Review: Your Life Is Manufactured

Posted: February 10, 2025

Book review: Your Life Is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better by Tim Minshall

How much do you know about toilet paper?

You likely know where it comes from (a forest) and where it ends up (…) but you probably aren’t familiar with the special machine that chops and trims the trees, and you probably don’t know that the pulped cellulose fiberre—the precursor to toilet paper—is dehydrated for transportation before being rehydrated at a rolling mill, where it is then sprayed onto a fast-moving wire mesh that produces one kilometer of five-meter-wide toilet paper every minute.

Now look around you: look at all the other items in your vicinity. Do you know how any of those were made?

“Throughout every day of your life you will be wearing, consuming, being transported or sheltered by, communicating through or being restored to health by manufactured products,” writes Tim Minshall, Director of the Institute of Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge, in his new book. “Yet the processes by which these items appear in our lives are, to most of us, largely invisible.”

In Your Life Is Manufactured, Professor Minshall shines a light on the hidden world of manufacturing in a witty, self-deprecating style that belies his grand job title. In under 300 pages, we are taken on a whistle-stop tour of the manufacturing facilities and supply chains that make modern life possible, as well as a short history of how these came to be and a glimpse at how they are evolving.

The picture that emerges is of a system as sophisticated as it is fragile, equally worthy of awe and horror.

Efficiency and sustainability in manufacturing

Minshall has spent decades in the world of manufacturing, and his belief and pride in the sector jump off the page. But he is also willing to reckon with aspects of the industry that need to change—and fast.

Sustainability, says Minshall, is the number one issue for manufacturing. Indeed, the sector might be a model of efficiency if measured purely in dollars and cents. When environmental externalities are factored in, however, it is absurdly wasteful. Scottish salmon is a paradigmatic example: “it can be economically advantageous to have fish caught off the Scottish coast sent thousands of miles to China for processing and then shipped back for sale in UK supermarkets.”

As the supply-side enabler of consumer demand, the manufacturing world bears significant responsibility for the parlous state of our planet. Yet as Minshall is quick to point out, manufacturing is also a critical part of the green transition. “Manufacturing firms,” he writes, “are going to make the machines that will give us widescale access to renewable energy, ensure sustainable sources of food and deliver clean transportation.”

It might frustrate some readers that Your Life Is Manufactured doesn’t offer any policy prescriptions about how to clean up manufacturing or get consumerism under control, but neat conclusions would not do justice to such a complicated set of issues.

On two of these issues, in particular, Minshall adds a perspective that perhaps only he—as a senior academic with extensive connections across the public and private sector—could: reshoring and technology.

Reshoring and the industrial commons

Reshoring, along with tariffs and protectionism, has become a source of heated political discussion. Minshall doesn’t come down on side or other of the debate, he but does make a nuanced and level-headed contribution to it.

Particularly valuable is the concept of the “industrial commons”—effectively the total manufacturing knowledge in a nation’s workforce. A strong industrial commons, argues Minshall, gives a nation tremendous resilience in times of crisis. He cites the fabrication of ventilators, during the pandemic, by UK engineering firms with no prior experience in medical devices but with enough transferrable knowledge to cobble something viable together.

When questions around reshoring are framed in these terms, a strong manufacturing sector becomes eminently sensible—a rather uncontroversial kind of insurance policy. Between crises, of course, it is also a source of good jobs and technological innovation.

Data and servitization

“Digitalised data,” says Minshall, “are the most valuable commodities for any manufacturing business today.” It’s a bold-sounding claim, but one with which it is difficult to disagree.

Connected devices are transforming not only the efficiency of manufacturing outfits, but their entire business models. Minshall calls this change the “servitization” of the sector—focusing not on selling a product but on “addressing the customer’s real needs.”

Even jet engines manufacturers like Rolls-Royce and GE are no longer selling the engines themselves to airline companies. Instead, they’re offering “power by the hour” and taking on full responsibility for performance and maintenance.

This model, of course, would not be possible without “exquisitely detailed data on not only what the customers are doing with their engines, but also what the engines themselves are up to.”

All the world’s a factory

Despite the complex topics it tackles, Your Life Is Manufactured is a remarkably breezy read. It’s also crammed with fascinating titbits: Henry Ford’s production line was inspired by abattoirs; the idea of interchangeable components originated in the 18^th century with a gunsmith in Southern France; 99.9% of manufacturing firms are classified as “small or medium-sized enterprises.”

Minshall’s book is written primarily for the general public, but its easy-going erudition and broad scope would make it a worthwhile read for those in policy and industry alike. Just don’t expect a 10-step guide to improving your slaughterhouse.