Key insights from
Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World
By Václav Smil
What you'll learn
The insights contained here are just a smattering of the 71 snapshots Vaclav Smil offers us in his book Numbers Don’t Lie. Each story offers an opportunity to sharpen low-resolution ideas about population, civilization, globalization, energy usage, technology, and the environment using the most reliable statistics available on the subjects. The internet is already bursting with facts and figures—most of which are misleading, outdated, outright false, or fail to offer a sense of scale, proportion, and context. Smil goes to great lengths to be objective, pulling statistics from only four kinds of primary sources: “worldwide statistics published by global organizations, yearbooks issued by national institutions, historical statistics compiled by national agencies, and papers in scientific journals.” Taken together, these figures help us better understand our world and current moment in history.
Key insights
- • What you'll learn
- 1 When it comes to fertility, the focus has shifted from quantity of life to quality of life, but that shift might come back to bite us.
- 2 The movement toward megacities shows no signs of slowing down.
- 3 Global records reveal that the simplest method to give your child the best chance of being tall is lots of milk.
- 4 Too fast a transition to electric cars will do more harm than good for the environment.
- 5 Wine-drinkers are a dying breed in France these days.
- 6 Empire longevity has shrunk over the course of human history.
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