Numbers Don't Lie Quotes

“And 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.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“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.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“Physics is indisputable, but economics rules.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“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.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“腹八分目 (hara hachi bun me, “belly eight parts [in ten] full”)—an ancient Confucian precept,”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“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.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“Without the low operating costs, high efficiency, high reliability, and great durability of diesel engines, it would have been impossible to reach the extent of globalization that now defines the modern economy.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“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.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“Milk has been a key growth factor, be it in Japan or in the Netherlands. Before the Second World War, Dutch males were smaller than American men, but post-1950 US milk consumption declined while in the Netherlands it rose until the 1960s—and it remains higher than in the US. The lesson is obvious: the easiest way to improve a child’s chances of growing taller is for them to drink more milk. Is life expectancy finally topping out?”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“Better health and better nutrition—above all, greater intakes of high-quality animal protein (milk, dairy products, meat, and eggs)—have driven the shift, and being taller is associated with a surprisingly large number of benefits. These do not include generally higher life expectancy, but a lower risk of cardiovascular diseases, and also higher cognitive ability, higher lifetime earnings, and higher social status. Correlation between height and earnings was first documented in 1915 and has since been confirmed repeatedly, for groups ranging from Indian coal miners to Swedish CEOs. Moreover, the latter study showed that the CEOs were taller in firms with larger assets!”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“Mesopotamian”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“arable”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“The Arthur D. Little management consultancy estimates that—based on a vehicle life of 20 years—the manufacture of an EV creates three times as much toxicity as that of a conventional vehicle. This is mostly due to the greater use of heavy metals.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“In 2018, nuclear power provided the highest share of electricity in France (about 72 percent), 50 percent in Hungary, Swiss reactors contributed 38 percent, and in South Korea it was 24 percent, while the share in the US was just below 20 percent.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“But the 1880s are also embedded in our lives in many smaller ways. Over a decade ago, in Creating the Twentieth Century, I traced several daily American experiences through mundane artifacts and actions that stem from that miraculous decade. A woman wakes up today in an American city and makes a cup of Maxwell House coffee (launched in 1886). She considers eating her favorite Aunt Jemima pancakes (sold since 1889) but goes for packaged Quaker Oats (available since 1884). She touches up her blouse with an electric iron (patented in 1882), applies antiperspirant (available since 1888), but cannot pack her lunch because she has run out of brown paper bags (the process to make strong kraft paper was commercialized in the 1880s). She commutes on the light rail system (descended directly from the electric streetcars that began serving US cities in the 1880s), is nearly run over by a bicycle (the modern version of which—with equal-sized wheels and a chain drive—was another creation of the 1880s: see engines are older than bicycles!, this page), then goes through a revolving door (introduced in a Philadelphia building in 1888) into a multistory steel-skeleton skyscraper (the first one was finished in Chicago in 1885). She stops at a newsstand on the first floor, buys a copy of the Wall Street Journal (published since 1889) from a man who rings it up on his cash register (patented in 1883). Then she goes up to the 10th floor in an elevator”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“lower than Canada, Germany, and Japan. In science, US schoolchildren place just below the mean PISA score (497 versus 501); in reading, they are barely above it (498 versus 496)—and they are far behind all the populous, affluent Western nations. PISA, like any such study, has its weaknesses, but large differences in relative rankings are clear: there is not even a remote indication of any exceptional US educational achievements.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“Educational achievements of US students (or a lack thereof) are scrutinized with every new edition of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The latest results (2018) for 15-year-olds show that, in math, the United States ranks just below Russia, Slovakia, and Spain, but far”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“Los números no mienten es un libro ecléctico que abarca desde las personas, las poblaciones y los países hasta el uso de la energía, la innovación técnica y las máquinas y dispositivos que definen nuestra civilización moderna. Por si eso fuera poco, concluye con varias observaciones sobre hechos relativos al suministro de alimentos y distintas opciones alimentarias, además del estado y la degradación del medioambiente.”
― Vaclav Smil, Los números no mienten: 71 historias para entender el mundo

“Rigid ranking based on minuscule differences misleads rather than informs. Rounding and approximation is superior to unwarranted and unnecessary precision. Doubt, caution, and incessant questioning are in order—but so is the insistence on quantifying the complex realities of the modern world. If we are to understand many unruly realities, if we are to base our decisions on the best available information, then there is no substitute for this pursuit.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“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.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“Numbers may not lie, but individual perceptions of them differ.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

“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.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“Milk has been a key growth factor, be it in Japan or in the Netherlands. Before the Second World War, Dutch males were smaller than American men, but post-1950 US milk consumption declined while in the Netherlands it rose until the 1960s—and it remains higher than in the US. The lesson is obvious: the easiest way to improve a child’s chances of growing taller is for them to drink more milk.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“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.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“es evidente que la dieta mediterránea reduce el riesgo de problemas cardiovasculares, rebaja el riesgo de determinados cánceres en torno a un 10 por ciento y ofrece cierta protección contra la diabetes de tipo 2. Caben pocas dudas de que, si los países occidentales la hubiesen seguido de forma generalizada, no habrían alcanzado los niveles de obesidad prevalentes hoy en día. En 2013, la UNESCO inscribió la dieta en la Lista Representativa del Patrimonio Cultural Intangible de la Humanidad, mencionando a Croacia, Chipre, Grecia, Italia, Marruecos, Portugal y España.”
― Vaclav Smil, Los números no mienten: 71 historias para entender el mundo

“Introducción Los números no mienten es un libro ecléctico que abarca desde las personas, las poblaciones y los países hasta el uso de la energía, la innovación técnica y las máquinas y dispositivos que definen nuestra civilización moderna. Por si eso fuera poco, concluye con varias observaciones sobre hechos relativos al suministro de alimentos y distintas opciones alimentarias, además del estado y la degradación del medioambiente. Estas son las grandes cuestiones que he abordado en mis libros desde los años setenta. Por encima de cualquier otra consideración, esta obra trata de que los hechos cuadren. Pero eso no es tan fácil como podría parecer: aunque la World Wide Web rebosa de números, demasiados de ellos son cantidades reutilizadas de procedencia desconocida, a menudo expresadas en dudosas unidades. Por ejemplo, el PIB francés en 2010 fue de 2,6 billones de dólares, pero ese valor ¿está dado en moneda corriente o constante?; la conversión de euros a dólares ¿se hizo empleando la tasa de cambio actual o la paridad del poder adquisitivo?; ¿cómo podríamos saberlo? Por el contrario, casi todas las cifras que aparecen aquí están sacadas de cuatro clases de fuentes primarias: estadísticas de ámbito mundial publicadas por organizaciones globales,[1] anuarios publicados por instituciones nacionales,[2] estadísticas históricas recopiladas por las agencias nacionales”
― Vaclav Smil, Los números no mienten: 71 historias para entender el mundo

“Because the year has 8,760 hours, this average mortality prorates to 0.000001 or 1 × 10–6 deaths per person per hour of living. This means that the average additional chance of dying while flying is just 5/1,000th of the risk of simply being alive. Smoking risks are 100 times as high; ditto for driving in a car. In short, flying has never been safer.”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World