Numbers Don't Lie: A Book Review

The world we live in today is a very complex place. While we live in the most advanced era ever, the underlying frameworks that make this possible are several layers of complexity. This book by Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don’t Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World is an explanation of some of the underlying things that make our world go round. Although Smil said 71 Things You Need to Know About The World, I believe he didn’t write all that you need to know. There are several other missing pieces that he couldn’t cover, of course, I understand a book can’t talk about everything. I am saying this as a warning so that one does not read this and assume it is everything.

Other than that, Smil does an excellent job of explaining the thing he picks on. I found the book very informative. I like how he used data, statistics, and numbers to make his point. He is a clear thinker and thinks clearly about his topics. He writes about food, transportation, technology, people, the environment, countries, and energy. A good attraction for this book is that the chapters are very short, it just always says enough about the topic to make you informed and capable of holding a reasonable conversation. Smil explained deep technological terms in a way that made me stay on.

A key thing about this book is how it opens your mind to things you’ve probably never consciously thought of. For instance, I used to be scared of air transport believing that air transport is risky, only to read this and realize that air transport is the safest transport, after trains! There are several other ways you are more likely to die than air transport.

What this book does, which the author does not say, is to make you think about things in a different way. If you use numbers, it will improve significantly how you see the world and everything in it. The first few chapters talk about people, population, and standard of living. He makes the argument that the best measure of the standard of living of a people is the child mortality rate. How incredible! If a society has a high child mortality rate, it tells you so much about its health system, education, poverty,

and several other things. With one number, you begin to see the whole society. While numbers are not everything, Smil makes that clear, they help in understanding the world.

Indeed, I came away with the conclusion that Numbers Don’t Lie., they tell you what you need to know.