Call number
909 SMI
Collection
Publication
Penguin Books (2021), 368 pages
Description
Mathematics. Politics. Science. Nonfiction. HTML:"There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil."â??Bill Gates An essential guide to understanding how numbers reveal the true state of our worldâ??exploring a wide range of topics including energy, the environment, technology, transportation, and food production. Vaclav Smil's mission is to make facts matter. An environmental scientist, policy analyst, and a hugely prolific author, he is Bill Gates' go-to guy for making sense of our world. In Numbers Don't Lie, Smil answers questions such as: What's worse for the environmentâ??your car or your phone? How much do the world's cows weigh (and what does it matter)? And what makes people happy? From data about our societies and populations, through measures of the fuels and foods that energize them, to the impact of transportation and inventions of our modern worldâ??and how all of this affects the planet itselfâ??in Numbers Don't Lie, Vaclav Smil takes us on a fact-finding adventure, using surprising statistics to challenge conventional thinking. Packed with fascinating information and memorable examples, Numbers Don't Lie reveals how the US is leading a rising worldwide trend in chicken consumption, that vaccination yields the best return on investment, and why electric cars aren't as great as we think (yet). Urgent and essential, with a mix of science, history, and witâ??all in bite-sized chapters on a broad range of topicsâ??Numbers Don't Lie inspires readers to interrogate what… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member breic
Weak. Smil's 71 choices did not seem particularly original to me. I think I'd already heard all of the statistics, just from reading newspapers and magazines. Nothing surprised me, and Smil didn't add any insight. Maybe it is nice that Smil has collected them together, but … why do I need to read
> a dollar now buys nearly 38 times more electricity than it did in 1902. But, during that period, average (again, inflation-adjusted) manufacturing wages nearly sextupled, which means that in a blue-collar household, electricity is now more than 200 times more affordable … a lumen of electric light for a working-class household is now approximately 2,500 times more affordable than it was in the early 20th century
> While food balance sheets of virtually all affluent Western nations (be it the US or Spain, France or Germany) show a daily availability of 3,400–4,000 kilocalories per capita, the Japanese rate is now below 2,700 kilocalories, roughly 25 percent lower.
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another article about declining US per capita dairy consumption? > a dollar now buys nearly 38 times more electricity than it did in 1902. But, during that period, average (again, inflation-adjusted) manufacturing wages nearly sextupled, which means that in a blue-collar household, electricity is now more than 200 times more affordable … a lumen of electric light for a working-class household is now approximately 2,500 times more affordable than it was in the early 20th century
> While food balance sheets of virtually all affluent Western nations (be it the US or Spain, France or Germany) show a daily availability of 3,400–4,000 kilocalories per capita, the Japanese rate is now below 2,700 kilocalories, roughly 25 percent lower.
Show Less
LibraryThing member DavidWineberg
Numbers Don’t Lie is an absolute delight for a reader like me. Vaclav Smil takes an engineer’s approach to dozens of everyday issues and shows how they work – or don’t – by the numbers. If we looked at more things this way, we would be dramatically better off.
The book is a collection of
And it’s entertaining. Along the way, Smil interjects the occasional plea for sanity, such as simply improving home insulation rather than trying to invent sic-fi geo-engineering brainstorms, which are at best unproven and at worst dangerous. But always technologically difficult and impossibly expensive.
Take education, for an example of disproving by the numbers. Smil says “Politicians may look far and wide for evidence of American exceptionalism, but they won’t find it in the numbers, where it matters.” In 2018, he says, the OECD test results showed American 15 year olds reading below those in Russia, Slovakia and Spain. In science, they ranked below the mean, and in reading, just two points above average, far from the top where Americans think they routinely place.
The stats also say Americans are more likely to die within a year of birth, live shorter lives and be less likely to learn. One of my favorite OECD stats, which Smil missed, is that American teens lead in just one category – self-esteem. They too think they’re all exceptional.
He can also take a fun side trip. He lauds the 1880s as a time of great innovation, something we never think about. The 1880s saw a bunch inventions and product launches that we still employ today: Quaker Oats, light rail, bicycles, the Wall Street Journal, revolving doors, elevators, cash registers, Coca Cola, vending machines, ballpoint pens, and Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, no matter what they intend calling it going forward.
It’s not all encompassing, however. Smil’s paean to the diesel engine is all about how efficient it is, how powerful, how its fuel is closer to raw and therefore less expensive, and on and on. But he totally neglects to mention that diesel exhaust is a listed carcinogen, dirtying the atmosphere far beyond its share of an already terrible situation.
In writing about energy, Smil cites nuclear fusion as “the most notorious example of an ever-receding innovative achievement. “ It is always the next big thing in clean, economical nuclear power, and like Donald Trump’s healthcare plan, is always just around the corner. Watch for it, you’ll see. But it never comes.
I very much appreciate the common sense he exhibits repeatedly throughout. He says we know airplane boarding does not work, but we “persist in proven failures”. We could board planes from the front and the back, we could abolish reserved seating or implement a pyramid system. Why not just fix boarding instead of dreaming of hyperloop trains, he asks.
He questions economic stats and forecasts. He says GDP “rises not only when lives get better and economies progress, but also when bad things happen to people or the environment. Higher alcohol sales, more driving under the influence, more accidents, more emergency room admissions, more injuries, more people in jail – GDP goes up. More illegal logging in the tropics, more deforestation and biodiversity loss, higher timber sales – again, GDP goes up. We know better, but we still worship high annual GDP growth rate, regardless of where it comes from.” In addition to all the things GDP gets wrong, the whole concept is misleadingly pointless by the numbers.
But then, there are times when Smil gets carried away, to the point where most readers will not be able to fathom what he’s writing about: “Under photopic conditions (that is, under bright light, which allows color perception), the luminous efficacy of visible light peaks at 683 lm/W at a wavelength of 555 nanometers. That’s in the green part of the spectrum – the color that seems, at any given level of power, to be the brightest.” I don’t know how many times I have read that, but I still couldn’t explain it anyone else. Or to myself.
On the other hand, his explanation of the perceptible differences in incandescent vs fluorescent vs LED vs sunlight describes exactly what about each one makes it uncomfortable or acceptable. Because the differences are measurable. Fluorescents are low pressure and produce only monochromatic yellow (they are too blue), so they aren’t used in homes. LEDs produce light for three to four hours a day for 20 years, a huge savings over incandescent bulbs, but “they still can’t match natural light’s spectrum.” Too much in the blue range, not enough in the red. Incandescent lights gave out too little blue, fluorescents too little red. “They don’t please the eye.” Sunlight wins top place, hands down and as yet unmatched.
He points out that a lumen of electric light costs 1/2500th of what it cost in early in the 20th century. So lights are everywhere, and far brighter than they have ever been.
Smil tackles fear of flying with stats from 2017, when he says he spent more than 100 hours in large jets. He says the four airlines that flew him had their last fatal accidents in 1983, 1993, 1997 and 2000. Who looks up stats like that? You are safer in the air than in an American hospital, he says, where deaths from viruses, bacteria and errors are increasing (to the point where the healthcare system is the second biggest cause of death in the USA). His advice to all: keep flying and avoid hospitals.
As to food, who but an engineer could come up with this analysis? Meat production breaks out as pork , 40%, chicken 37% and beef 23%. Their total was 300 million tons in 2018. But beef is by far the most expensive to get to market. It takes 11,0000 liters of water to produce one pound of beef. 60% of all crops go to raising beef. Horribly inefficient and wasteful. What if, he says, we adjust the mix to 40% pork, 50% chicken and 10% beef? We would then have 30% more chicken, 20% more pork, while halving the environmental burden. Yet total tonnage would then actually rise to 350 million tons, feeding far more people. This is doable and desirable. Just change the government incentives.
Disclosure: I freely admit I am predisposed to like this book, for a couple of reasons. One, I had a mentor who like Smil, was also a Czech refugee, also a scientist/engineer, also living in Canada. He, like Smil, not only taught me to look at the figures behind the “facts”, but assemble them properly to understand their context. He became my closest friend for a good two decades, and I helped him publicize a number of causes to promote the truth against the myths and outright lies. But where Smil became a professor emeritus and has published 40 books, Bohumil Jerabek earned himself a deck of patents on everything from vacuum cleaners to chainsaws, and had a lab so well equipped that engineers from the National Research Council came to play at his house on weekends. He would have loved this book,roared in laughter at many of the claims that are so true, and had he known Smil, they would have been best friends forever.
Two, Numbers Don’t Lie is very much like my own book, The Straight Dope, or what I learned from my first thousand nonfiction reviews. I too assembled a book around topics so it was more than just miscellaneous trivia. I too assembled it from reviews I had published over a ten year period. I too dragged the salient facts into the spotlight to promote knowledge beyond the rumors. And I too made it easy to read and digest in bite-sized chunks that stir the brainwaves.
So in my mind, the fast-reading and fun Numbers Don’t Lie is a wonderful experience that provides something for everyone.
David Wineberg
The book is a collection of
Show More
very short articles Smil wrote for an IEEE magazine. He has grouped them into categories like home, transport, energy and so on, so readers can explore the “well what about…” alternatives. This is the book that proves/disproves what people routinely toss off as factual. It is an air-clearer of real use to all and sundry.And it’s entertaining. Along the way, Smil interjects the occasional plea for sanity, such as simply improving home insulation rather than trying to invent sic-fi geo-engineering brainstorms, which are at best unproven and at worst dangerous. But always technologically difficult and impossibly expensive.
Take education, for an example of disproving by the numbers. Smil says “Politicians may look far and wide for evidence of American exceptionalism, but they won’t find it in the numbers, where it matters.” In 2018, he says, the OECD test results showed American 15 year olds reading below those in Russia, Slovakia and Spain. In science, they ranked below the mean, and in reading, just two points above average, far from the top where Americans think they routinely place.
The stats also say Americans are more likely to die within a year of birth, live shorter lives and be less likely to learn. One of my favorite OECD stats, which Smil missed, is that American teens lead in just one category – self-esteem. They too think they’re all exceptional.
He can also take a fun side trip. He lauds the 1880s as a time of great innovation, something we never think about. The 1880s saw a bunch inventions and product launches that we still employ today: Quaker Oats, light rail, bicycles, the Wall Street Journal, revolving doors, elevators, cash registers, Coca Cola, vending machines, ballpoint pens, and Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, no matter what they intend calling it going forward.
It’s not all encompassing, however. Smil’s paean to the diesel engine is all about how efficient it is, how powerful, how its fuel is closer to raw and therefore less expensive, and on and on. But he totally neglects to mention that diesel exhaust is a listed carcinogen, dirtying the atmosphere far beyond its share of an already terrible situation.
In writing about energy, Smil cites nuclear fusion as “the most notorious example of an ever-receding innovative achievement. “ It is always the next big thing in clean, economical nuclear power, and like Donald Trump’s healthcare plan, is always just around the corner. Watch for it, you’ll see. But it never comes.
I very much appreciate the common sense he exhibits repeatedly throughout. He says we know airplane boarding does not work, but we “persist in proven failures”. We could board planes from the front and the back, we could abolish reserved seating or implement a pyramid system. Why not just fix boarding instead of dreaming of hyperloop trains, he asks.
He questions economic stats and forecasts. He says GDP “rises not only when lives get better and economies progress, but also when bad things happen to people or the environment. Higher alcohol sales, more driving under the influence, more accidents, more emergency room admissions, more injuries, more people in jail – GDP goes up. More illegal logging in the tropics, more deforestation and biodiversity loss, higher timber sales – again, GDP goes up. We know better, but we still worship high annual GDP growth rate, regardless of where it comes from.” In addition to all the things GDP gets wrong, the whole concept is misleadingly pointless by the numbers.
But then, there are times when Smil gets carried away, to the point where most readers will not be able to fathom what he’s writing about: “Under photopic conditions (that is, under bright light, which allows color perception), the luminous efficacy of visible light peaks at 683 lm/W at a wavelength of 555 nanometers. That’s in the green part of the spectrum – the color that seems, at any given level of power, to be the brightest.” I don’t know how many times I have read that, but I still couldn’t explain it anyone else. Or to myself.
On the other hand, his explanation of the perceptible differences in incandescent vs fluorescent vs LED vs sunlight describes exactly what about each one makes it uncomfortable or acceptable. Because the differences are measurable. Fluorescents are low pressure and produce only monochromatic yellow (they are too blue), so they aren’t used in homes. LEDs produce light for three to four hours a day for 20 years, a huge savings over incandescent bulbs, but “they still can’t match natural light’s spectrum.” Too much in the blue range, not enough in the red. Incandescent lights gave out too little blue, fluorescents too little red. “They don’t please the eye.” Sunlight wins top place, hands down and as yet unmatched.
He points out that a lumen of electric light costs 1/2500th of what it cost in early in the 20th century. So lights are everywhere, and far brighter than they have ever been.
Smil tackles fear of flying with stats from 2017, when he says he spent more than 100 hours in large jets. He says the four airlines that flew him had their last fatal accidents in 1983, 1993, 1997 and 2000. Who looks up stats like that? You are safer in the air than in an American hospital, he says, where deaths from viruses, bacteria and errors are increasing (to the point where the healthcare system is the second biggest cause of death in the USA). His advice to all: keep flying and avoid hospitals.
As to food, who but an engineer could come up with this analysis? Meat production breaks out as pork , 40%, chicken 37% and beef 23%. Their total was 300 million tons in 2018. But beef is by far the most expensive to get to market. It takes 11,0000 liters of water to produce one pound of beef. 60% of all crops go to raising beef. Horribly inefficient and wasteful. What if, he says, we adjust the mix to 40% pork, 50% chicken and 10% beef? We would then have 30% more chicken, 20% more pork, while halving the environmental burden. Yet total tonnage would then actually rise to 350 million tons, feeding far more people. This is doable and desirable. Just change the government incentives.
Disclosure: I freely admit I am predisposed to like this book, for a couple of reasons. One, I had a mentor who like Smil, was also a Czech refugee, also a scientist/engineer, also living in Canada. He, like Smil, not only taught me to look at the figures behind the “facts”, but assemble them properly to understand their context. He became my closest friend for a good two decades, and I helped him publicize a number of causes to promote the truth against the myths and outright lies. But where Smil became a professor emeritus and has published 40 books, Bohumil Jerabek earned himself a deck of patents on everything from vacuum cleaners to chainsaws, and had a lab so well equipped that engineers from the National Research Council came to play at his house on weekends. He would have loved this book,roared in laughter at many of the claims that are so true, and had he known Smil, they would have been best friends forever.
Two, Numbers Don’t Lie is very much like my own book, The Straight Dope, or what I learned from my first thousand nonfiction reviews. I too assembled a book around topics so it was more than just miscellaneous trivia. I too assembled it from reviews I had published over a ten year period. I too dragged the salient facts into the spotlight to promote knowledge beyond the rumors. And I too made it easy to read and digest in bite-sized chunks that stir the brainwaves.
So in my mind, the fast-reading and fun Numbers Don’t Lie is a wonderful experience that provides something for everyone.
David Wineberg
Show Less
LibraryThing member Stbalbach
70 some chapters on energy, population etc.. Smil distills large complex topics to their mathematical essence and you feel enlightened. The problem is, they are large complex topics for a reason. Throughout I was thinking "yeah but" there is so much missing. With short zingers on big things, it's
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easy to leave out contradictory information. It's entertaining and interesting, but reality is complex. Smil is at his best in live lectures, from which many of these chapters derive, too bad he couldn't narrate. Show Less
LibraryThing member Paul_S
Mostly useless trivia.
LibraryThing member nbmars
Vaclav Smil was born in Czechoslovakia and now lives in Canada. He writes about scientific issues with a wry sense of humor. He is also the favorite author of Bill Gates.
His most recent book, Numbers Don’t Lie, is actually a collection of 71 magazine articles he has written over the years. Each
The book also agues forcefully for various sensible energy conservation strategies, such as double or triple-paned windows, pointing out that good insulation will not conserve a lot of energy if much of the heat in a house escapes through the windows.
Because the chapters are short and not linearly connected, the book can be browsed at leisure. It is also adaptable to listening to the audio version on relatively short car trips, as I did. Although the audio version includes PDF access, several charts and graphs would facilitate understanding a number of the author’s more controversial assertions.
(JAB)
His most recent book, Numbers Don’t Lie, is actually a collection of 71 magazine articles he has written over the years. Each
Show More
article is short, but tends to be surprising or counterintuitive, often using hard data to disabuse the casual reader of popular preconceptions. For example, Smil asserts that the 1880s were the most technologically innovative decade in history, bringing us generally available electric power, sky scrapers, the internal combustion engine, the ballpoint pen, the modern bicycle, and Coca-Cola. The book also agues forcefully for various sensible energy conservation strategies, such as double or triple-paned windows, pointing out that good insulation will not conserve a lot of energy if much of the heat in a house escapes through the windows.
Because the chapters are short and not linearly connected, the book can be browsed at leisure. It is also adaptable to listening to the audio version on relatively short car trips, as I did. Although the audio version includes PDF access, several charts and graphs would facilitate understanding a number of the author’s more controversial assertions.
(JAB)
Show Less
LibraryThing member nmarun
The book grows your perspective about seeing the bigger picture like when the author explains how GDP grows even when bad things happen to people. So true.
There's something about books like this that I enjoy since it assists in understanding so many things about the world from economics, to
"Eight parts in ten-full" rule actually makes sense not only from a healthy diet perspective, but also provokes your thoughts around food wastage.
There's something about books like this that I enjoy since it assists in understanding so many things about the world from economics, to
Show More
history, to health and others. It was refreshing to read how transformers work and benefits provided by Diesel. Factfulness was another recent book that is on similar lines that I cherished."Eight parts in ten-full" rule actually makes sense not only from a healthy diet perspective, but also provokes your thoughts around food wastage.
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LibraryThing member booktsunami
The Guardian apparently calls him "the nerd's nerd" and he certainly covers a lot of ground and puts some really interesting statistics forward. For example he has computed the feeding efficiencies for different types of meat species: 3-4 units of feed per edible unit for broiler chickens, 9-10 for
Similarly, he goes to great lengths to demonstrate that large wind generators absorb a lot of resources to construct. His implied conclusion is that they are not economic because of this....but he also has the throw-away line that these costs would be recovered in on year of operations. So, presumably, the next 19-20 years of generation would be virtually free (apart from maintenance costs and disposal coasts).
I really enjoyed his articles. Each a short pithy essay making his points really strongly. For example: diesel engines are here to stay. There are no readily available mass-mover (container ships, bulk haul ships, trucks and freight trains) alternatives. However, I really detect a blind spot when it comes to the role of services in the economy. Vaclav seems to hold fast to the notion that the only good economic activity is manufacturing. This flies in the face of the reality that all of the advanced economies are increasingly reliant on services as the economic generator and most GDP in the developed countries is generated by the service sectors. (It's over 80% in USA and Australia for example). Manufacturing is a very small direct contributor But Vaclav writes like an engineer who places manufacturing on a pedestal and suggests that no other sector can generate so many well paying jobs. Sorry Vaclav. You are wrong. The service sectors generate by far the most jobs in advanced economies and tell the community that the lawyers, bankers, doctors, dentists, IT programmers, etc. have poorly paid jobs and you invite incredulity. Again Vaclav seems terribly out of touch, and has a real blind spot with the services sector.
He does however make the point that the USA is not the world leader on a number of important indices such as life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, happiness. (And, I might add, income equality). The USA is certainly up there with the leaders but lots of other countries are outperforming it.
He has an interesting article about kerosene (which is the primary constituent of jet fuel). He makes the point that it has a very high energy density of 42.8 mégajoules per kilogram. This is slightly less than gasoline but it can stay liquid down to -47 degrees C, and it beats gasoline on cost evaporative losses and fire risk. He can't see an alternative to Kerosene for aviation but does make the point that today's airliners are burning about 50% less fuel per passenger km than they did in 1960.
All in all, I found the book fascinating and his erudition impressive. I would have been even more impressed if I was not aware of those blind spots mentioned above. Happy to give it 4.5 stars.
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pork and 20-30 for beef.Interestingly this also demonstrates that Vaclav has his blind spots. Broilers are raised in intensive sheds and fed grain (which is grown elsewhere), Beef in the USA may also be produced on feedlots but can also be produced on the open range where the animals feed on low value grass or herbage which could not otherwise be utilised. So his equations are fine....as far as they go but they are not the full story.Similarly, he goes to great lengths to demonstrate that large wind generators absorb a lot of resources to construct. His implied conclusion is that they are not economic because of this....but he also has the throw-away line that these costs would be recovered in on year of operations. So, presumably, the next 19-20 years of generation would be virtually free (apart from maintenance costs and disposal coasts).
I really enjoyed his articles. Each a short pithy essay making his points really strongly. For example: diesel engines are here to stay. There are no readily available mass-mover (container ships, bulk haul ships, trucks and freight trains) alternatives. However, I really detect a blind spot when it comes to the role of services in the economy. Vaclav seems to hold fast to the notion that the only good economic activity is manufacturing. This flies in the face of the reality that all of the advanced economies are increasingly reliant on services as the economic generator and most GDP in the developed countries is generated by the service sectors. (It's over 80% in USA and Australia for example). Manufacturing is a very small direct contributor But Vaclav writes like an engineer who places manufacturing on a pedestal and suggests that no other sector can generate so many well paying jobs. Sorry Vaclav. You are wrong. The service sectors generate by far the most jobs in advanced economies and tell the community that the lawyers, bankers, doctors, dentists, IT programmers, etc. have poorly paid jobs and you invite incredulity. Again Vaclav seems terribly out of touch, and has a real blind spot with the services sector.
He does however make the point that the USA is not the world leader on a number of important indices such as life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, happiness. (And, I might add, income equality). The USA is certainly up there with the leaders but lots of other countries are outperforming it.
He has an interesting article about kerosene (which is the primary constituent of jet fuel). He makes the point that it has a very high energy density of 42.8 mégajoules per kilogram. This is slightly less than gasoline but it can stay liquid down to -47 degrees C, and it beats gasoline on cost evaporative losses and fire risk. He can't see an alternative to Kerosene for aviation but does make the point that today's airliners are burning about 50% less fuel per passenger km than they did in 1960.
All in all, I found the book fascinating and his erudition impressive. I would have been even more impressed if I was not aware of those blind spots mentioned above. Happy to give it 4.5 stars.
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LibraryThing member Shrike58
Although billed as an "essential" guide to the constraints hemming in policy decisions in terms of production and energy use, this collection of essays by the noted polymath Vaclav Smil mostly exist to have provided him with amusement; having been given a platform by the Institute of Electrical and
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Electronic Engineers. As for the overarching theme, you can say that it's about achieving efficiencies in modern industrial society, the constraints to doing so, and how how restraint in consumption is highly underrated. One thing that I can say is that even just dipping at random into this collection will probably make you feel smarter. Show Less
LibraryThing member waldhaus1
Countless insights. I believe it was Lord Kelvin who said you can only discuss things you can measure. While that may be debated this book provides a smorgasbord of measurements and much food for thought. It also serves as a continuing warning about climate change. Still out is a very upbeat
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presentation indicating many opportunities for action. Show Less
Pages
368
ISBN
0143136224 / 9780143136224