities on the overall material requirements of the museum itself: the only certain conclusion is that they will not go away. 5.2 Relative Dematerializations: Specific Weight Reductions Reduction of material inputs in production can be accomplished in four principal ways: by gradual improvements that do not involve new materials
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and bulky vacuum tubes, first by tiny transistors and then by transistors crowded onto silicon chips to make microprocessors. In reality, these processes of relative dematerialization are not mutually exclusive and, as in the just described case of beverage containers, strategies that combine two or more approaches have been common. But
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cans, and both kinds of containers have been progressively redesigned in order to use thinner body sheets and smaller tops. In other cases, relative dematerialization has been a welcome consequence of innovations motivated by other goals. The substitution of tiles by plastic flooring simulating tile design was not driven by
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7 orders of magnitude (40 million times) was accompanied by only a 60-fold increase of total mass. This is an exceptional example of relative dematerialization associated with an enormous operational improvement, and performance/mass gains of an order of magnitude are limited to devices that are functionally dominated by microprocessors
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microchips are not the dominant component of the total design, there has been no even remotely similar mass decline, and in some cases microprocessor-driven dematerialization has been actually accompanied by substantial increases of overall mass. Passenger cars (and other two-axle four-wheel vehicles) are perhaps the best example
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air conditioners) and a still growing range of electronic gadgets ranging from TVs and CD players to game boxes, personal computers, and cellphones. Clearly, relative dematerialization is decidedly one of those “many parallel instances” noted by Jevons as less means more. Progressively lower mass (and hence decreased cost) of individual products
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and an incredible lack of progress during a quarter century that witnessed so many important technical advances. Finally, there has not been any progressive automotive dematerialization in the USA because, until 2004, the average distance driven annually per capita increased, making higher demands on fuel production and distribution, on car
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longer distances had increased the average per capita mass of American vehicles more than 30-fold compared to 1920. An analogical calculation involving the relative dematerialization of prime movers and the massively rising aggregate consumption of materials could be made for the modern airline industry. The thrust-to-weight ratio of
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pioneer of material substitutions using light-weight metals and compounds, a trend that has now culminated in increasing reliance on carbon composites. But this relative dematerialization has not resulted in lighter commercial fleets as their composition shifted toward larger aircraft. This trend is best illustrated by the evolution of Boeing 737
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widespread possession of a widening range of consumer goods and the deliberately engineered rapid obsolescence of many products are two notable factors that militate against dematerialization even in the most affluent societies already suffused with goods, and the net outcome can be determined only by taking a longer look at aggregate
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prosperity of Europe's agricultural sector. Keeping these realities in mind, these statistics show that between 2000 and 2009 resource productivities – reverse indicators of relative dematerialization measured in €/kg and including all fossil fuels – have improved in most EU countries. These productivity gains rose by 17% for the EU-27,
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outsourcing of material-intensive (and often also polluting) industries to foreign low-cost producers has lowered the direct domestic consumption of primary inputs; and relative dematerialization has slowed down the growth of demand. In a few countries with reliable data the overall material inputs have stabilized or have even slightly declined
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currency or, for international comparisons, per constant US$ (that is monies adjusted for inflation). The most obvious advantage of tracing this indirect measure of relative dematerialization is that historical data series for total primary energy supply – TPES, an aggregate of all fuels and primary (that is hydro, nuclear, wind, and
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laudable result of determined efforts to improve energy conversion efficiencies in industries, household, and transportation, and it may be a good proxy indicator of gradual dematerialization. But it can also be the not so laudable outcome of a large-scale deindustrialization that has seen energy-intensive activities (metallurgy, chemical syntheses, heavy
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anticipated rise of hydrogen, the good element, has clearly been proceeding at a slower pace. In any case, what is true about relative and absolute dematerialization of global material consumption is true about relative and absolute decarbonization of the global energy supply: in both cases relative declines have been unmistakable, impressive
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gains that can be impressively demonstrated by long-term tracing of specific energy and material uses, that is by declining energy intensities and by relative dematerialization, as well as by moderation, or even near-elimination, of typical environmental impacts. At the same time, growing populations and improving quality of life
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synthetic fertilizers, polymers (plastics), and metals and nonmetallic elements not previously exploited by pre-industrial societies. In all of these cases there has been no dematerialization in absolute terms, not on the national level for any major economy and not on the global level. These realities lead to many obvious questions
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material and energy savings are nowhere near early exhaustion. These opportunities will be further enhanced by new materials and by the continuing advances in relative dematerialization, topics for a separate section. I will close the book (without normative prescriptions) by raising questions about some fundamental departures from the twentieth-century
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in many countries declining) and aging population could be largely or completely met by a combination of continued lowering of average energy intensities, of relative dematerialization of products and services, and by intensified recycling and reuse. And the greatest contributor to the rising material demand of the past generation will not
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charge-carrying capacity far surpasses that of Si, in the case of InSb by 2 orders of magnitude (Service, 2009). 6.3 New Materials and Dematerialization Prospects for new materials, for better varieties of commonly used commodities and for more efficient (above all less energy-intensive) and less environmentally damaging means
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aggregate material demand before 2050. The environment responds to absolute inputs and throughputs of pollutants resulting from these larger material flows: of course, without relative dematerialization the global and national atmospheric emissions, water pollution, land degradation, inappropriate waste disposal, and toxic burden would be even worse, but the combination of
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continuing relative dematerialization, moderated population growth, and improved environmental protection would have to be seen as a great success if it could just slow down the overall rate
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noticeable declines (akin to the already achieved turnaround in global emissions of SO2 or elimination of lead from common consumer products). During the past generation, dematerialization, defined in terms of declining consumption per GDP of energy or of goods, has generally persisted in both affluent and modernizing countries (Ausubel and Waggoner
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high hopes that people infatuated with e-gadgets have for the transformative powers of electronics in general and for its capacity as an agent of dematerialization in particular. How wrong that conclusion is can be best illustrated by looking at the material consequences of smartphones and other, concurrently diffusing, electronic
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cycle designed to manage stability – can be taken, first in order to limit consumption of materials, and then to begin to move to absolute dematerialization? And does the best path toward this goal lead through collective enforcement or individual enlightenment? Of course, history offers many examples of societies whose rulers
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rise of global temperatures, and even more so their unprecedented decadal jump, would likely lead to measures whose effect would be to accelerate the relative dematerialization (and decarbonization) of the global economy and to reduce overall demand for materials. The other decisive and unpredictable development would be an unprecedented economic crisis
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Geosciences, University of Texas, Austin, TX, http://phe.rockefeller.edu/AustinDecarbonization/AustinDecarbonization.pdf (accessed 22 May 2013). Ausubel, J.H. and Waggoner, P.E. (2008) Dematerialization: variety, caution, and persistence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105: 12774–12779. AWWS (American Water Works Service
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Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, Random House, New York. Herman, R., Ardekani, S.A. and Ausubel, J.H. (1990) Dematerialization. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 37: 333–347. Hermes, M.E. (1996) Enough for One Lifetime: Wallace Carothers, Inventor of Nylon, American Chemical Society and
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cost of sizes Bridges Bronze Calcium Cameras Cans aluminum beverage garbage steel Carbonates Cars energy cost of Ford Model T fuel consumption SUVs US Cellphones dematerialization due to Cells photovoltaic (PV) Cement in China energy cost of Portland Roman Ceramics Charcoal China concrete in history material consumption in metals in
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Clay Coal and decarbonization Coccolithophores Coke Computers personal Concrete in China in construction deterioration of reinforced Consumption direct material (DMC) Copper Cotton Crops Dams Decarbonization Dematerialization consequences of of national economies relative Density energy specific Design computer assisted (CAD) Desulfurization flue gas (FGD) Diatoms Dioxide carbon nitrogen sulfur titanium Electricity
The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron · 14 Jun 2023 · 271pp · 79,355 words
ourselves on the Web? What entity will govern the world of tomorrow on the basis of its control of the physical architecture of our supposedly dematerialised lives? For two years, across four continents, I followed the trail of our emails and the ‘likes’ of our holiday photos: from the steppes of
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one … because they don’t exist. If the French expression is anything to go by, a happy life is a hidden life. If not a dematerialised one. On the other side, we have ‘pioneer’ networks and communities advocating for moderate, responsible, and eco-friendly digital habits.13 Among them is a
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!’, an engineer tells me, almost embarrassed by how obvious this is.11 It is becoming increasingly clear how absurd it is to talk about the ‘dematerialisation’ of our economies when the virtual has such a tremendous physical impact in the real world. More from less But for the billions who subscribe
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wholesale to the discourse of the digital gurus, admitting that our economies and way of life cannot be dematerialised without material is nothing short of heresy. Wasn’t the eruption of the digital realm, which is obviously ‘virtual’, supposed to curb our consumption of
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a population of 1.3 million — the next stop in my investigation, in the summer of 2020 — holds the prize of the most digitalised and ‘dematerialised’ country in the world. Ninety-nine per cent of Estonia’s public services are online. Other than getting married, divorced, or carrying out major banking
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marketing vocabulary to sex up the digital world with the attributes of virtuality. Without giving much thought to the words we use, we talk about ‘dematerialised payments’, and ‘holographic’, ‘virtual’, and ‘augmented reality’ headsets for entertainment. But the most ambiguous of all these is ‘the cloud’ — a supposedly
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dematerialised place where we can store our documents.27 ‘The cloud is ethereal, woolly’, says a specialist in responsible digital activities.28 How do we find
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for aesthetic harmony has contributed to feeding billions of consumers with the illusion that the digital world is harmless for the planet.34 Yet all dematerialised enterprises over the last 5,000 years tell another story. While it may not seem obvious how writing fits in, its invention by the Mesopotamians
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would become the very first tool for dematerialising people themselves. ‘The written word has the characteristic of being accessible on demand and able to be consulted at any point. It is thanks to
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to take place without the physical presence of the object being traded.’36 Then came the bill of exchange, ‘at which point money itself was dematerialised to promote trade, and, from the fifteenth century, would become the elemental tool of international trade and the first major step towards the
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dematerialisation of the world of the economy.’37 Now, with modern technologies, ‘man will task the machine with the ability to think for him, dematerialising in a way his thoughts’ (with the calculator), but also his words (the
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telephone) and his image (visual media).38 Dematerialisation therefore began well before the advent of computer technology, by replacing animal with metal, metal with paper, and paper with digital media. The resource did
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. And given our colossal need for materials to design modern electronic equipment, computerisation just confirms this mechanism. In fact, says a specialist in sustainable IT, ‘Dematerialising means materialising in another way.’39 An era of electronic purges The design of digital interfaces is one thing; their fate at our hands and
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, antennas, routers, and other WiFi terminals currently in service by 100, 1,000, or even 10,000, and you will reach the conclusion that these ‘dematerialised’ technologies not only consume materials, but are quite simply becoming one of the most massive enterprises in materialisation in history. Companies in sectors as diverse
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the sand of an allegedly ethereal world free of all physical shackles, we are evading the reality that will eventually catch up with us: a dematerialised world will always be a more materialistic world. This is where the debate takes an ideological turn. The rebound effects can be equally feared and
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commercial divers await orders from the shore. Also on the beach is Laurent Boudelier, the mayor of the neighbouring town of Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez. ‘Dematerialisation is a physical reality’, he tells me. ‘To send and receive data there needs to be a connection’. This connection is what brings the local
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internet bestows on us this gift of ubiquity, and gives our actions physical consistency both here and thousands of kilometres away. Under the pretext of dematerialising everything, digital technologies materialise twofold what we do. But with the material world comes presence, occupation, power plays, and geopolitics. As we tweet, like, post
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. In the twenty-first century, states will be prepared to go to war so that we can amuse ourselves. Regardless of what the proponents of dematerialisation say, we will continue to be governed by the fundamental particles of matter, just as much as by time’s arrow, the force of gravity
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story of how we learned to prosper using fewer resources — and what happens next, Scribner, 2019. Also listen to McAfee on HBR IdeaCast, Episode 700, Dematerialisation and What It Means for the Economy — and Climate Change, 17 September 2019. 15 ‘An eco-modernist manifesto’, ecomodernism.org, April 2015. It could also
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reading: Lynne Peskoe-Yang, ‘Analysing Every Second of the Classic Dial-Up Modem Sound’, Popular Mechanics, 2 March 2022. 35 Gilles de Chezelles, La Dématérialisation des échanges [‘The dematerialisation of exchanges’], Lavoisier, 2006. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Keynote by Bela Loto, op cit. We should rather talk about ‘scaling
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up matter’ — moving from matter to ‘multi-matter’, instead of ‘dematerialisation’ given this ‘multi-materialisation’ we observe. See Florence Rodhain’s La Nouvelle Religion du numérique [‘The new digital religion’], Libre & Solidaire, 2019. 40 ‘Beijing orders
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. 41 Christopher L. Magee et al., ‘A simple extension of dematerialization theory: Incorporation of technical progress and the rebound effect’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 117, April 2017. The same conclusions were reached in a study on the supposed dematerialisation of 99 world economies: ‘Results show that no countries exhibit a
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dematerialization of economic activity’. From Federico M. Pulselli et al., ‘The world economy in a cube: A more rational structural
Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
by Ed Conway · 15 Jun 2023 · 515pp · 152,128 words
story doesn’t seem to accord with the reality, because this stuff clearly matters. For all that we are told we live in an increasingly dematerialised 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
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sustain ourselves without digging much deeper into the earth and exploding mountains to satisfy our demand for commodities. We will never live in a truly dematerialised world; ever since humans picked up stone and fashioned it into tools we have been exploiting the earth and leaving our mark. But we can
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. As we waft around the world waving devices that connect wirelessly to local or phone networks it’s easy to convince ourselves that we have dematerialised the information age. Yet none of this – video calls, internet searches, email, cloud servers, streaming box sets – would be possible without something very physical indeed
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of Invention: Where Be Dragons’, https://antonhowes.substack.com/p/age-of-invention-where-be-dragons . 2 Vaclav Smil, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization (Wiley, 2013). 3 Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald, Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics (Cambridge University Press, 1978). 4 There is
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., Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867–1914 and Their Lasting Impact (Oxford University Press, 2005) Smil, V., Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization (Wiley, 2013) Smil, V., Natural Gas: Fuel for the 21st Century (Wiley, 2015) Smil, V., Still the Iron Age: Iron and Steel in the Modern
The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters
by Diane Coyle · 15 Apr 2025 · 321pp · 112,477 words
2 1 c on t e n t s Figures and Tables vii Introduction 1 1 “Political Arithmetick” 9 2 Productivity without Products 34 3 Dematerialisation 72 4 (Dis)intermediation 99 5 Free 126 6 Borders 154 7 Value 178 8 Wealth 205 9 A New Framework? 240 References 265 Acknowledgements
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what statistics are needed for economic policy and business decisions. Chapters 3 to 5 then look in detail at measurement challenges due to digitalisation: the dematerialisation of economic value, the disintermediation of activities and business model changes, and the provision of free products. Chapter 6 follows up with a focus on
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of my work since the mid-1990s—almost since the birth of the World Wide Web, beginning with the “weightlessness” of my 1997 book. 3 Dematerialisation “solutions” are everywhere. Once you notice, it seems that every business is in the business of offering solutions rather than old-fashioned goods and services
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, but they w ere ahead of their time. This bundling of solutions around simpler products or s ervices is part of the phenomenon of weightlessness, dematerialisation, described previously. The reason for bundling is that the additional services 72 De m a t e r i a l i s a t
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i o n 73 account for a growing proportion of added value in the economy. This chapter explores the implications of this increasing dematerialisation of economic value for how to understand the changing structure of production, and hence the limitations of current statistics. It covers three phenomena: manufacturers that
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than (or as well as) physical goods, and the shift to a subscription-based production model. These phenomena are the result of the tide of dematerialisation of value sweeping over manufacturing, and the ways manufacturers are responding. The conventional model is a company that does its own design and R
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of the distribution of economic value in production networks and on platforms is needed. Fourth, the products discussed in this chapter are examples of the dematerialisation of economic value and involve intangibles. The economic importance of intangibles is unmissable (Haskel and Westlake 2018, Bontadini et al. 2023), but they pose distinctive
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also provide opportunities for the stronger parties to capture a disproportionate share of the value created. Th ere are both benign and malign aspects of dematerialisation. It is hard to believe that the progressive degradation of consumer experience—the enshittification—will be allowed to continue. 98 Chapter Thr ee In any
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policymakers should appreciate that the manufacturing-services distinction is increasingly meaningless. The question they need to keep in focus is who is benefiting from the dematerialisation of economic value and the resulting changes in production structures. Are national firms (wherever they are classified) able to provide “solutions,” capturing value downstream or
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, 203; price indices and, 181; producer prices and GDP, 195–96; quality- adjusting, 46; significance of problems with, 190–95 degrowth movement, 219–21 dematerialisation, 72–98; cloud computing, 88–92; factoryless goods production, 73, 74, 75, 75, 76–81, 881; services, 93–97; servitisation, 73–74, 75, 75, 81
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narratives and, 26–27; missing activities and innovations, 15–17; social construction of, 25–26; as social products, 220. See also economic measurement economic value: dematerialisation of, 97–98; human elements of, 42; identifying, 85–88; measuring, 263 300 economic welfare, 203–4; comprehensive wealth and, 210–12; evaluation of
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innovations: productivity growth and, 56–59, 57, 70–71; time and, 65, 66–68, 68 producer prices, 195–201 production: alternative structures, 75 (see also dematerialisation); defined, 105–6; time spent in, 123 production boundary, 105–8; digitally intermediated services and, 104–5; increase in activities crossing, 108–12; shifting activities
The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy
by Diane Coyle · 29 Oct 1998 · 49,604 words
and surveys. The economics profession is only just starting to investigate the properties of weightlessness, which makes much conventional economic analysis outdated. The key is dematerialisation. The value in our economy — whatever it is we are willing to pay money for — has less and less physical mass. Whether it is software
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-shirt made in Macau or Morocco, or we will buy a designer shirt for 20 or 50 times the price. One of the characteristics of dematerialised output is that its use by one person does not preclude its use by another. Danny Quah, a London School of Economics professor who has
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ingrained habit of thinking about economic value as something with physical presence, with weight and mass. This is less and less true. Economic value is dematerialising. In 1885 the United Kingdom imported nearly 16 million hundredweights of wheat meal and flour, and 1.1 billion pounds of raw cotton, amongst other
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or making programmes for satellite television. Most of these are high-technology, depending for their existence on modern computer power and telecommunications. They are also dematerialised, or weightless. Weightlessness has in a sense become a commonplace. It is not too surprising to learn that a third of the increase in global
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... It’s postnational and postgeographical’.2 Danny Quah, a professor at the London School of Economics, and one of the pioneers of weightless economics, writes: ‘Dematerialised commodities show no respect for space and geography’.3 This is due to a property that he calls ‘infinite expansibility’. Put simply, this means that
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the use of a dematerialised object by one person does not prevent another from using it. Other people can simultaneously use the word processing code I use as I type
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do so. This kind of activity has no specific location, and no clear points of entry and exit across national boundaries. Danny Quah says: ‘With dematerialisation, the natural marketplace is unbounded’. It is global. Consider the survey of foreign exchange trading conducted every few years by the Bank for International Settlements
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movies like Strange Days and Crash set the dystopian future only a year or two away from now. The economic disruptions due to weightlessness, the dematerialisation of the economy — well, most people could do without it, whatever long-term promise it holds out. The next chapter explains in detail that the
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trades become known. The fact that there are widespread ‘network externalities’, or benefits from using something that grows with the number of users, in the dematerialised industries will reinforce the superstar trend. For example, the Apple Macintosh operating system has always been acknowledged as better than Microsoft’s by industry experts
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makes life much simpler. The externality put the billionaire into Bill. The mitigating factor in the winner-takes-all trend, Danny Quah notes, is that dematerialisation is also helping to reduce the costs and difficulty of becoming a superstar. You do not need to be born with a great bone structure
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taxing spending could prove much harder. Governments might be left relying on very high taxes on things whose physical presence means the taxation possibilities cannot dematerialise — such as duties on petrol, for which you have to take your car to the petrol station, or road tolls, or landfill fees. Or perhaps
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be focused on London, New York and Tokyo? Take the first of these three financial centres. It is a paradox that as its activity has dematerialised, London as a place has become ever more important. Obviously, some things that were done in London have moved thanks to high technology. This includes
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competitors based in other countries entering their market because of cheaper transport costs and lower barriers to trade, although that is part of it. The dematerialisation of an increasing proportion of economic activity means it is not really taking place anywhere. How can a business get to grips with competition from
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their book.) In my language, it is the increasing weightlessness of the economy that is taking the superstar phenomenon into ever wider areas of activity. Dematerialisation has two effects. It decreases the cost of delivering a service or product and it increases the market for the service. If I am a
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down of boundaries. The value in what the financial markets do lies not just in financing tangible trade and direct investment flows, but increasingly in dematerialised functions such as hedging risk. Moreover, governments cannot reverse technological change Globalism and Globaloney 173 in the way they might be able to rebuild cross
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between computers. The technology for private currencies is already in place. Their emergence waits only for our monetary habits to change. The biggest challenge The dematerialisation of the economy means the structure of trade is changing so that trade rules will have to adapt. It also has the potential to transform
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what we understand as money. The one thing that will never dematerialise is people. People will be the biggest challenge to the existing international economic order. The economic pressures on the world’s poorest populations, which have
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people, not places where people go to work and produce economic value’.12 He argues that the dematerialisation of economic output, with the irrelevance of transportation costs that implies, means: ‘The natural marketplace for dematerialised objects is essentially unbounded’.13 He reckons that loosens the ties of geography. Yet the fact that
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, the benefit that users of a product derive the more users there are, and infinite expansibility, the property that allows one person to use a dematerialised commodity without it detracting from anybody else’s use of the same thing. It is feasible for one company to supply an entire global market
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of the fundamental economic trend towards weightlessness. The two transformations, political and economic, go hand in hand of course. As the last chapter argued, the dematerialisation of value means the economically efficient scale of government has changed, and it has become increasingly clear that national governments cannot manage the national economy
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minimal or catastrophic the results will be. In the economic sphere, the course of development has taken us down a path of increasingly weightless and dematerialised production. This means that for the first time there is no economy ‘out there’ either, no fixed framework of activity within which people have a
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offers hope that future growth in the rich part of the world will not put the same pressures on the environment. The great thing about dematerialised production is that it does not use physical resources. The natural resource cost of financial services is extremely low compared to steel mills; they use
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123-4, 126-31, 14041, 182, 221 currency 167, 169-70, 177, 188, 189-90 David, P. 197 decentralisation 207-10, see also redesigning government dematerialisation xiv-xv, 3, 4, 13, 115 dependency/poverty trap 85-6, 123, 135-7, 140, 230 Desai, M. 90 Disney, R. 157 Disraeli, B. 155
The Future of Money
by Bernard Lietaer · 28 Apr 2013
of the metal currency. The next step in the disappearing act is already well under way. The vast majority of our paper money has further dematerialized into binary bits in computers belonging to our bankers, brokers, or other financial institutions, and there is serious talk that all of it may soon
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scarce. What are the consequences of these characteristics for a society that uses information as its primary economic resource? First, such an economy is literally dematerialising. In 1996, Alan Greenspan noted: 'The US output today, if measured in tons, is the same as one hundred years ago, yet the GDP?" has
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, design, sales, advertising, most of which could be 'delocated' anywhere in the world and transmitted via highspeed data lines. Along with the other factors, this dematerialization process makes it much harder for governments or regulatory agencies to measure, tax or regulate what is going on. For instance, the French government will
Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel · 12 Aug 2020 · 286pp · 87,168 words
decades since. In fact, exactly the opposite has happened. Since 2000, the growth of material use has outpaced the growth of GDP. Instead of gradually dematerialising, the global economy has been rematerialising. Source: materialflows.net, World Bank Perhaps most disturbingly of all, this trend shows no signs of slowing down. On
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response, however. They insist that all we need to do is ‘decouple’ GDP growth from resource use. There’s no reason we can’t just dematerialise economic activity, and keep growing GDP even as resource use falls back down to sustainable levels. They admit, of course, that resource use has historically
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couple of decades. This data was picked up by journalists who were quick to announce that rich countries had reached ‘peak stuff’ and were now ‘dematerialising’ – proof that we can keep growing GDP for ever without having to worry about ecological impact. But ecologists have long rejected these claims. The problem
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and for all that they are right. Indeed, putting hard limits on resource use and waste will help incentivise the transition, spurring the shift toward dematerialised GDP growth. But every time we propose this policy to green growthers, they wriggle away. Indeed, to my knowledge, not a single proponent of green
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aggregate, the total mass of material use is tightly coupled to ecological impact, with a correlation factor of 0.73. See E. Voet et al., ‘Dematerialisation: not just a matter of weight,’ Journal of Industrial Ecology, 8(4), 2004, pp. 121–137. 16 The relationship between GDP and energy is not
Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann · 1 Dec 2015 · 1,213pp · 376,284 words
and undermined folk ideas which, for example, had invested trees and other objects with the power of speech and action. The real question is whether dematerialization captures the overall thrust of modernity and whether it led to a distinctly carefree attitude to things in the West. After all, that the Chinese
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his brilliant study of the changing image of abundance in modern America, T. J. Jackson Lears presents this period as a culminating stage in the ‘dematerializing of desire’. Advertisers nurtured a restless self. There was always another new product around the corner promising greater self-fulfilment. New stuff was scarcely unpacked
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than an account of how people actually engaged with the material world. If we are concerned with the latter, another story emerges. Rather than ongoing dematerialization, the 1890s–1920s witnessed a renaissance of the material self. The enlightenment story continued, albeit in a different key. The language of the passions, of
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a Plexiglass cylinder filled with the empty cigarette packs, cosmetic bottles and other packaging discarded by his Pop-artist friend. Conceptual artists set out to dematerialize art by placing concept over object. ‘The world is full of objects, more or less interesting,’ the American Douglas Huebner famously said in 1969. ‘I
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were still devouring ever more. Material productivity was outpaced by a faster metabolism. There have been only three short periods when the world enjoyed actual dematerialization: the deep recession of 1929–32, the end of the Second World War, and 1991–2, when the Soviet Union collapsed. None of these are
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murkier, as illustrated by the case of the United Kingdom. From the point of view of national accounts, the UK emerges as a posterboy of dematerialization. The country successfully ‘decoupled’ growth from material input, to use the fashionable phrase. The material base of the economy is the Total Material Requirement (TMR
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a blip. Material intensity has failed to reverse the major increase in Britain’s material bulk in the 1970s–’90s. Most worryingly, the picture of dematerialization might be a statistical illusion. At home, the balance has shifted from industry to services. Here is a major cause for the rise in material
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loath to switch from territorial accounts to consumption-based emission accounts. The only region in the world that can claim to have accomplished all-round dematerialization is Central Asia, which went into freefall when the Soviet Union broke up. In the 1970s, campaigners for environmental justice in the United States added
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. According to a number of recent commentators, we are already living in the twilight years of the empire of things. They announce the coming of ‘dematerialization’ and ‘post-consumerism’, marked by a growing interest in experiences, emotions and services, a revival of repairing, and the spread of leasing initiatives and sharing
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and will become widespread enough to tackle the scale of the empire of things and its material legacy. The main evidence marshalled in support of dematerialization is the growing significance of services in the world economy. In value-added terms, services contributed 30 per cent to world trade in 1980. By
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up 80 per cent of world exports in 2008 (83 per cent in 2000). The latest available figures for merchandise trade offer little evidence of dematerialization. In the fifteen years between 1998 and 2013, world merchandise trade (which does not include services) doubled, in spite of the significant dip of the
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oil, coal and aluminium all the way to the cement needed to build not only apartments but the shops and service centres of our allegedly ‘dematerialized’ lifestyles. In 2010, the latest available data, total material consumption in the OECD was 45 gigatonnes, the equivalent of 100kg per person per day.8
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‘smart’ technologies would by 2020 be able to save over five times their own ecological footprint by facilitating more efficient transport and buildings and by dematerializing the way we live, as things will give way to electronic and virtual alternatives.16 What such prognoses tend to ignore is what people do
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Pogue, ‘Should You Upgrade Your Phone Every Year?’, in: Scientific American, 20 Aug. 2013. 89. For these opposite dynamics, see Valerie M. Thomas, ‘Demand and Dematerialization Impacts of Second-hand Markets’, Journal of Industrial Ecology 7, no. 2, 2003: 65–76. 90. The data from the German 2001–2 time budget
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; golden mean 390 Armstrong, Louis 352 arson 300, 321–2 art 30, 52, 463; conceptual 636; creative arts 465, 496 see also music; Dada 636; dematerialized 636; Japanese arts and self-cultivation 472; paintings see paintings/pictures; ‘readymade’ 636–7; and waste 636–7 Arthashastra 357 artisans 41, 42, 44, 47
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–7; banking network in South Asia 367; citizenship 357; company services 531, 534; consumer movements 392–3, 394–8, 552; crisis of 1989 371, 372; dematerialization 669; football 617; luxury brands 439; middle class in 140, 142, 143, 355–6, 373–5, 380, 392, 519; migration within 356, 595; modernity 358
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–5; credit 409, 410, 412, 414, 415, 416, 423, 424, 426, 429, 430, 431; defence spending 542; demand for British goods 126, 140, 170–71; dematerialization 668; domestic energy consumption 672, 674; domestic interior at centre stage 108; elderly people 506, 507, 509–11, 512; ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis of British working class
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; trade spurred by 92; and the trading of leisure for income 6–7; Western demand for exotic goods 10, 78–93 see also exotic goods dematerialization 95–6, 230–31, 668–9, 682–3, 686 democracy/democratization 159–60; advertising pitching democratic consumers against dictatorial politicians 287–8; American corporations styled
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lust for luxury 677; creation of wants 8, 302, 365, 677; critical reflection and the nourishment of 288–9; defended as engine of growth 278; dematerialization of desire 230–31; encouraged by cheap public goods 331; eroding customs 153; fuelled by easy credit 362; gender and 197; and industriousness 151; and
Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson · 8 Dec 2016 · 573pp · 115,489 words
continually growing incomes for upwards of nine billion people. And the critical question is not whether the complete decarbonisation of our energy systems or the dematerialisation of our consumption patterns is technically feasible, but whether it is possible in our kind of society. The analysis in this chapter suggests that it
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oil or gas means fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Thinking in terms of services reveals new ways to decarbonise or dematerialise human activities. When the value proposition of enterprise revolves around the delivery of dematerialised services rather than the manufacture of material products, there is a huge potential to rethink the relationship between
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’. Leisure and recreation, for example, is one of the fastest-growing sectors in modern economies and ought in principle to be a prime candidate for dematerialisation. In practice, the way we spend our leisure time can be responsible for as much as 25 per cent of our carbon footprint.6 Yet
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that there are different versions of capitalism even within the advanced economies. But none of them has so far achieved significant progress in relation to ‘dematerialised services’. 6 When accounted for using a consumption-based perspective: see Druckman and Jackson (2008, 2009), Jackson et al. (2007), Tukker et al. (2007). 7
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161–3, 177 demand 104, 113–16, 166–7; post-financial crisis 44–5; post-growth economy 162, 164, 166–9, 171–2, 174–5 dematerialisation 102, 143 democratisation, and wellbeing 59 deposit guarantees 35 deregulation 27, 34, 36, 196 desire, role in consumer behaviour 68, 69, 70, 114 destructive materialism
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly · 6 Jun 2016 · 371pp · 108,317 words
stage. So much more of our routines and infrastructure remains to be liquefied, but liquefied and streamed they will be. The steady titanic tilt toward dematerialization and decentralization means that further flows are inevitable. It seems a stretch right now that the most solid and fixed apparatus in our manufactured environment
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ways that it is driving the frontiers of the economy. Five deep technological trends accelerate this long-term move toward accessing and away from ownership. Dematerialization The trend in the past 30 years has been to make better stuff using fewer materials. A classic example is the beer can, whose basic
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the new cans don’t need a beer can opener. More benefits for just 20 percent of the material. That’s called dematerialization. On average most modern products have undergone dematerialization. Since the 1970s, the weight of the average automobile has fallen by 25 percent. Appliances tend to weigh less per function
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. Of course, communication technology shows the clearest dematerialization. Huge PC monitors shrunk to thin flat screens (but the width of our TVs expanded!), while clunky phones on the table become pocketable. Sometimes our
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the value of GDP per kilogram of inputs rose from $1.64 in 1977 to $3.58 in 2000—a doubling of dematerialization in 23 years. Digital technology accelerates dematerialization by hastening the migration from products to services. The liquid nature of services means they don’t have to be bound to
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materials. But dematerialization is not just about digital goods. The reason even solid physical goods—like a soda can—can deliver more benefits while inhabiting less material is
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great attraction. The ability and right to improve, personalize, or appropriate what is shared will be a key question in the next iteration of platforms. Dematerialization and decentralization and massive communication all lead to more platforms. Platforms are factories for services; services favor access over ownership. Clouds The movies, music, books
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them? All these questions apply not only to clouds and meshes but to all decentralized systems. • • • In the coming 30 years the tendency toward the dematerialized, the decentralized, the simultaneous, the platform enabled, and the cloud will continue unabated. As long as the costs of communications and computation drop due to
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no matter where in the world (whether the United States, China, or Timbuktu) they take place. The underlying mathematics and physics remain. As we increase dematerialization, decentralization, simultaneity, platforms, and the cloud—as we increase all those at once, access will continue to displace ownership. For most things in daily life
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weight: “Study Finds Aluminum Cans the Sustainable Package of Choice,” Can Manufacturers Institute, May 20, 2015. weight of the average automobile has fallen: Ronald Bailey, “Dematerializing the Economy,” Reason.com, September 5, 2001. In 1930 it took only one kilogram: Sylvia Gierlinger and Fridolin Krausmann, “The Physical Economy of the United
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Ecology 16, no. 3 (2012): 365–77, Figure 4a. from $1.64 in 1977 to $3.58 in 2000: Figures adjusted for inflation. Ronald Bailey, “Dematerializing the Economy,” Reason.com, September 5, 2001. “Software eats everything”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011. Toffler
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your e-reader. accelerometers, 221 accessing and accessibility, 109–33 and clouds, 125–31 and communications, 125 and decentralization, 118–21, 125, 129–31 and dematerialization, 110–14, 125 and emergence of the “holos,” 293–94 as generative quality, 70–71 ownership vs., 70–71 and platform synergy, 122–25 and
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–44, 151–52, 270–71 commercials, 197. See also advertising commodity attention, 177–79 commodity prices, 189 communications and decentralization, 118–19, 129–31 and dematerialization, 110–11 and free markets, 146 inevitable aspects of, 3 oral communication, 204 and platforms, 125 complexity and digital storage capacity, 265–66 computers, 128
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and top-down vs. bottom-up management, 153 Deep Blue, 41 deep-learning algorithms, 40 DeepMind, 32, 37, 40 deep reinforcement machine learning, 32–33 dematerialization, 110–14, 125, 131 diagnoses and diagnostic technology, 31–32, 239, 243–44 diaries and lifelogging, 248–49 Dick, Philip K., 255 diet tracking, 238
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