We take for granted many of the conveniences of modern life: car, TV, refrigerator. These are present in nearly every American household, because they got cheaper over time.
But what's cheap for us can be costly in other ways to the planet that yields up the materials for our materialistic lifestyle. Professors Raj Patel and Jason Moore demonstrate in their book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet.
One of the cheap things is life, we learn in this interview from 2017.