Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

by Vaclav Smil

My hope is that this book will help readers understand the true state of our world. I hope it might surprise you, cause you to marvel at the uniqueness of our species, at our inventiveness and our pursuit of better understanding. My goal is to demonstrate not only that numbers do not lie, but to discover which truth they convey.

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.

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.

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.

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.

TN Model

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.

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.

In contrast, measurements for the second half of the 20th century show minimal gains in India and Nigeria, none in Ethiopia, and a slight decline in Bangladesh.

The lesson is obvious: the easiest way to improve a child’s chances of growing taller is for them to drink more milk.

In 1850, the combined life expectancies of men and women stood at around 40 years in the United States, Canada, Japan, and much of Europe. Since then, the values have followed an impressive and almost perfectly linear increase that saw them nearly double. Women live longer in all societies, with the current maximum at just above 87 years in Japan.

The trend may well continue for a few decades, given that from 1950 to 2000 the life expectancies of elderly people in affluent countries rose at about 34 days per year. But without fundamental discoveries that change the way we age, this trend to longer life must weaken and finally end. The long-term trajectory of Japanese female life expectancy—which increased from 81.91 years in 1990 to 87.26 years in 2017—fits a symmetrical logistic curve that is already close to its asymptote of about 90 years.

The world record lifespan is the 122 years claimed for Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman who died in 1997. Strangely, after more than two decades, she still remains the oldest survivor ever, and by a substantial margin. (Indeed, the margin is so big as to be suspicious; her age and even her identity are in question.) The second-oldest supercentenarian died at 119, in 1999, and since that time there have been no survivors beyond the 117th year.

Kurzweil hopes that dietary interventions and other tricks will extend his own life until major scientific advances can preserve him forever. It is true that there are ideas on how such preservation might be achieved, among them the rejuvenation of human cells by extending their telomeres (the nucleotide sequences at the ends of a chromosome that fray with age). If it works, maybe it can lift the realistic maximum to well above 125 years. But for now, the best advice I can give to all but a few remarkably precocious readers is to plan ahead—though perhaps not as far ahead as the 22nd century.

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.

Documented cases of such long-distance chases come from three continents and include some of the fleetest quadrupeds. In North America, the Tarahumara of northwestern Mexico could outrun deer. Further north, Paiutes and Navajos could exhaust pronghorns. In South Africa, Kalahari Basarwa ran down a variety of antelopes and even wildebeests and zebras during the dry season.

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.

In 1800, less than 2 percent of the world’s population lived in cities; by 1900 the share was still only about 5 percent. By 1950 it had reached 30 percent, and 2007 became the first year when more than half of humanity lived in cities. By 2016, the United Nations’ comprehensive survey found 512 cities with a population greater than 1 million, with 45 of them larger than 5 million and 31 surpassing 10 million. This largest group has a special name: “megacities.”

20 out of the 35 megacities (nearly 60 percent) are in Asia. There are six in Latin America, two in Europe (Moscow and Paris), three in Africa (Cairo, Lagos, Kinshasa), and two in North America (New York and Los Angeles).

United Nations has forecast the emergence of 10 additional megacities by 2030: six in Asia (including India’s Ahmedabad and Hyderabad), three in Africa (Johannesburg, Dar es Salaam, Luanda), and Colombia’s Bogotá.

In 1909, Fritz Haber, a professor at the University of Karlsruhe, had ended the long-running quest for synthesizing ammonia from its elements. Nitrogen and hydrogen were combined under high pressure and in the presence of a catalyst, to make ammonia (NH3

By October 1913, BASF—then the world’s leading chemical conglomerate, under the leadership of Carl Bosch—had commercialized the process at the world’s first ammonia plant, in Oppau in Germany. This synthetic ammonia was to be used in the production of such solid fertilizers as sodium or ammonium nitrate (see THE WORLD WITHOUT SYNTHETIC AMMONIA, p. 221).

Excusing that very poor rating by saying that the European countries have homogeneous populations does not work: modern France and Germany are full of recent immigrants (just spend some time in Marseille or Düsseldorf). What matters more is parental knowledge, good nutrition, the extent of economic inequality, and access to universal healthcare, the United States being (notoriously) the only modern affluent country without the latter.

EEC continued to accept new members: the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Denmark in 1973; Greece in 1981; Spain and Portugal in 1986. And then, after the USSR collapsed in 1991, the way was open to pan-European integration. In 1993, the Maastricht Treaty established the European Union; in 1999, a common currency, the euro, was created; and 27 nations now belong to the Union.

Given these fundamental realities, a rational observer must wonder what tangible differences, what clear benefits could any reassertion of British insularity bring. False claims can be painted on buses, extravagant promises are easy to make, feelings of pride or satisfaction may become fleetingly convincing—but none of those intangibles can change what the UK has become: an aging nation; a deindustrialized and worn-out country whose per capita GDP is now just over half of the Irish mean (something that Swift, Gladstone, or Churchill would find utterly unfathomable); another has-been power whose claim to uniqueness rests on having too many troubled princes and on exporting costumed TV series set in fading country mansions staffed with too many servants.

Fortunes of all major nations have followed specific trajectories of rise and retreat, but perhaps the greatest difference in their paths has been the time they spent at the top of their performance: some had a relatively prolonged plateau followed by steady decline (both the British empire and the 20th-century United States fit this pattern); others had a swift rise to a brief peak, followed by a more or less rapid decline. Japan is clearly in the latter category. Its swift post–Second World War ascent ended in the late 1980s, and it’s been downhill ever since: in a single lifetime, from misery to an admired—and feared—economic superpower, then on to the stagnation and retreat of an aging society. The Japanese government has been trying to find some way out—but radical reforms are not easy in a gerrymandered country that still cannot seriously contemplate even moderate-scale immigration and that is yet to make real peace with its neighbors.

Rapid economic growth since 1980 has made China by far the richer of the two, with a nominal GDP (per the IMF estimate for 2019) nearly five times that of India ($14.1 trillion versus $2.9 trillion). In 2019, China’s per capita average, measured in terms of purchasing power parity, was (according to the IMF) more than twice as high as India’s ($20,980 versus $9,030).

China is a tightly controlled one-party state run by a politburo of seven aged men, while India continues as a highly imperfect but undeniably democratic polity. In 2019, Freedom House assigned India 75 points on its freedom index, compared with a measly 11 points for China (the UK got 93 and Canada 99).

It will be fascinating to see to what extent India can replicate China’s economic success. And China, for its part, must cope with its loss of the demographic dividend: since 2012, its dependency ratio—the number of people of working age divided by the number of those who are too young or too old to work—has been rising (it is now just over 40 percent). The question is whether the country will become old before it can become truly rich. Both countries have enormous environmental problems and both will be challenged to feed their populations—but India has about 50 percent more farmland.

More pressing are the need to further lower its fertility rate as rapidly as possible (everything else being equal, that raises per capita income), the challenges of maintaining basic food self-sufficiency (a country of more than 1.4 billion is too large to rely on imports), and finding a way out of the deteriorating relations between the country’s Hindus and Muslims.

plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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.

The conclusive experiment took place on June 19, 1878, at Stanford’s Palo Alto farm. Muybridge lined up thread-triggered glass-plate cameras along the track, used a white-sheet background for the best contrast, and copied the resulting images as a sequence of still photographs (silhouettes) on the disc of a simple circular device he called a zoopraxiscope, in which a rapid series of rotating stills conveyed motion. Sallie Gardner, the horse Stanford had provided for the test, clearly had all four hooves off the ground at the gallop. But the airborne moment did not take place as portrayed in famous paintings, perhaps most notably Théodore Géricault’s The 1821 Derby at Epsom, now hanging in the Louvre, which shows the animal’s legs extended away from its body. Instead, it occurred when the horse’s legs were beneath its body, just prior to the moment the horse pushed off with its hind legs.

Muybridge’s 1,000 frames a second soon became 10,000. By 1940, the patented design of a rotating mirror camera raised the rate to 1 million per second. In 1999, Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a spectrograph that could capture the transition states of chemical reactions on a scale of femtoseconds—that is, 10-15 seconds, or one-millionth of one-billionth of a second.

Today, we can use intense, ultrafast laser pulses to capture events separated by mere attoseconds, or 10-18 seconds. This time resolution makes it possible to see what has until recently been hidden from any direct experimental access: the motions of electrons on the atomic scale.

In July 1958, Jack S. Kilby of Texas Instruments came up with the monolithic idea. His patent application described it as “a novel miniaturized electronic circuit fabricated from a body of semiconductor material containing a diffused p-n junction wherein all components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated into the body of semiconductor material.” And Kilby stressed that “there is no limit upon the complexity or configuration of circuits which can be made in this manner.”

The speed of intercontinental travel rose from about 35 kilometers per hour for large ocean liners in 1900 to 885 km/h for the Boeing 707 in 1958, an average rise of 5.6 percent a year. But speed of jetliners has remained essentially constant ever since—the Boeing 787 cruises just a few percent faster than the 707. Between

outside the microchip-dominated world, innovation simply does not obey Moore’s Law, proceeding at rates that are lower by an order of magnitude.

Small clay cylinders and tablets, invented in Sumer in southern Mesopotamia some 5,000 years ago, often contained just a dozen cuneiform characters in that ancient language, equivalent to a few hundred (or 102) bytes. The Oresteia, a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus in the fifth century BCE, amounts to about 300,000 (or 105) bytes. Some rich senators in imperial Rome had libraries housing hundreds of scrolls, with one large collection holding at least 100 megabytes (108 bytes).

Shakespeare’s plays and poems in their entirety amount to 5 megabytes, the equivalent of just a single high-resolution photograph, or of 30 seconds of high-fidelity sound, or of 8 seconds of streamed high-definition video.

And once we start creating more than 50 trillion bytes of information per person per year, will there be any real chance of making effective use of it? After all, there are fundamental differences between accumulated data, useful information, and insightful knowledge.

The fast breeder reactor, so called because it produces more nuclear fuel than it consumes, is one of the most remarkable examples of a prolonged and costly innovation failure. In 1974, General Electric predicted that by 2000 about 90 percent of the United States’ electricity would come from fast breeders. GE was merely reflecting a widespread expectation: during the 1970s, the governments of France, Japan, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States were all investing heavily in the development of breeders. But high costs, technical problems, and environmental concerns led to shutdowns of British, French, Japanese, American (and also smaller German and Italian) programs, while China, India, Japan, and Russia are still operating experimental reactors. After the world as a whole spent well above $100 billion in today’s money over some six decades of effort, there has been no real commercial payoff.

why do we measure the progress of economies by gross domestic product? 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 to 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.

Human minds have many irrational preferences: we love to speculate about wild and crazy innovations but cannot be bothered to fix common challenges by relying on practical innovation waiting to be implemented. Why do we not improve the boarding of planes rather than delude ourselves with visions of hyperloop trains and eternal life?

project to generate electricity from fission stalled during the 1980s, as demand for electricity in affluent economies fell and problems with nuclear power plants multiplied. And three failures were worrisome: accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986, and at Fukushima in Japan in 2011 provided further evidence for those opposed to fission under any

The only leading economies with major expansion plans are in Asia, led by China and India, but even they can’t do much to reverse the decline in the share of nuclear power in worldwide electricity generation. That share peaked at nearly 18 percent in 1996, fell to 10 percent in 2018, and is expected to bump up to just 12 percent by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency.

space, cost was no object. In the mid-1950s, PV cells ran about $300 per watt. The cost fell to about $80/W in the mid-1970s, to $10/W by the late 1980s, to $1/W by 2011, and by late 2019 PV cells were selling for just 8–12 cents per watt, with further declines certain to come (of course, the cost of installing PV panels and associated equipment in order to generate electricity is substantially higher, depending on the scale of a project: they now range from tiny roof installations to large solar fields in deserts).