Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
Plastic films also release phthalates (common plasticizers) whose levels in Chinese soils are now usually at the high end of the global range, and are mostly higher than allowable concentrations (Lü et al. 2018; Li et al. 2016). In China about 20% of arable land is already contaminated with different kinds of toxins whose concentrations exceed nati
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a new information sector and that consist of one or more of the following information-centered activities: collection (texts, data, images, multimedia), classification, aggregation, analysis, evaluation (generic and customized), transmission, and storage, all done in order to gain superior insights (be it into consumers’ decision-making or into an
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In the common (albeit misleading) terminology, no industrial revolution could have taken place without the preceding agricultural revolution. This labor push factor was potentiated by the effect of the already noted Engel’s law: reduced share of spending on food can be used to buy more manufactured products. Second, new opportunities in industrial
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Longevity is an outcome of complex interactions that include economic, nutritional, and health care variables,
Vaclav Smil • Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
that dietary and behavioral intervention (reducing intake of total energy and sweetened drinks in particular, exercising more) in individuals with prediabetes can reduce the disease’s onset by 30–60%
Vaclav Smil • Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
These realities are perfect examples of what might be seen as the end of structural transitions: modern economic production fusing the activities that could have been previously categorized in three classic sectors but that now form new inseparable synergistic wholes.
Vaclav Smil • Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
The average American now reads only four books a year, and a quarter of Americans do not read any books (Pew Research Center 2018).
Vaclav Smil • Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
End points or asymptotic levels indicating the completion of demographic, dietary, and energy transitions are either self-evident or can be well defined. There can be no doubt that a society has completed its demographic transition once its fertility rates have declined below the replacement level and remained there for decades; that it has gone th
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the size of the population residing in the country’s nth largest city is equal to 1/n of the largest city’s total, corresponding to a power law with a coefficient of –1