NUMBERS DON’T LIE

71 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE WORLD

VACLAV SMIL

Viking, 366pp, £16.99

Vaclav Smil is one of Bill Gates’s favourite authors, and in this eclectic, stimulating collection of essays he applies a statistician’s brain and a debunking temperament to a wide range of received wisdoms.

Which was the decade that saw the greatest leap in human progress? Richard Preston asked reviewing the book in the Times. The surprising answer is the 1880s: that decade gave us electricity generators, production motor cars, the ‘hydroelectric power station, the first electric street railway, Coca-cola, the ballpoint pen, the electric lift, the steel-framed skyscraper, deodorants and the vending machine’. Even the so-called digital revolution just plays variations on old inventions: microprocessors and radio waves.

Smil’s mission, said Preston, is to put all sorts of scientific and economic claims in their proper historical and international context. This ‘combative’, ‘scattergun’ collection ‘analyses innovation, globalisation, environmental questions and historical curiosities’ – and its most interesting running theme is that we’re lying to ourselves about how long it will take to ditch fossil fuels.

‘For all Smil’s devotion to the facts, his harrumphing can sound thoroughly subjective at times,’ Preston cautioned. ‘Nevertheless his fascination with numbers is infectious.’

And the BBC’S Science Focus thought it was a book for ‘anyone confused by statistics or dubious of data in a world where numbers seem to mean everything and nothing.’