How useful are data without theory?

The answer depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

Vaclav Smil's latest book, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World, is a good argument for the benefits of atheoretical thinking.

The trends, levels, distributions, measures of central tendency and frequencies that Smil describes are not offered as evidence of a particular line of argument. Smil does not start with hypotheses of how the world works and then report data to confirm or disconfirm these statements.

Instead, the data (mostly) stand alone.

Reading Numbers Don't Lie is like spending quality time with a map. Data are the companion to geography. Both must be internalized first before one can figure which questions are worth asking.

Distressingly, Smil chooses not to include any data on postsecondary education. This lapse may be forgiven, as Smil provides quantitative insights on most every other part of the world.

For Vol. 2, I'd humbly ask Smil to consider a chapter on the key statistical indicators of global higher education change.

What data about academia might be interesting to surface?

One of the most insightful chapters of Numbers Don't Lie is about the growth of megacities. A megacity is a city of over 10 million residents. Here is Smil's graphic of megacities in 2018, taken from the PDF that comes with the audiobook.