Vaclav Smil. Invention and Innovation.

 Chinese Communists determined early on that Mao was 70% right and 30% wrong. This closed the discussion and spared the Chinese the disasters of perestroika. The book, as everything Smil, seems to be 99% accurate but 1% of his idiosyncrasies and grotesque mistakes sow doubt in the rest of his narrative. 

    Of course, as a loyal Czech he must disparage all things Soviet and Russian, which is a minor distraction, and a climate sceptic that biases his outlook on many important matters. In his book on energy (which? he has many) he suggested that electric cars cannot replace gas-powered vehicles based on his estimate that a combined power of all electric vehicles is comparable to a power of all the world's utilities. 

    He forgot that at any given moment only a tiny fraction of motor vehicles is on the road and most rarely, if ever, run the engines at their maximum. Similarly silly is his suggestion that photovoltaics are not that efficient despite a spectacular decline in price because "the module cost is now about 15 percent of the total investment. The rest is needed to cover structural costs and electrical components... , inverters... , labor costs and other soft costs. Obviously, none of these components, from steel and aluminum to transmission lines, permitting, inspection and sales taxes is tending to zero, and hence the overall cost of installation show a distinctly declining rate of improvement..." Yes, indeed, but these costs are the costs of any electric infrastructure, so if the new houses were to have electricity at all, they have to be factored in. Furthermore, old electric infrastructure is continually replaced irrespectively of underlying method of generation. 

    Smil also claims that in the last half-century there were few breakthroughs outside of computing and electronics, which he measures by the size of electronic components. Yet, he misses a revolution in biotech. If it were not for it, new Covid-19 vaccines might never appear, certainly not at that short times scale and humanity would have suffered truly catastrophic consequences. Without the Internet, slow or fast, quarantine and isolation of that many people -- to the utility of which Smil obviously does not subscribe -- would be impossible. But the humanity might not progressed to Covid era at all without modern antiviral drugs becoming extinct in early 2000s because of the HIV (I am joking). 

    His points about obvious boondoggles: Musk's hyperloop, electric aircraft and fusion energy are well taken. I can also agree with his judgement that there is no net acceleration in the pace of inventions. If any era in human history was truly explosive, it was the century beginning some time in 1840-1850s. These were electric telegraph (predecessor of the internet), telephone, automobile, radio, aircraft, synthetic drugs and fertilizers, television, jet propulsion, nuclear energy, and, finally electronic computers. 

    Vaclav Smil is certainly an intellect to be reckoned with unlike philosophical charlatans of the Fukuyama school. I would like to talk to him rather than the neighbors' dogs to whose company I am now confined. But his 1% messes it all.