How the World Really Works
A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future
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4.3 • 14 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
* THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *
'Another masterpiece from one of my favorite authors . . . If you want a brief but thorough education in numeric thinking about many of the fundamental forces that shape human life, this is the book to read. It's a tour de force' BILL GATES
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We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don't know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to risks, our environment and its future, How the World Really Works offers a much-needed reality check - because before we can tackle problems effectively, we must understand the facts.
In this ambitious and thought-provoking book we see, for example, that globalization isn't inevitable and that our societies have been steadily increasing their dependence on fossil fuels, making their complete and rapid elimination unlikely. Drawing on the latest science and tackling sources of misinformation head on - from Yuval Noah Harari to Noam Chomsky - ultimately Smil answers the most profound question of our age: are we irrevocably doomed or is a brighter utopia ahead?
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'Very informative and eye-opening in many ways' HA-JOON CHANG, author of 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
'If you are anxious about the future, and infuriated that we aren't doing enough about it, please read this book' PAUL COLLIER, author of The Future of Capitalism
Customer Reviews
Brilliant, but short
What you get in this book is brilliant. But with a title as all-encompassing as ‘how the world really works’, I was hoping for more detail in each of the 6 substantive chapters (he rounds off with a 7th chapter detailing why predictions of catastrophe and utopia have always been wrong and why they are likely to remain wrong). While the prose and examples provided are excellent, I do not come away thinking I understand how the world really works. I know ‘what makes the world really work’- which are the four pillars of modern civilisation as Smil convincingly puts it. Perhaps an exception- I understand how the food chain really works in much more detail. But I wish the other chapters had all been longer. I wish there had been MUCH more detail on constraints that have led the world to settle into the pattern of where it is now. Why does sub Saharan Africa have so little fertiliser? Is it price, suitability of soil, politics, something else? Why does one country in the world produce 70% of its electricity from nuclear power but no other country is even close? Is this a constraint of scale, or of ambition, or both, or something else? Smil brings up all these factoids but does little to elucidate how we got to the position we are in, which I would suggest should have been within the scope of the book. What I will say is that I now want to read much more Smil- perhaps the answers to my questions are in his other books. But this book was like watching an elite rock band perform a headline show and only play for 45 minutes.