★★★★☆ If you have a question about politics or economics whose answer is a number...

Pocket World in Figures

The Economist

I have only ever subscribed to two print magazines in my life, Scientific American and The Ecomonist. (The Economist, for historical reasons they are happy to explain to you, calls itself a newspaper.) Contrary to what the name suggests, The Economist is not particularly a magazine about economics -- it's a news magazine.

One of the perqs of subscribing to The Economist is that every Christmas they send you an updated version of this little book, Pocket World In Figures. You can also buy a copy from Amazon, although I don't think you can get the most recent version. It is divided into two parts: World Rankings and Country Profiles. Each item in the Rankings section lists a bunch of things in order of some number. For instance, the first ranking is nations by land area, which begins with Russia, at 17,075,000 square kilometres. This is followed by the highest mountains, then the longest rivers, ...

The Country Profiles contain the kind of information you might expect: land area, population, economic figures, etc. The last profile in the Country Profiles section is not actually a Country Profile, but a list of figures for the entire world.

Since about 2000, it has become more difficult for such a booklet to justify its existence. NCSA Mosaic became widely available in 1993, and by 2000 the World Wide Web had enough stuff in it that you could look up most facts there. This book, as its name suggests, really is a pocket book that you can carry around in the back pocket of your jeans or your purse. In 2000 computers were still inconveniently bulky and Internet access was a nontrivial problem. In 2007 Apple released the iPhone, and before long we were all carrying supercomputers with Internet access in our pockets.

I still think this is a pretty cool book, but I have to admit I seldom now use it for its intended purpose. Wikipedia usually does the job more conveniently. Sadly, my New York Public Library Desk Reference has suffered the same fate.

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