4 Comments
User's avatar
colin Hélie-Harvey's avatar

Taiwan has very low car ownership per capita. The statistic cited is for motor vehicles, which makes sense because scooters are everywhere there.

Expand full comment
Étienne Fortier-Dubois's avatar

Huh yeah that makes sense!

Expand full comment
Rainbow Roxy's avatar

It's interesting how that 1920 proposal for geometric federalism emerged. What if such a radical partioning had actually taken root? The implications are fascinating.

Expand full comment
Judith Stove's avatar

So much intriguing content here, thanks. But you write that technology is rarely lost. Is that really the case? I would have thought that the big counter-example in the West would be the vast corpus of Roman engineering/architectural know-how, which seems to have been so thoroughly lost that when Roman sites started to be (kind of) formally excavated in the 18th century, people had no idea what they were looking at - everything was a 'temple,' even the bath-houses and theatres. It wasn't until the 20th century that archaeologists were able to appreciate (e.g.) Roman mining tech. But I'm happy to be corrected if this is an overstatement or misapprehension.

Expand full comment