On the second floor of the Inka Museum in Cusco, in the colonial-era hall, I stopped before a glass case.
Inside, displayed, was an old silver coin. About four centimeters across, two millimeters thick. On one face, the arms of the Spanish Crown; on the other, the Pillars of Hercules and the inscription "PLVS VLTRA (further beyond)." The Pillars of Hercules symbolized the western edge of the Mediterranean — the boundary of the ancient world. "Further beyond" was the motto of the Spanish Empire. The declaration that we go beyond that boundary into the world.
Among the small letters carved at the rim, the word "POTOSI" caught my eye. Beneath it the date 1760. The coin was an eight-real (8 reales) silver piece, struck from silver mined at the Potosí mine. In Spanish, the "peso", or, after its weight, the "peso de ocho", or, in the English-speaking world, "piece of eight."
This little piece of metal was the reserve currency of the eighteenth-century world economy. From the Americas to Europe, from Europe to Asia, from Asia back to the Americas — this coin circled the earth. The Venetian merchants of Marco Polo's lineage used it; the samurai of Edo Japan held it; the merchants of Ming China used it for settlement; the colonists of Philadelphia paid taxes with it. It was the world's first truly global currency.
And in this single coin — there is mixed a drop of Indigenous blood.
This is not poetic exaggeration. The silver of this coin came from a mountain in the Bolivian highlands by the name of Potosí. A cold, dry highland at 4,090 meters above sea level. From the underground of that mountain, over about 280 years from 1545, about 45,000 tons of silver were extracted.¹ And in the process of extraction — by the conservative estimates of historians — about eight million Indigenous people died.²
The amount of silver in a single coin is about 27 grams. How much labor was required to extract that much silver? How many lungs ruined by mercury poisoning? How many families separated? Such questions are not visible on the gleaming surface of the coin. But they are surely there.
This chapter traces the silver's planetary journey. Beginning in the underground of Potosí — through Seville in Spain — across the Pacific to Manila — and on to its final destination, China. That journey produced humanity's first true globalization. Not something that began with a paper in the 1980s, nor with nineteenth-century free trade. 1571, the year a trading ship sailed from Manila in the Philippines to Acapulco in Mexico. From that point the earth first became one economic system.
And the fuel of that system was Indigenous suffering.
In 1545, on a high plateau in the central-southern Andes of Bolivia, an Indigenous shepherd named Diego Gualpa was tending his llamas on a peak called in his language "qullqi urqu (the silver mountain)."
One evening a strong wind rose. He pressed himself to a rock to escape the gale. At that moment the rock tilted, and beneath it a vein of reddish ore was exposed. Gualpa had worked as a miner in a Spanish settlement. He knew what the red glow was. A vein of silver.³
For a while he kept the discovery to himself. But in the end he told a Spanish settler. The rumor spread. In April 1545, the Spanish conquistador Juan de Villarroel formally registered the mountain in the name of the Spanish Crown. The mountain's name changed. "Cerro Rico" — "the Rich Mountain."
The geological conditions of Cerro Rico were extreme. Altitude 4,090 meters. Mean annual temperatures near zero, thin oxygen, a barren highland where almost nothing grows. Among the worst conditions in the world for long human habitation. Yet beneath that mountain lay the largest single silver vein in human history.
Immediately after the 1545 discovery, settlers poured in. From Spain, from other colonies, from Indigenous villages. Hundreds in the first year, thousands in the next, tens of thousands within a decade. Potosí grew rapidly into a city.
The pace of growth is astonishing.⁴
Population around 150,000 in 1611. What does this mean? Compare:
That is, Potosí was among the largest cities in the world. At 4,000 meters in a desert highland. A place where neither food, water, nor wood is naturally supplied. Only one thing made this possible — silver. Silver created sufficient economic gravity that everything human could be imported.
The face of downtown Potosí was strange. Lavish Spanish-style mansions, vast churches, theaters, and bullrings, all built at 4,000 meters. Spanish noblewomen in silks imported from Seville and Lisbon. Porcelain from Canton. French wine and Italian olive oil. The Spanish elite of Potosí enjoyed the goods of the whole world. This luxury was possible because of the Indigenous labor beneath the mountain.
To see the real face of Potosí, one must split the city in two.
Above the mountain — Cerro Rico itself. The galleries where the miners worked. Altitude 4,000–4,800 meters. In winter, below minus 20°C. The oxygen low all year, the breath short. The galleries narrow, dark, full of dust. Through openings small enough for a child, miners followed the vein. The fumes of the lamp oil filled the lungs. Mercury vapor coming out of the vein mixed in the air.
Beneath the mountain — downtown Potosí. The world of the Spanish settlers. Despite the cold of 4,000 meters, fires burned in the hearths of mansions; warm dishes came to the table; musicians played. The silver brought up by the miners went to amalgamation works, was refined, then struck into silver coin in the royal mint. Each day dozens of llamas left the city loaded with refined silver, headed for the Pacific ports.
These two worlds, in the same Potosí, are completely different orders of being. The human above the mountain works at the limit of existence. The human below enjoys the abundance of a world empire. Between them flows the silver. And that flow keeps 200,000 people alive at 4,000 meters.
This structure is itself the economic embodiment of Wetiko. Extreme extraction on one side maintains extreme consumption on the other. Neither stands on its own. They are bound together. And to maintain the system, this asymmetry must be continuously reproduced.
In Chapter 1 I described in detail the mita system of the Inca Empire. Cyclical communal labor. The Quechua word means "turn." The state provided food, drink, and clothing; construction sites coincided with festivals; the laborer was recognized as a member of the community. The system that built the Inca Empire's ninety-five years.
After the Spanish conquest of 1533, the Inca state was gone. But the name "mita" remained. The Spanish took it over in their own way. They kept the form. They kept the name. But they completely changed the content.
The decisive moment was the decree of Francisco de Toledo, viceroy of Peru, in 1573.⁵ We met Toledo already in Chapter 7. The viceroy who executed Túpac Amaru in 1572. After ending Inca political resistance, he reorganized Inca institutions for his purposes.
The heart of Toledo's decree:
Logically this might seem similar to the Inca mita. Cyclical, obligatory, applied to every adult male. In practice it was something completely different.
In the Inca mita:
Two systems of the same name did opposite things. This is Wetiko's cunning. It borrows the form of a relational tradition and converts it into a tool of extraction.
The labor in Potosí was severe in itself, but the most lethal was amalgamation.⁶
There were traditionally two methods for separating silver from ore. Smelting (melting the ore to extract the silver) and amalgamation (binding only the silver by combining the ore with mercury).
In 1554 the Spanish miner Bartolomé de Medina improved amalgamation in Mexico.⁷ The method, known as "the patio process", involved mixing ore with mercury and salt and having Indigenous laborers tread the mixture barefoot. After weeks of treading and mixing, the paste was heated to evaporate the mercury, and what remained was pure silver.
Why was this lethal? Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin. It is absorbed through the skin of the bare foot. The vapor enters the lungs. In the heating phase, workers were entirely exposed to its fumes. Mercury poisoning causes irreversible brain damage, destruction of the nervous system, muscle spasms, loss of teeth, kidney failure. Those in the late stage could not walk, could not speak, could not remember their own names. The Spanish chronicles called such people "mocuroso". "Those who do not move," or, in a still crueler translation, "walking corpses."
Several seventeenth-century Jesuit accounts describe vividly the late-stage mercury poisoning of Potosí miners. The condition of those called by the Spanish word "mocuroso": hands and feet trembling, tongues swollen, speech incoherent, even names forgotten. Last rites came at the moment of death — and often the patient no longer knew who he was. He could not return home. He died in Potosí, nameless.⁸
The names of the missionaries of that age have partly survived. The names of the miners they described — have hardly survived at all.
How many died?
The exact number can never be known. The records are deficient, and the cause of death (mining accident, mercury poisoning, hunger, disease, exhaustion) is hard to distinguish. But historians have made rough estimates. The Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, in Open Veins of Latin America (Las venas abiertas de América Latina) (1971), proposed the figure of about 8 million.⁹ Later researchers criticized this as exaggerated. Conservative estimates range from three to five million.
But even at the lowest estimate — three million dead is comparable in scale to twentieth-century mass killings. It belongs alongside the Holocaust (six million), the Rwandan genocide (eight hundred thousand), the Kantō massacre (tens of thousands). Yet we do not remember the deaths of Potosí this way. Why? Because the perpetrator wrote the official record, and the victim had no voice.
Translate the number into days, and it becomes more concrete. If three million died over 280 years, that is an average of about twenty-nine a day. Somewhere in a gallery at 4,000 meters, every day, twenty-nine new people who would not return home. From accident, from poisoning, from exhaustion. And every day twenty-nine new people took their place. For 280 years, every day.
Each had a name. A family. A field at home. A wife, children, parents left behind. All of this — in the dark of Cerro Rico — vanished.
This is why I stood for so long before the silver coin in the museum. In a single coin dozens of lives may be melted in. Their names we do not know. But the fact that this coin exists is the silent testimony that they were there.
In 1571 a decisive turning point in world history occurred.
An expedition led by the Spanish explorer Miguel López de Legazpi (1502–1572) arrived at Manila in the Philippines and established a settlement.¹⁰ Manila quickly became the hub of trans-Pacific trade.
The route was simple but revolutionary. Acapulco in Mexico → Manila → Canton (Guangdong) in southern China. And the reverse. The route was called "Galeón de Manila" — Spanish for "Manila Galleon." Great sailing ships crossed the Pacific once or twice a year, integrating the world economy.
From 1573 to 1815, for 242 years, this route persisted.¹¹ More than 250 galleons sailed back and forth between Acapulco and Manila. Each held about 1,000–2,000 tons. The Pacific crossing took about six months, with high mortality. Many ships were wrecked or seized by pirates.
But the profits of this trade were vast. Because — the exchange ratio was extremely favorable.
What did the galleon carry?
From Acapulco to Manila: silver from Potosí. And American cacao, tobacco, dyes.
From Manila to Acapulco: silk, porcelain, tea, spices, lacquer from China. Cottons, jewels, opium from India and Southeast Asia.
The core exchange was silver for Chinese goods. And this exchange reorganized the axis of the world economy.
Why China? This is the central question of this chapter.
In 1567 Ming China undertook a major economic reform.¹² The reform known as the Single Whip Law (一條鞭法): tax and tribute were unified into payment in silver. Previously taxes could be paid in kind (grain, cloth, labor); now only silver was accepted.
With this reform, China's demand for silver exploded. Tens of millions of peasants suddenly needed silver. Domestic production of silver in China could not meet the demand. Silver had to be imported. And the source of those imports was — Potosí.
From this point, 40 to 60 percent of the world's silver eventually flowed into China.¹³ Silver mined at Potosí went to Seville, then crossed the Pacific by Manila Galleon, was sold to Chinese merchants in Manila, and through Canton entered the Chinese interior. Or it went directly Potosí → Acapulco → Manila → China.
This flow created a planetary trade imbalance. Europe had nothing to sell to China. China was self-sufficient and did not want European cloth or goods. Europe, on the other hand, wanted Chinese silk, porcelain, and tea. The only way to balance the exchange was silver. So a great part of the world's silver flowed into China, and Chinese goods flowed out to Europe in return.
This trade pattern continued for more than 200 years. And this pattern would become the ultimate cause of the nineteenth-century Opium War. Britain, paying silver for Chinese tea, eventually found the trade deficit unbearable, and tried to recover the silver by smuggling Indian opium into China. The result was the Opium War of 1840. But that story is beyond the scope of this chapter.
Western history textbooks have long described the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as "the beginning of European supremacy." "The age in which Europe began to dominate the world." But this narrative is inaccurate.
In 1998 the American economic historian Andre Gunder Frank (1929–2005) published a revolutionary work. The title was ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age.¹⁴ "ReOrient" carries the double meaning of "reorient direction" and "re-illuminate the East."
Frank's central claim was startling. The center of the world economy of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries was not Europe but China. His evidence:
Frank's claim provoked much debate. Some scholars criticized him for exaggeration; others said he had not gone far enough. Yet his core insight was widely accepted. The Eurocentric narrative distorts the actual flow of the economy. Before 1800, Europe was not the center of the world economy. It was the edge.
Then why did Europe come to dominate the world after the nineteenth century? That is a separate question, and the answer is complex. The combined result of the Industrial Revolution (technological asymmetry), Opium Wars and colonization (political asymmetry), and the financial system (capital asymmetry). But for the three hundred years from 1500 to 1800, China was the economic center, and Europe revolved around it. The silver of Potosí proves that gravity.
This fact has a particular resonance for the Korean reader. Because — Joseon was also part of this silver world system.
From the late sixteenth century into the early seventeenth century, Joseon used silver as a primary means of settlement in trade with Ming China.¹⁵ Not only in the official tribute relationship with Ming, but also in border trade, silver served as the medium of payment. And silver mined in Joseon — at the Dancheon mine in Pyeongan Province and elsewhere — flowed into China. Some Japanese silver passed through Joseon on its way to China.
Especially important is the cupellation method (灰吹法). This technique was invented in 1503 by Joseon technicians of Yangdaesan, Kim Gam-bul and Kim Geom-dong. An innovative method for refining silver using lead. Yet around 1533, this technique leaked to Japan. The Japanese merchant Kamiya Jutei (神谷寿禎) took Joseon technicians to Iwami in Japan.¹⁶ With this technique the Iwami silver mine in Japan exploded in production and, by the late sixteenth century, came to account for about a third of world silver production. That silver fed Japan's economic and military strength — and became the material foundation of the Imjin War of 1592.
The technique of Joseon went to Japan, made Japan a great power, and that Japan invaded Joseon. This tragic irony will be treated in detail in Chapter 13. Here let it be enough to remember — that Joseon was not outside this global silver system. Potosí and Joseon were linked by a single chain.
The decisive establishment of 1571's significance in world economic history was the work of the American economic historian Dennis O. Flynn and the Spanish economic historian Arturo Giráldez. Their 1995 paper in the Journal of World History — its title "Born with a 'Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade in 1571" — became a turning point in world-historical research.¹⁷
Flynn and Giráldez's central claim: 1571 is the true turning point of world history.
Why is 1571 special? Because that year Manila was founded. And with Manila's founding, the Pacific became, for the first time, a regular trade route.
"World trade" before then had in fact been the sum of separate trade networks. Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, East Asian, Atlantic. Each existed but was not connected. Price changes in one did not affect the other.
After 1571 everything changed. If the production of Potosí silver rose — the cargo of the Manila Galleon rose — China's silver inflow grew — China's economy felt inflationary pressure. Conversely, if China rolled back its tax reform — the demand for silver fell — silver prices fell in Manila — Spanish silver exports were less profitable — investment in the Potosí mine fell.
That is, events at one end of the earth began to directly affect events at the other. This is true globalization. Before 1571 it did not exist. From 1571 it began.
One of the early effects of this globalization was Europe's Price Revolution.¹⁸
From the first half of the sixteenth century, prices rose sharply throughout Europe. Between 1500 and 1650, average European prices rose about sixfold. An unprecedented inflation in European history.
The cause is debated, but a major factor was the massive influx of American silver. Silver from the mines of Potosí and Mexico, arriving in Europe, lowered the relative value of silver. To buy the same goods now required more silver. This is monetary inflation.
The inflation shook European society. The real income of wage earners on fixed pay fell. The power of nobles on fixed rents weakened. Meanwhile, merchants and capitalists gained relatively. Some economic historians argue that this shift accelerated the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism.¹⁹
Meanwhile a great part of the silver passed through Europe and flowed to China. The flow affected the Ming Chinese economy as well. The sudden increase in silver supply caused inflation in some regions of China, especially the trading cities. And shifts in silver supply shocked Ming finances. Silver inflows fell in the mid-seventeenth century, taxes were not collected properly, and this became one factor in the Ming dynasty's fall in 1644.²⁰
That is, fluctuations in the Potosí mine influenced the fate of a Chinese dynasty. This is the world after 1571. Everything is connected. Events on the other side of the earth affect my life. This is the familiar experience of the twenty-first century, but its origin lies 450 years back.
The world flow of Potosí silver was tangled with another flow. The Atlantic slave trade.
Indigenous mining labor in Potosí and Mexico was extreme exploitation; nevertheless, as Indigenous populations crashed (from the combined effects of influenza, smallpox, overwork, and massacre), labor demand had to be filled elsewhere. The answer was Africa.
From the mid-sixteenth century, Spain began importing African slaves to the New World. At first in small numbers, then increasingly mass-scaled from the seventeenth century. This is the beginning of the Atlantic triangular trade. The next chapter (12) treats it in detail.
What matters here is — Potosí silver and Atlantic slavery were one system. Silver flowed to Europe, European capital flowed to Africa, African slaves flowed to the Americas, and from the Americas silver, sugar, and tobacco flowed back to Europe. All these flows formed one circuit.
And the central engine of that circuit was Potosí. Without Potosí silver the system would not have begun. Without Potosí silver the system would not have continued. The deaths of millions of Indigenous were the fuel of a planetary economic system.
The story must be brought into the present. Because Potosí is not a relic of history but ongoing.
Today miners still work in the galleries of Cerro Rico. Silver is nearly exhausted, but tin and zinc and other minerals are still extracted. Miners number about 15,000.²¹ Most are poor Bolivian Indigenous. Some are children. UN reports on child labor name Potosí repeatedly.²²
The working conditions are not very different from the sixteenth century. The galleries are still narrow, dark, full of dust. Oxygen falls further as one descends below 4,000 meters. Miners chew coca leaves to dull hunger and exhaustion. They handle explosives directly. Many miners die in their mid-thirties to mid-forties of silicosis, the lung disease in which stone dust accumulates and slowly suffocates the breath. A disease still hard to treat with modern medicine.
Bolivian public health data and local NGO reports have repeatedly testified to the reality of the Potosí miners. The miners' average life expectancy is estimated to be in the early to mid-forties,²³ a figure that belongs not to the twenty-first century but closer to nearly a century ago. Yet they live, work, and die at Potosí now.
In 1987 UNESCO listed Potosí as a World Heritage Site. The official reason: "a masterpiece of sixteenth-century Spanish colonial city planning." Indeed downtown Potosí has many well-preserved colonial-era buildings. Cathedrals, mansions, plazas. Tourist attractions.
But this "cultural heritage" status is doubled. The beauty of Potosí was built upon the deaths of eight million. To not acknowledge this and call it "a masterpiece of colonial architecture" is — a contemporary form of Wetiko's self-concealment.
Recently some residents and scholars of Potosí have begun to question the heritage status. The concept of "Heritage of Shame" has been proposed. That is, Potosí should be preserved — but as memory, not as pride. To teach later generations "this is what happened." Like Auschwitz preserved in Poland.
But this view is not yet mainstream. Even today tourists photograph the colonial-era buildings of Cerro Rico, pay admission, and tour the mine's interior. "A miner's life experience" is sometimes marketed. The suffering of the Indigenous turned into a tourism product.
Wetiko becomes a tourism product. This is a peculiar form of the twenty-first century.
I return to the museum's glass case.
That single silver coin holds me and will not let me go. A small piece of metal. Twenty-seven grams. Yet within it — the dark beneath Potosí, the nameless deaths of mercury-poisoned men, the waves of a galleon crossing the Pacific, transactions in Manila harbor, the taxes paid by a Ming peasant, the gifts received by a Joseon envoy — all this is compressed.
The earth is contained in one coin.
This is the first face of globalization. Before 1571 there was nothing like it. After 1571 — through the past 450 years — the world has become one through the circulation of such coins. The dollars, euros, and won we use today are all descendants of this coin. All of them convert someone's labor into an abstracted number, and circulate that number at planetary scale.
And the fuel of the circulation is — still someone's sweat and blood. Five hundred years ago it was the Indigenous miner of Potosí. Today it is the cobalt miner of the Congo, the garment worker of Bangladesh, the delivery driver of Amazon. The form has changed, but the structure persists.
This is the essence of economic Wetiko. A geometry of extraction and concentration. A structure in which the small sacrifices of many gather as the great abundance of the few. And as that structure operates at planetary scale, victim and beneficiary cannot see each other's faces. Abstraction evaporates the responsibility of conscience (Chapter 9).
I close this chapter with a foreshadowing. If Potosí was the archetype of Wetiko's extractive form, that alone could not complete a planetary system. Pairing the silver flow, another commodity was needed. The archetype of productive plantation. That is sugar.
In the next chapter we go to the sugarcane fields of the Caribbean. There 12.5 million Africans were forcibly carried across the Atlantic. And those fields — as Sidney Mintz shockingly argues — became the archetype of the modern factory system. The history contained in a spoonful of sugar in an English worker's tea forms a pair with the history contained in a Potosí silver coin.
Silver and sugar. The two pillars of the first globalization. And both were — built with blood.
¹ The estimate of 45,000 tons of Potosí silver production is from Peter Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), and Kris Lane, Potosí: The Silver City That Changed the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
² Estimates of Potosí mortality vary widely. The figure of about 8 million is given in Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1971); conservative estimates are 3–5 million. Owing to the deficiency of records, an exact figure cannot be fixed.
³ For Diego Gualpa's discovery of Potosí, see Lewis Hanke, The Imperial City of Potosí (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), chapter 1.
⁴ For Potosí population growth, see Lane (2019), chapter 2.
⁵ For Toledo's 1573 mita decree, see Jeffrey A. Cole, The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).
⁶ For the amalgamation process at Potosí, see Bakewell (1984), chapter 4.
⁷ For Bartolomé de Medina's patio process, see Alan Probert, "Bartolomé de Medina: The Patio Process and the Sixteenth Century Silver Crisis," Journal of the West 8 (1969): 90–124.
⁸ The quotation is based on the records of the Jesuit missionary Alonso Sánchez in the 1580s, reconstructed by the author from the contents.
⁹ Galeano (1971), op. cit.
¹⁰ For the founding of Manila and Legazpi's role, see John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959).
¹¹ For the history of the Manila Galleon trade, see William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1939).
¹² For the Ming Single Whip Law, see Ray Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
¹³ For estimates of the share of world silver flowing to China, see Richard Von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
¹⁴ Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
¹⁵ For Joseon's silver trade with Ming, see Lee Yeong-hun, Socioeconomic History of Late Joseon (Seoul: Hangilsa, 1988).
¹⁶ For the transmission of the cupellation method to Japan, see Lee Tae-jin, "The Expansion of Sixteenth-Century East Asian International Trade and Joseon's Response," Journal of Korean History 43 (2000): 1–47.
¹⁷ Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, "Born with a 'Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade in 1571," Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201–221.
¹⁸ For Europe's Price Revolution, see Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), the classic study.
¹⁹ For the Price Revolution's role in the decline of feudalism, see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
²⁰ For the relationship between the Ming collapse and silver supply, see William S. Atwell, "International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy, circa 1530–1650," Past and Present 95 (1982): 68–90.
²¹ Estimate of current Potosí miners from Bolivian Ministry of Mining (2020) data.
²² UN reports on child labor: International Labour Organization, Child Labour in Mining and Globalization (Geneva: ILO, 2007).
²³ The figure is the author's reconstruction based on Bolivian medical association reports on Potosí health.
As one trained in medicine, I add: silicosis and mercury poisoning are preventable diseases in the twenty-first century. Adequate ventilation, masks, limits on working hours, regular health examinations would prevent most cases. But these are not provided in Potosí. Why? Because the international market price of the minerals these miners extract is low. If the cost of providing safety equipment exceeds the value of the mineral, then the miner's life becomes the first object of cost-cutting. This is the economics of contemporary Wetiko.