*`=this.author`* > [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Copper > As Robert Friedland, a mercurial mining billionaire puts it, “Based on world ecological and environmental problems, every single solution drives you to copper.” > In a 2021 report American investment bank Goldman Sachs declared that “copper is the new oil.” > If steel provides the skeleton of our world and concrete its flesh then copper is civilisation’s nervous system, the circuitry and cables we never see but couldn’t function without. > The economist William Nordhaus once calculated that it would have taken a nineteenth-century worker nearly a thousand hours to save up to buy enough candles to produce the same amount of light emitted by a 100-watt bulb for a few hours each evening. Running that bulb would cost the modern worker the equivalent of about ten minutes of work. > One of the least-appreciated economic stories of the modern world—again, because it mostly happened out of most people’s view—was the astonishing leap in productivity afforded to manufacturers by electric drive motors. Out went the clunky, inefficient steam engines in factories and in came electric motors. This alone doubled American manufacturing productivity by 1930, and then again by 1960. # Quotes # References