Vaclav Smil, the 80-year-old Czech-Canadian scientist whom Bill Gates cites as his favorite author, rarely disappoints. Smil’s 2022 book, How the World Really Works, is a superb paean to the physical world and its primacy in our lives — warning us that idealistic techies are wrong when they claim that teraflops and petabytes are what matters. As the economist and book reviewer Michael Edesess noted in Advisor Perspectives last year,
If you’re a modern techy, you might say [that]… the four pillars of modern civilization… [are] something like the microchip, the cloud, the internet, and wi-fi. Nope, says Smil. The four pillars of modern civilization are cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia.
“He’s right,” concludes Edesess, as do I. The material world matters. Many of us, dazzled by information technology, underestimate the importance of natural resources, materials science, and good old-fashioned heavy industry. (Without synthetic ammonia, used to make fertilizer, half of us would starve. Good to know.)
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