User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
This is a very informative book, approaching a diverse range of topics, from dietary habits, natality, engineering, to climate change factors and GDP. All data are statistics, but what is interesting is their interpretation.
As the author says,
"numbers need to be seen in wider contexts", not just taken out from charts.
One example:
"And why do we measure the progress of economies by gross domestic products? GDP is simply the total annual value of all goods and services transacted in a country. It 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 rooms 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."There are a lot of parallels between different external factors affecting life expectancy, dietary habits (diary fat, contrary to other beliefs, lower the risk of coronary diseases and strokes), energy efficiency, and so on.
If you hold an interest in such topics and statistics, this is a very good book. It is spiced here and there with a bit of dry humor, which makes the reading very pleasant, despite the numerous numbers.
It isn't groundbreaking, but it puts into a different perspective what we take for granted, and teaches us how to interpret those statistics correctly.
>>> ARC received thanks to
Penguin General UK / Viking via NetGalley <<<
Rating: really liked it
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 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
Rating: really liked it
A quick read whirlwind tour of a number of topics, at a pace of only about 2-3 pages per topic. Some fun notes and examples:
- 75% of all births between 2020 - 2070 will be in Africa
- vaccinations have an extraordinarily high benefit-cost ratio, an approx. ~44X return on investment
- estimated heritability of linespace is only ~15-30% (?)
- humans are sweating champions in the animal kingdom, very useful for thermoregulation and endurance even in hot weather
- synthesis of ammonia not only averted the Malthusian catastrophe, but also just in time allowed a blockaded Germany to continue manufacturing explosives and prolonged WWI by years.
- renewables only provided ~4.5% of electricity in 2017, and electricity is only 27% of global energy consumption ;s
- many large uses of fossil fuels have no clear non-carbon alternatives, including long-distance transport (air, water), production of primary iron, cement, synthesis of ammonia, plastics, space heating
- no other domesticated land animal can covert feed to meat as efficiently as broilers (chickens raised for meat production), at a feed-to-meat conversion efficiency of ~15% (pork 10%, beef 4%). The lives of these chicken are straight up unethical - they live 7 weeks (normal lifespan is ~8 years), have malformed bodies, spend life in dark confinement. But cost $2.94 / pound of boneless breast, great.
- in North America / Europe about 60% of total crop production is for animal feed, not human feed
- four pillars of modern civilization, allegedly: ammonia, steel, cement, plastics
This is a fun / quick read, though mostly a large collection of mostly disconnected cliff-notes style quick fact summaries that are dense in numbers and comparisons and can become a bit exhausting. Perhaps due to speed, some topics get a somewhat questionable, almost misleading treatment, for example I found the EV and GDP sections mildly annoying.
Rating: really liked it
Finally gave up on this. It's just a series of rants. The most pessimistic, cynical and grouchy book I've read. Yes, there are facts, though mostly lacking reference and explanation, but they're often fairly common knowledge. There's a lot of contradiction too. I gave up after the chapter titled Being Realistic About Innovation. It was basically a rant asking why is humanity focussing on hyperloops when we can't even fix aeroplane boarding. It's just a facile argument. The latter is fixed, it's just airlines haven't implemented it for a variety of reasons. It has no bearing on the research going on in other areas. The same chapter talks about what a waste it has been researching breeder nuclear power plants, because they never worked out. Come on, Smil, if you're going to criticise failed promises maybe counter it with delivered innovation. True, breeders haven't quite provided what was 'promised', but show someone from the 1960s a smartphone, or AI, or Google, or a pic from the Hubble.
The whole book reads like someone who has lost faith in the modern world and no longer understands it. In 2020 the world doesn't need this book, it needs a way to examine these facts and determine how to make them work for us, or alter them so they do.
Rating: really liked it
An essential guide to understanding how numbers reveal the true state of our world and exploring a wide range of topics including energy, the environment, technology, transportation, and food production. Renowned polymath and statistician 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 environment--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 world--and how all of this affects the planet itself--in Numbers Don't Lie, Vaclav Smil takes us on a fact-finding adventure, using surprising statistics and illuminating graphs 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 wit--all in bite-sized chapters on a broad range of topics--Numbers Don't Lie inspires readers to interrogate what they take to be true.
Undoubtedly one of the most riveting and interesting nonfiction books of the past few years, Vaclav Smil has become a must-read author for me. His books are always so fascinating, informative, accessible and above all else, and what sets them apart from the rest, highly entertaining. Spanning a multitude of diverse topics, he provides answers to questions I didn't even know I needed, or wanted, the answers to. With humorous anecdotes, objective statistics and a wide-ranging set of examples to illustrate his points, Smil once again has created a fantastic, fun and eminently readable work which helps us to see a different perspective on the numbers that tell us all about the intriguing and enigmatic world in which we live. Many thanks to Viking for an ARC.
Rating: really liked it
See more of my book reviews on my blog, Literary Flits
Numbers Don't Lie is a collection of numerous short essays which were, mostly, first published in American magazine, IEEE Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. Covering a wide range of topics, the essays are crammed with a lot of information, but their brevity means that I never quite felt as though Smil had explored each of his ideas to a satisfactory depth. I was frequently left with a nagging sense that perhaps the crux of the matter had been left, unexamined, just out of the frame. Numbers in themselves don't lie, but their selection and presentation can easily be manipulated to prove pretty much any argument and I wondered what the major influences behind this work were. I would certainly question the two essays promoting increased cow's milk consumption as universally healthy for humans, and essays regarding the future of meat-eating actually seemed to contradict each other. Smil apparent resignation to continued levels of fossil fuel usage is concerning. Comments like diesel fuel being here to stay are directly counter to what we must achieve to combat the climate emergency, and Smil does seem surprisingly negative about the possibilities for renewable energy solutions, especially now governments are beginning to actively support such technologies rather than suppressing them through biased taxation measures (a point he doesn't make). Assumptions of slow progress historically within an industry doesn't mean significant gains will never be made there and it's perfectly possible to concurrently pursue several avenues of improvement. Overall I think Numbers Don't Lie could be an interesting starting point to spark conversations about some of the issues raised, but unfortunately I found it more of a frustrating read than anything else with the snarky comments concluding each essay being particularly irritating.
Rating: really liked it
This book is a collection of short essays written by Vaclav Smil that explore various unrelated topics.
From a brief exploration of the history of bicycles, the consequences of some countries having increasingly older populations, and showing us how electricity costs us much less than it did decades ago, to some opinions such as the importance of dairy consumption and moderate meat eating not having any adverse health effects, this book has a little bit of everything. However, after having finished it, I was left without retaining much information,
because the delivery was extremely dry. I should've known better before picking up a book called "Numbers Don't Lie...", and in hindsight, it isn't that surprising, but I was hoping the information would be delivered in a more digestible and interesting way.
Instead, we get endless pages of facts and statistics being listed, and I was quite honestly bored. A lot of topics were simply not that interesting, especially the section regarding fuels and electricity which was an absolute slog to get through, and the ones that were of slight interest to me didn't offer any new insights, simply regurgitating facts and figures in a robotic tone.
Definitely not what I like reading, so perhaps I shouldn't have picked this up to begin with. However, if facts and numbers being delivered in a relatively dry and straightforward way would not bore you, this book might be an interesting read. Bill Gates states that this book is one of his favourites, which isn't what drew me to read this, but I thought I should mention it if it is at all relevant. As for me, I will be making sure to avoid these types of books in the future, and I prefer consuming this type of information through visual media.
“Numbers may not lie, but individual perceptions of them differ.”
Rating: really liked it
In the pro- and epilogue Vaclav Smil mentions that the goal of the book is to show that numbers should always be looked at in the context both broader and narrower. Numbers might not lie, but their truth is not always immediately apparent. The book provides 72 example questions plus answers, limiting each question to only a few pages.
While not unexpected, all the examples come at the cost of detail. The author might show that numbers need to be examined from various angles, but, since only very few examples even include a minor discussion on the meaning, it is left to the reader to fill in the blanks: there is *n0* overarching narrative or argument. It also create a sense of contradictive examples especially in the chapter on technological development and the environment. The shortness of each chapter also means some things are provided as fact, but on what basis does the author concludes that milk drinking increases the age of death? There might be a correlation, but is not the same as it being the cause. Finally, the author is kind of negative in the far majority of his examples, especially when it comes to environment and technological developments. Are there really no positive examples on numbers except the occasional one in transportation? To be honest, when I read the author proudly proclaim he has never used a smartphone, and describes an average day of the life in an office worker that comes nowhere near my or that of my co-workers, he comes across as a bit behind the times.
All in all, it is an easily digestible book that provides some food for thought, but it lacks body, partially expected due to its setup and partially due to the chosen randomness of the subjects and negative/contradictive example. If you look for a quick read and some alternative points of view on various questions, it is the book for you. Otherwise, meh.
Rating: really liked it
First and foremost I really like the way the book is structured. It consists of small articles which the author has written for various publications and now has been compiled here. Since all of them are really short ones one can easily pick up the book from anywhere and start reading. (And can leave in between and restart again at another time).
The main premise of the book is to make us understand the complexity of the world we live in through numbers. It helps immensely in our pursuit of better understanding this world and hence make it a better place. The author has stated in the introduction that the goal is to demonstrate not only that numbers do not lie, but to discover which truth they convey.
The book deals with diverse number of areas and hence it is surely a delightful read. On the way one discovers new things and also understands the larger picture where the numbers are already known. One can dive in to the book if they are wondering about these questions-
1. Which is the best indicator of quality of life?
2. How far can China go?
3. Why we shouldn't write diesel off just yet?
4. Why Nuclear electricity is am unfulfilled promise?
5. What's rational meat eating?
6. What's worse for the environment- your car or the phone?
Again these are only 6 out of 71 interesting topics which are covered in this essential read. I like how efficiently the author has conveyed very complex ideas in a simplistic manner. Again when backed with statistics you cant really ignore the assertion even when its counterintuitive.
The only drawback I encountered while reading the book was that the articles ended too soon. The fact that book covers 71 articles it became too short and a deeper and meaningful analysis was not possible. I know the very strength of this book also makes for a weakness in my opinion.
Rating: really liked it
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 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.
Rating: really liked it
This book helped me better understand a lot of little things I had been trying to wrap my head around.
Such as termal conductivity in different building materials and their cost to the environment.
Reading this book feels like having an ultra factual conversation on a bit of each of the most consequential practical technologies of our time with a team of of specialists, each getting 3 minutes to speak.
Rating: really liked it
One of the rare times I did not enjoy a Bill Gates recommendation.
Book-reader mismatch: too broad, not deep enough (unlike Smil's thorough, challenging, and fantastic Energy and Civilization: A History). In the afterword Smil makes it clear this is mostly a collection of unrelated short essays he wrote for IEEE Spectrum.
In the intro, Smil says "this book is about getting the facts straight" yet some topics and conclusions venture into realms that seem like personal or political conclusions or judgements. I'm not opposed to that at all - but when you have some chapters that make the case for topics like vaccinations or home energy efficiency (which should be objectively measurable) and others that make the case for personal/political observations (like how well the EU functions), it doesn't really support the title.
Another gripe that triggered me as a disciple of Gary Taubes: in the section "Energizing Ourselves", it's clear Smil is writing about food and calories with an energy balance mental model, e.g. overeating causes obesity. Example: "Americans are still eating more [food] than is good for them" (p232). This danger of this type of statement, which feels intuitively true (and to be fair, in many respects is true), it does not leave room for discussion of metabolic issues, e.g. the idea the
type of food you eat can impact your hormones (like insulin) which are responsible for "deciding" whether to store calories as fat, or burn them. (Just read Gary Taubes)
Rating: really liked it
A bit overrated.
All the facts are quite well documented and the overall reasoning is good, but I can't honestly say that there was any 'wow effect' ('OMG! I didn't know that, this changes my perspective on X and Y soooo much!'). Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it was all obvious and there were no surprises - far from that.
The chapter(s) I found most interesting? Probably the one about the energy cost of production and maintenance of personal electronics (phone) VS car. And the one about the economics of wind farms. Honestly, I can't recall any other ones that have stuck in my memory until now.
2.7 stars.
Rating: really liked it
I am hesitating between 4 and 5 stars. This book really made me realise I don't know that much about the world. It also made me less optimistic about the future. So I learned a lot (like the world most important stuff if ammonia, steel, cement and plastics) but I lost some as well (my believe in green energy).
Rating: really liked it
Definitely a lot of interesting an insightful facts and figures about the world we live in. I however missed an overarching story line.
