Breaking Necessity: The True Cost Arrives

In the 2018 draft of this book, I made a prediction and two mistakes. The prediction: fragmented chains hide the true cost of everything we buy, and that transparency gap will not survive. The mistakes: the two examples I used to prove it. I could quietly fix them and pretend I was always right. I would rather show you the repair, because the mistakes make the point better than the examples ever did.

First, the prediction, because it needs saying plainly. When a chain fragments, cost fragments with it, and some of it falls through the cracks on purpose. The factory's emissions are not in the product's price. The overtime three tiers upstream is not on the label. Every link optimises its own fraction, and whatever can be pushed outside the chain (onto a river, an atmosphere, a workforce far away) makes the product cheaper and the quarter better. The market price of almost everything you buy is a partial invoice. In 2018 I wrote that this could not last: that the hidden part of the bill would be forced into the open. People found that naive. Hold that thought.