![Amazon prime logo](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/marketing/prime/new_prime_logo_RGB_blue._CB426090081_.png)
Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
-42% $10.99$10.99
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Save with Used - Very Good
$9.89$9.89
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Jenson Books Inc
Learn more
1.27 mi | ASHBURN 20147
Returnable | Yes |
---|---|
Resolutions | Eligible for refund or replacement |
Return Window | 30 days from delivery |
Refund Timelines | Typically, an advance refund will be issued within 24 hours of a drop-off or pick-up. For returns that require physical verification, refund issuance may take up to 30 days after drop-off or pick up. Where an advance refund is issued, we will re-charge your payment method if we do not receive the correct item in original condition. See details here. |
Late fee | A late fee of 20% of the item price will apply if you complete the drop off or pick up after the ‘Return By Date’. |
Restocking fee | A restocking fee may apply if the item is not returned in original condition and original packaging, or is damaged or missing parts for reasons not due to Amazon or seller error. See details here. |
Return instructions
Item must be in original condition and packaging along with tag, accessories, manuals, and inserts. Unlock any electronic device, delete your account and remove all personal information. |
Returnable | Yes |
---|---|
Resolutions | Eligible for refund or replacement |
Return Window | 30 days from delivery |
Refund Timelines | Typically, an advance refund will be issued within 24 hours of a drop-off or pick-up. For returns that require physical verification, refund issuance may take up to 30 days after drop-off or pick up. Where an advance refund is issued, we will re-charge your payment method if we do not receive the correct item in original condition. See details here. |
Late fee | A late fee of 20% of the item price will apply if you complete the drop off or pick up after the ‘Return By Date’. |
Restocking fee | A restocking fee may apply if the item is not returned in original condition and original packaging, or is damaged or missing parts for reasons not due to Amazon or seller error. See details here. |
Return instructions
Item must be in original condition and packaging along with tag, accessories, manuals, and inserts. Unlock any electronic device, delete your account and remove all personal information. |
![Kindle app logo image](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/app/kindle-app-logo._CB668847749_.png)
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World Paperback – May 4, 2021
Purchase options and add-ons
From the author of How the World Really Works, an essential guide to understanding how numbers reveal the true state of our world--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 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.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateMay 4, 2021
- Dimensions5.4 x 0.73 x 8.24 inches
- ISBN-100143136224
- ISBN-13978-0143136224
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
![iphone with kindle app](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/dp/nfcx/PersistentWidget-Ruby-Large._CB485955431_.png)
Explore your book, then jump right back to where you left off with Page Flip.
View high quality images that let you zoom in to take a closer look.
Enjoy features only possible in digital – start reading right away, carry your library with you, adjust the font, create shareable notes and highlights, and more.
Discover additional details about the events, people, and places in your book, with Wikipedia integration.
Similar items that may ship from close to you
- Energy and Civilization: A History (Mit Press)PaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Thursday, Jul 18
- Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and FailureHardcoverFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Thursday, Jul 18
- Size: How It Explains the WorldPaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Thursday, Jul 18
- Energy: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides)PaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Thursday, Jul 18
- Oil: A Beginner's Guide (Beginner's Guides)PaperbackFREE Shipping on orders over $35 shipped by AmazonGet it as soon as Thursday, Jul 18
Get to know this book
What's it about?
This book is about how numbers reveal the true state of our world, exploring topics like energy, environment, technology, transportation, and food production.Popular highlight
The lesson is obvious: the easiest way to improve a child’s chances of growing taller is for them to drink more milk.609 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
In the race of life, we humans are neither the fastest nor the most efficient. But thanks to our sweating capability, we are certainly the most persistent.459 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
My own choice of a single-variable measure for rapid and revealing comparisons of quality of life is infant mortality: the number of deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births.408 Kindle readers highlighted this
From the Publisher
![Vaclav Smil is my favorite author — Bill Gates](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/aplus-media-library-service-media/9b8a857a-58dd-4a9c-a172-7ef0434ae0d1.__CR0,0,970,300_PT0_SX970_V1___.jpg)
Editorial Reviews
Review
“[A] tidy, entertaining collection of brief inquiries into a host of hot-button topics… Throughout, Smil’s viewpoint is balanced, and each element of the text is fully backed by research as well as the author’s contagious curiosity. Even when examining dire circumstances, Smil keeps readers engaged. A fascinating book to be read straight through or consulted bit by bit.”—KIRKUS
“[Smil] presents a robust array of data, at times with devastating acuity.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Within an eclectic topical range encompassing energy production, transportation, machines and devices, food production and consumption, and demography, Smil uses numbers to pin down the facts… in each essay, his literary and numeric clarity guarantees that readers will learn new facts and gain new perspectives.”—BOOKLIST
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
What happens when we have fewer children?
Total fertility rate (TFR) is the number of children born per woman during her lifetime. The most obvious physical constraint on this is the length of the fertile period (from menarche to menopause). The age of first menstruation has been decreasing from about 17 years in preindustrial societies to less than 13 years in today's Western world, while the average onset of menopause has advanced slightly, to just above 50, resulting in a typical fertile span of some 38 years compared to about 30 years in traditional societies.
There are 300-400 ovulations during the fertile lifespan. As every pregnancy precludes 10 ovulations and because an additional 5-6 ovulations have to be subtracted for each pregnancy, due to the reduced chance of conception during the traditionally prolonged breastfeeding period, the maximum fertility rate is about two dozen pregnancies. With some multiple births the total can be in excess of 24 live births, confirmed by historical records of women having more than 30 children.
But typical maximum fertility rates in societies practicing no birth control have always been much lower than this, due to the combination of pregnancy loss, still births, infertility, and premature maternal mortality. These realities reduce maximum population-wide fertilities to 7-8; indeed, such rates were common on all continents well into the 19th century, in parts of Asia until two generations ago, and they can still be found in sub-Saharan Africa, with Niger at 7.5 (which is well below the preferred family size: when asked, the average number of children that Nigerien women would prefer is 9.1!). But even in that region, the TFR-although still high-has declined (to 5-6 in most of those countries), and the rest of the world now lives with moderate, low, and extremely low fertilities.
The transition toward this new world began at different times, not only among different regions but also within regions: France was far ahead of Italy, Japan far ahead of China-and Communist China eventually took the drastic step of restricting families to a single child. That aside, desire for fewer children has been driven by an often highly synergistic combination of gradually rising standards of living, the mechanization of agricultural work, the displacement of animals and people by machines, mass-scale industrialization and urbanization, increasing numbers of females in the urban labor force, advancing universal education, better healthcare, a higher survival rate of newborns, and government-guaranteed pensions.
A historic pursuit of quantity turned, sometimes rapidly, into the quest for quality: the benefits of high fertility (ensuring survival amid high infant mortality; supplying additional labor force; providing old-age insurance) began to weaken and then to disappear, and smaller families invested more in their children and in raising their quality of life, usually starting with better nutrition (more meat and fresh fruit; more eating out) and ending with SUVs and flights to distant tropical beaches.
As is often the case in both social and technical transitions, the pathbreakers took a long time to accomplish the change, while some late adopters completed the process in just two generations. The shift from high to low fertility took about two centuries in Denmark and about 170 years in Sweden. In contrast, South Korean fertility fell from more than 6 TFR to below the replacement level in just 30 years, and even before the introduction of the one-child policy, Chinese fertility had plunged from 6.4 in 1962 to 2.6 in 1980. But the unlikely record holder is Iran. In 1979, when the monarchy was overthrown and Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to establish a theocracy, Iran's fertility averaged 6.5, but by the year 2000 it was down to the replacement level and it has continued to fall.
The replacement level of fertility is that which maintains a population at a stable level. It is about 2.1, with the additional fraction needed to make up for girls who will not survive into fertile age. No country has been able to stop the fertility decline at the replacement level and achieve a stationary population. An increasing share of humanity lives in societies with below-replacement fertility levels. In 1950, 40 percent of humanity lived in countries with fertilities above 6 and the mean rate was about 5; by the year 2000, just 5 percent of the global population was in countries with fertilities above 6, and the mean (2.6) was close to the replacement level. By 2050, nearly three-quarters of humanity will reside in countries with below-replacement fertility.
This nearly global shift has had enormous demographic, economic, and strategic implications. European importance has diminished (in 1900 the continent had about 18 percent of the world's population; in 2020 it has only 9.5 percent) and Asia has ascended (60 percent of the world total in 2020), but regional high fertilities guarantee that nearly 75 percent of all births during the 50 years between 2020 and 2070 will be in Africa.
And what does the future hold for countries whose fertility has fallen below the replacement level? If the national rates remain close to the replacement (no lower than 1.7; France and Sweden were at 1.8 in 2019), then there is a good chance of possible future rebounds. Once they slip below 1.5, such reversals appear increasingly unlikely: in 2019, there were record lows of 1.3 in Spain, Italy, and Romania, and 1.4 in Japan, Ukraine, Greece, and Croatia. Gradual population decline (with all of its social, economic, and strategic implications) seems to be the future of Japan and of many European countries. So far, no pro-natalist government policies have brought any major reversal, and the only obvious option to prevent depopulation is to open the gates for immigration-but that looks unlikely to happen.
The best indicator of quality of life? Try infant mortality
When looking for the most revealing measures of human quality of life, economists-ever ready to reduce everything to money-prefer to rely on per capita values of gross domestic product (GDP) or disposable income. Both measures are obviously questionable. GDP goes up in a society where increasing violence requires more policing, higher investment in security measures, and more frequent admissions to hospitals; and average disposable income tells us nothing about the degree of economic inequality or about the social net available to disadvantaged families. Even so, these measures do give a pretty good overall ranking of countries. Not too many people would prefer to live in Iraq (2018 nominal GDP of about $6,000) than in Denmark (2018 nominal GDP of about $60,000). And average quality of life is undoubtedly higher in Denmark than in Romania: both belong to the EU, but the disposable income is 75 percent higher in the former.
Since 1990, the most common alternative has been to use the Human Development Index (HDI), a multivariable measure constructed in order to provide a better yardstick. It combines life expectancy at birth and educational achievements (mean and expected years of schooling) with the gross national income per capita-but (not surprisingly) it correlates highly with the average per capita GDP, making the latter variable about as good a measure of the quality of life as the more elaborate index.
My own choice of a single-variable measure for rapid and revealing comparisons of quality of life is infant mortality: the number of deaths during the first year of life that take place per 1,000 live births.
Infant mortality is such a powerful indicator because low rates are impossible to achieve without having a combination of several critical conditions that define good quality of life-good healthcare in general, and appropriate prenatal, perinatal, and neonatal care in particular; proper maternal and infant nutrition; adequate and sanitary living conditions; and access to social support for disadvantaged families-and that are also predicated on relevant government and private spending, and on infrastructures and incomes that can maintain usage and access. A single variable thus captures a number of prerequisites for the near-universal survival of the most critical period of life: the first year.
Infant mortalities in preindustrial societies were uniformly and cruelly high: even by 1850 the rates in western Europe and in the United States were as high as 200-300 (that is, every fifth to every third child did not survive the first 365 days). By 1950, the Western mean was reduced to 35-65 (typically one out of 20 newborns died within its first year), and now the lowest rates in affluent countries are below 5 (with one infant among 200 not seeing its first birthday). After leaving out minuscule jurisdictions-from Andorra and Anguilla to Monaco and San Marino-this group with infant mortalities lower than 5 per 1,000 includes about 35 countries ranging from Japan (at 2) to Serbia (at just under 5), and its frontrunners show why the measure cannot be used for simplistic ranking without reference to wider demographic conditions.
Countries with the lowest infant mortalities are mostly small (with populations less than 10 million and usually less than 5 million), they include the world's most homogeneous societies ( Japan and South Korea in Asia; Iceland, Finland, and Norway in Europe), and most of them have very low birth rates. Obviously, it is more challenging to reach and maintain very low infant mortalities in larger, heterogeneous societies with high rates of immigration from less affluent countries, and in countries with higher birth rates. As a result, it would be difficult to replicate the Icelandic rate (3) in Canada (infant mortality at 5), a country whose population is more than 100 times larger and that welcomes annually about as many newcomers (from scores of countries, and mostly from low-income societies in Asia) as there are total people living in Iceland. The same realities affect the United States, but the country's relatively high infant mortality (6) is undoubtedly influenced (as is, to a lesser degree, the Canadian rate) by higher economic inequality.
In this sense, infant mortality is a more discerning indicator of quality of life than the income average or the Human Development Index, but it still needs qualifications: no single measure is a fully satisfactory proxy for gauging a nation's quality of life. What is not in doubt is that infant mortalities remain unacceptably high in a dozen of sub-Saharan nations. Their rates (above 60 per 1,000) are equal to those in western Europe some 100 years ago, a timespan that evokes the developmental gap those nations have to close in order to catch up with affluent economies.
The best return on investment: Vaccination
Death due to infectious diseases in infancy and childhood remains perhaps the cruelest fate in the modern world, and one of the most preventable. Measures needed to minimize this untimely mortality cannot be ranked as to their importance: clean drinking water and adequate nutrition are as vital as disease prevention and proper sanitation. But if you judge them by their benefit-cost ratios, vaccination is the clear winner.
Modern vaccination dates back to the 18th century, when Edward Jenner introduced it against smallpox. Vaccines against cholera and plague were created before the First World War, and others against tuberculosis, tetanus, and diphtheria before the Second. The great postwar breakthroughs included routine vaccinations against pertussis (whooping cough) and polio. Today, the standard practice everywhere is to inoculate children with a pentavalent vaccine that prevents diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and polio, as well as meningitis, otitis, and pneumonia, three infections caused by Haemophilus influenzae type B. The first dose comes 6 weeks after birth; the other two follow at 10 and 14 weeks. Each pentavalent vaccine costs less than $1, and every additional vaccinated child reduces the chances of infection among unvaccinated peers.
Given these realities, it has been always clear that vaccination has an extraordinarily high benefit-cost ratio, though one that is not easy to quantify. But thanks to a 2016 study supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and conducted by US healthcare professionals in Baltimore, Boston, and Seattle, we can finally measure the payoff. The study's focus was on the return on investment associated with projected vaccination coverage levels in nearly 100 low- and middle-income countries during the second decade of this century-the decade of vaccines.
Benefit-cost ranges were based on the costs of vaccines and of their supply and delivery chains on one hand, and on estimates of the averted costs of morbidity and mortality on the other. For every dollar invested in vaccination, $16 is expected to be saved in healthcare costs and the lost wages and lost productivity caused by illness and death.
And when the analysis went beyond the restricted cost-of-illness approach and looked at broader economic benefits, it found the net benefit-cost ratio was more than twice as high-reaching 44 times, with an uncertainty range of 27 to 67. The highest rewards were for averting measles: a 58-fold return.
The Gates Foundation released the finding of the 44-fold benefit in the form of a letter to Warren Buffett, the foundation's largest outside donor. Even he must be impressed with such a return on investment!
There is still some way to go. After generations of progress, the basic vaccination coverage in high-income countries is now nearly universal, at around 96 percent, and great advances have been made in low-income nations, where the coverage has risen from only 50 percent in the year 2000 to 80 percent in 2016.
The hardest part might be to eliminate the threat of infectious diseases entirely. Polio is perhaps the best illustration of this challenge: the worldwide infection rate dropped from some 400,000 cases in 1985 to fewer than 100 by the year 2000, but in 2016 there were still 37 cases in violence-beset regions of northern Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And, as illustrated recently by the Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19 viruses, new infection risks will arise. Vaccines remain the best way to control them.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books (May 4, 2021)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0143136224
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143136224
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.4 x 0.73 x 8.24 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #34,483 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #34 in Probability & Statistics (Books)
- #116 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)
- #712 in World History (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Vaclav Smil](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/S/amzn-author-media-prod/915b4q6da3a06v7hji0s01ebgu._SY600_.jpg)
Vaclav Smil is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He completed his graduate studies at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Carolinum University in Prague and at the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of the Pennsylvania State University. His interdisciplinary research interests encompass a broad area of energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies, and he had also applied these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science Academy) and the first non-American to receive the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology. He has been an invited speaker in more than 250 conferences and workshops in the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, has lectured at many universities in North America, Europe and East Asia and has worked as a consultant for many US, EU and international institutions. His wife Eva is a physician and his son David is an organic synthetic chemist.
Official Website: www.vaclavsmil.com
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book very informative and well-presented on a wide range of topics. They also describe it as easy to read and entertaining.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the book very informative and wonderful. They also appreciate the variety of areas and subjects discussed. Readers also mention that the book contains interesting facts that don't always align with what they hear from the media.
"...There were some great thought exercises in this book, and I loved how Smil was able to come up with creative analogies and comparisons to encourage..." Read more
""Numbers Don't Lie" is a very informative book on a wide range of topics written in an approachable and direct format...." Read more
"...Some are smartly written and elucidating, while some others are leaving a bit to be desired and potentially even looking at spurious correlations...." Read more
"This book is so well written and clearly illustrated with graphs, it is a revaluation on the challenges of our times...." Read more
Customers find the book easy to read and good for bedtime reading. They also appreciate the concise ideas and entertaining content.
"...The book is an easy read, and because the chapters are short and not bogged down in too many technical terms, it should appeal to a wide audience...." Read more
"...is a very informative book on a wide range of topics written in an approachable and direct format...." Read more
"...Some are smartly written and elucidating, while some others are leaving a bit to be desired and potentially even looking at spurious correlations...." Read more
"This book is so well written and clearly illustrated with graphs, it is a revaluation on the challenges of our times...." Read more
Reviews with images
![Fun ways of thinking about data, and putting things into correct historical context](https://cdn.statically.io/img/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/common/transparent-pixel._V192234675_.gif)
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Even in just the Introduction, there were already some surprising facts and comparisons that got me thinking. For example I was surprised to learn that Nigeria, as Africa’s most populous country, only uses 35 gigajoules of energy per year; while France was using 35 gigajoules per year by 1880. There are comparisons like this throughout the book, with the goal of putting raw data into a more digestible context, or helping you see numerical comparisons from a different perspective.
The book is divided into seven sections sections: People, Countries, Machines/Designs/Devices, Fuels/Electricity, Transport, Food, and Environment. In each section, Smil has several chapters that are each only a few pages. The chapters are each isolated stories about data, and don't really flow into each other like one cohesive narrative. This makes it easy to read a few, then put the book down and come back to it later, as you don't need the information from previous chapters to understand the next chapter.
There were some great thought exercises in this book, and I loved how Smil was able to come up with creative analogies and comparisons to encourage thinking about information in different ways. The book is an easy read, and because the chapters are short and not bogged down in too many technical terms, it should appeal to a wide audience. Highly recommended!
![Customer image](https://cdn.statically.io/img/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/common/transparent-pixel._V192234675_.gif)
Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2021
Even in just the Introduction, there were already some surprising facts and comparisons that got me thinking. For example I was surprised to learn that Nigeria, as Africa’s most populous country, only uses 35 gigajoules of energy per year; while France was using 35 gigajoules per year by 1880. There are comparisons like this throughout the book, with the goal of putting raw data into a more digestible context, or helping you see numerical comparisons from a different perspective.
The book is divided into seven sections sections: People, Countries, Machines/Designs/Devices, Fuels/Electricity, Transport, Food, and Environment. In each section, Smil has several chapters that are each only a few pages. The chapters are each isolated stories about data, and don't really flow into each other like one cohesive narrative. This makes it easy to read a few, then put the book down and come back to it later, as you don't need the information from previous chapters to understand the next chapter.
There were some great thought exercises in this book, and I loved how Smil was able to come up with creative analogies and comparisons to encourage thinking about information in different ways. The book is an easy read, and because the chapters are short and not bogged down in too many technical terms, it should appeal to a wide audience. Highly recommended!
![Customer image](https://cdn.statically.io/img/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91H7W7jO-CL._SY88.jpg)
![Customer image](https://cdn.statically.io/img/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91Pk7EVMLRL._SY88.jpg)
![Customer image](https://cdn.statically.io/img/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91V3DS9Uh4L._SY88.jpg)
*Once a country's fertility rate slips below 1.5 reversals of population decline are unlikely. Gradual population decline in Japan and many European countries seem inevitable while 75% of all births between 2020-2070 are expected to be in Africa;
*For every $1.00 invested in vaccinations $16.00 is expected to be saved in healthcare costs;
*Greater consumption of animal protein (meat, eggs and especially milk) is associated with a taller population, which is associated with longer life expectancy, lower risk of cardiovascular disease, higher cognitive abilities higher lifetime earnings and higher social status. Countries with the tallest populations include the Netherlands, Belgium, Estonia, Latvia and Denmark;
*Gas turbines are the ideal/most affordable suppliers of peak power and the best backups for wind and solar generation. The cost of new capacity in 2023 is expected to be $60 per megawatt-hour(MWh) for coal, $48 for solar photovoltaic, $40 for onshore wind, $30 for conventional gas turbines, and $10 for combined cycle gas turbines;
*Wind turbines are difficult to make, transport and require a large quantity of fossil fuels to construct;
*As a global mean, more than 60% of the electricity for an electric vehicle comes from fossil carbon. The manufacture of an EV creates 3x more toxicity than the construction of an ICE;
*High speed rail is the most energy efficient form of transportation compared to planes or automobiles. China has the world's longest network of high-speed rail with 29,000 kilometers while countries like the US, Canada and Australia as laggards;
*Better window insulation (triple-glazed windows) is one of the most effective ways to conserve energy;
*Carbon emissions are starting to slow down in affluent countries although are increasing in India and Africa, and therefore it is unlikely there will be a global decrease in the near term. The only way to keep the average world temperature from rising no more than 1.5 degrees C is to bring emissions to zero by 2050 which is almost impossible. There is currently not a sufficiently low-cost alternative to carbon that can produce the four pillars of civilization (ammonia, steel. cement and plastics) that will be consumed in Africa and Asia for decades.
The opening section is quite uneven ranging from ancient Egypt and the pyramids to fertility rates to human heights. The later sections are much tighter and focussed. The opening section is on is on People ("inhabitants of Our World"), followed by "nations in the Age of Globalization", and then "Inventions that Made Our World". The fourth section is "Energizing Our Societies", "How We Get Around", "Energizing Ourselves", and ending with "Damaging and Protecting Our World".
Smil does okay, but not great, in the articles involving sociology, social sciences and/or social issues. He really excels when talking about actually engineering issues, say for example like the gas turbine and other topics in the last 4 sections.
Prof Smil has gotten very good at presenting different life aspects in a quantitative manner.
Highly recommended for the Engineering minds out there.
Top reviews from other countries
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
Achei todos os assuntos abordados, em capítulos, de fácil leitura, quase divertidos, nunca cansativos ou chatos.
O livro me manteve interessado do começo ao fim.
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
I strongly recommend it for all the curious people out there who want to understand better how our world works, and why it does that like this.
![](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
![](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png)
In this book, there is a wealth of information about our world and how so many parts of it work. It is written very authoritatively by a highly knowledgeable author. This is a book that can be enjoyed by anyone and should be read, I believe, by everyone.