The Wheels of Industry

That chain set a hard ceiling on how much any society could produce, no matter how cleverly it organized labor.

Steam engines and, later, fossil fuels cracked that ceiling wide open. Coal and oil let societies mobilize concentrated stores of ancient solar energy far beyond anything a season's worth of growing fields could ever provide. Factories reorganized labor around the rhythm of machines rather than the rhythm of daylight and seasons; railways collapsed distances that had constrained trade and travel for millennia; and clocks and fixed schedules tightened their grip on daily life in a way agricultural societies, working by sunrise and harvest, had never needed.

Industry reshaped farming itself just as thoroughly as it reshaped factories. Mechanical harvesters, chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and veterinary medication together increased crop and livestock yields dramatically, and food became more abundant for a much larger fraction of humanity than at any earlier point in history. At the same time, Harari is pointed about the cost this imposed on domesticated animals specifically: industrial techniques that increased output per animal also tightened control over their lives, and the suffering built into modern factory farming, in his assessment, is on a scale that dwarfs almost anything that came before it.

His closing observation resists treating this expansion as an uncomplicated triumph: more is not automatically the same thing as better. Industrial growth genuinely extended human lifespans and multiplied the range of available choices, while simultaneously creating new dependencies on fragile global supply chains, new forms of pollution no earlier society had to manage, and layers of bureaucracy needed to coordinate it all. The wheels of industry turn very fast, and they demand a constant, ever-growing supply of fuel to keep turning.

Industrialization also created a problem earlier economies never faced: too many goods and not enough buyers. The answer, Harari argues, was a new ethic, consumerism, which turned buying into a virtue and self-indulgence into a way of life. He describes a division of labour between two commandments: the rich are told to invest, and everyone else is told to buy. Together they keep the capitalist economy growing.