Numbers Don’t Lie
Summary
Smil presents 71 short chapters as a practicum on basic numeracy, going through topics as varied as what makes us happy, how many people did it actually take to build the pyramids, is America exceptional, and eventually to Smil’s favorite topic of energy. Most chapters are exceptionally short, spanning just a few pages, but chock full of numbers and facts. Smil takes numbers seriously.
Quotes
But lifespan is a bodily characteristic that arises from the interaction of genes with the environment. Genes may themselves introduce biophysical limits, and so can environmental effects such as smoking […] the estimated heritability of lifespan is modest, between 15 and 30 percent. (26)
We are the superstars of sweating, and we need to be. An amateur running the marathon at a slow pace will consume energy at a rate of 700–800 watts, and an experienced marathoner who covers the 42.2 kilometers in 2.5 hours will metabolize at a rate of about 1,300 watts.
And we have another advantage when we lose water: we don’t have to make up the deficit instantly. Humans can tolerate considerable temporary dehydration providing that we rehydrate in a day or so. In fact, the best marathon runners drink only about 200 milliliters per hour during a race. (29)
American readers might find these facts discomforting, but there is nothing arguable about them. In the United States, babies are more likely to die and high schoolers are less likely to learn than their counterparts in other affluent countries. Politicians may look far and wide for evidence of American exceptionalism, but they won’t find it in the numbers, where it matters.(60)
- Smil is looking for measures of what make a good society, and he zeroes in on infant mortality rate and educational achievement, and by both measures America is decidedly middle of the pack.
The 1880s were miraculous; they gave us such disparate contributions as antiperspirants, inexpensive lights, reliable elevators, and the theory of electromagnetism—although most people lost in their ephemeral tweets and in Facebook gossip are not even remotely aware of the true scope of this quotidian debt. (100)
For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels. (150)
In the past 70 years, the energy density of the best commercial batteries hasn’t even quadrupled. (169)
But even though Ford staked much on this one car, it didn’t quite become the bestselling vehicle in history. That primacy belongs to the “people’s car” of Germany—the Volkswagen. Soon after he came to power, Adolf Hitler decreed its specifications, insisted on its distinctive beetle-like appearance, and ordered Ferdinand Porsche to design it. (195)
In the US more than half of all tuna served in restaurants and sushi shops is mislabeled. (242)
The most impressive illustration of China’s unprecedented construction effort is that in just the last two years the country emplaced more cement (about 4.7 billion tons) than the US did cumulatively throughout the entire 20th century (about 4.6 billion tons)! (285)
Always keeping in mind that these are just broad statistical associations, not causal claims, we might conclude that through elimination of likely nutritional factors, we see lower fat and lower sugar intakes as possibly important co-determinants of longevity.
The Paris Agreement of 2015 was lauded as the first accord containing specific national commitments to reduce future emissions. But actually, only a small number of countries made specific promises, there is no binding enforcement mechanism, and even if all those targets were met by 2030, carbon emissions would still rise to nearly 50 percent above the 2017 level. According to the 2018 study by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, the only way to keep the average world temperature rise to no more than 1.5°C would be to put emissions almost immediately into a decline steep enough to bring them to zero by 2050.
That is not impossible—but it is very unlikely. Reaching that goal would require nothing short of a fundamental transformation of the global economy on scales and at a speed unprecedented in human history, a task that would be impossible to do without major economic and social dislocations. The greatest challenge would be how to lift billions from poverty without relying on fossil carbon. The affluent world has used hundreds of billions of tons of it to create its high quality of life, but right now we do not have any affordable non-carbon alternatives that could be rapidly deployed on mass scales in order to energize the production of enormous quantities of what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization—ammonia, steel, cement, and plastics—which will be needed in Africa and Asia in the decades to come. The contrasts between the expressed concerns about global warming, the continued release of record volumes of carbon, and our capabilities to change that in the near term could not be starker.
Thoughts
Smil is a great thinker, and his power is to cut through the rhetoric and bias using as nearly unbiased data as possible to come to some conclusion about a hot button issue. You might disagree with the data, or how it was gathered, but the key part of using numbers in arguments is that the argument becomes assailable on some commonly agreed upon grounds. It is no longer an appeal to feelings, which are non-falsifiable. We can feel in our heart of hearts that American exceptionalism is a mirage, but until we define our terms and use some quantitative data in our assessment, we can only vaguely hand-wave towards euphemisms like “partisanship” or “quality of life”.
One of the fundamental abilities of humans is to leverage metaphor and abstraction to reason about physical reality, and especially about abstract concepts. But this short-circuits logical arguments that can be understood and rebutted. It is impossible to argue against the idea that America is receding on the global stage if you don’t define your terms and then build an actual argument removed from rhetoric. Rhetoric sways though, and arguments live and die based on language rather than numbers. This is Smil’s plea to counterbalance that narrative force.
At times, Smil can seem a curmudgeon as he snipes at the daze social media has cast over our intellectual capacities. This is the same sort of shouting at clouds most older folks do when they say anyone under 40 can’t go a whole conversation without looking at their phones. But within this book is a core animating principle that I’ve seen across Smil’s other work, and that is that there are truths in this world, icky ones in fact, that we need to divorce from rhetoric to make any meaningful progress on.