Links 30.2024
On a Personal Note
Hellooow, it’s me. I was wondering if after all these weeks you'd like to read :P
Sorry for that cheeky opening but I’ve been gone for some while, so it was hard to find a suitable hook to open up things again. In case you have wondered, I wasn’t on summer vacation or anything; but instead, I was grinding through the most intense work schedule of all time—where I barely found time to sleep. Let me tell you: No Korean skincare product can fix my eyebags at this point :(
Yet, I’m not complaining. I feel blessed to have the best job in the world. And when times get tough nonetheless, I know that I can always find some solace in literature. This time in Murakami:
"And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
That’s exactly how I feel whenever I finish a project, seminar, or whatever it is. I am incredibly privileged to work with many groups for an extended period—and not just time, intense time haha. And that makes reconnecting with the “real” world often so hard afterward. But I found my ways…and writing this newsletter is one of them.
But before I get too sentimental, here is something inspirational (…and something that I should send to my colleagues more regularly lol):
BTW Episode 04 of Weltanschauung just dropped.
Hayek, the Accidental Freudian
Corey Robin, the BS-artist who made it his life’s mission to discredit anything right of Karl Marx, is at it again. This time, he's spinning a tale about Friedrich August von Hayek. Don’t worry, this ain’t something to take intellectually seriously (Robin is a disgrace to the academe); rather it is a primer on “How to write an unsubstantiated hit piece for a major outlet.” So, here is the playbook:
Link Hayek to a dictator ✅
Dig up an obscure Nazi family history ✅
Turn his ideas about market competition upside down ✅
Obscure his ideas of social knowledge to make it sound esoteric ✅
Make his ideas of the open society sound like fascism ✅
Cherry-pick instances from his personal life, ideally divorce ✅
And of course, leave everything potentially charitable out ✅
Voilà, there you go. Of course, nothing in Robin’s fairy tales is even remotely close to the truth. In case you care, however, here are some sources that will set the record straight:
The most hilarious parts are always those when Clueless Corey is trying to engage with economic theory. For example, he tries to equate a Hayekian theory of innovation and competition with “elite domination.” Of course, this might sound plausible to the average (i.e. economically-illiterate) New Yorker reader who hates markets per se; but in a world where “inventors collect only 8 percent of the total private return from invention” and “bluecollar workers get about 26 percent of the gains” (Source), Robtard just reveals himself as a Putin-style spreader of disinformation. (Oh damn Corey, did I just equate you with a dictator? See, I’m learning fast)
BTW, Hayek is as much a Freudian as this text is factually accurate. Clueless Corey does not seem to understand the difference between tacit knowledge and unconscious knowledge. While Freud’s psychoanalysis rests on the assumption that unconscious knowledge can be revealed and articulated through therapy, the very point of tacit knowledge is that it cannot be articulated. That’s Hayek’s whole point, Corey! Bruv, if you hate Hayek that much, just read some Polanyi. FFS!
As you can get from my remarks: The whole article is utter garbage. Yet, I want to give you a taste of how bad it is. Here is the final section where our friend Corey is trying to paint the picture that Hayek’s divorce is sort of an allegory about the man himself. Obviously, this already is considered as malpractice by any kind of intellectual standard, but he doesn’t stop there. He dares to call this “the great trial” of a man who lived through…WW2. I just can’t:
The great trial of Hayek’s life was his twenty-four-year marriage to Helena (Hella) Fritsch, much of which he spent trying to get out of. Caldwell and Klausinger devote the last three chapters of their biography to the divorce—and for good reason, even if they can’t see it. In Hayek’s anguished bid to end his marriage, we find, just as Freud would have anticipated, the private pathology of the public philosophy, the knowledge problem in practice (SG: LOL). That we should discover those pathologies in a marriage is less remarkable than it might seem. From the treatises of antiquity to the novels of Jane Austen to the economics of Thomas Piketty, writers of all sorts have understood the overlap between unions of soul and contracts of need.
Before Hella, there was Lenerl—Helene Bitterlich, a distant cousin whom Hayek fell in love with after the First World War, and who shared his feelings. Sexually inexperienced and hopeless around women, Hayek didn’t make a move (SG: LOL). Eventually, another man did, and Lenerl accepted his proposal. Hayek began seeing Hella, and they married in 1926. Within a decade, he confessed to Hella that he had married her on the rebound from Lenerl. He secretly arranged to be with Lenerl at a future point and asked Hella for a divorce. She refused the divorce and any further discussion of it.
After the Second World War, Hayek resumed his efforts. Because he intended to support Hella and their children after the divorce, he resolved to get a higher-paying job in America. For two years, he crisscrossed the Atlantic, sometimes without telling Hella the purpose of his trips. By 1948, he had an offer from the University of Chicago. When he disclosed his plan to Hella, she again refused to grant him a divorce. He had his attorney scour the country’s various divorce laws, including Reno’s. Hella, too, spoke with a lawyer, who made clear that Hayek could not divorce her without her consent.
That Hayek and Hella should have found themselves in the marital equivalent of a Hayekian market—uncertain about each other’s plans, ignorant of each other’s moves, captive to each other’s tacit knowledge—did not give him perspective or pause. Instead, he did what victims, and left-wing critics, of the market often do. In a letter to Hella, he insisted on the objective facts of the situation and asserted the rationality and right of his position. He forgot the first rule of Hayekian economics, that all data is subjective. Hella told him that if he left her, she would have a nervous breakdown, forcing him to return to take care of their children. Then she resumed her silence.
Hayek tried a different tack, drawn from another page of his economic writing. In “The Meaning of Competition,” Hayek had taken issue with the economist George Stigler’s claim that “economic relationships are never perfectly competitive if they involve any personal relationships between economic units.” Hayek countered that the corollary of imperfect knowledge in a competitive market is the trust that we must invest in other individuals, who supply us with goods and services. We depend on our personal connections—and connections to those connections—to send us to the best doctor, restaurant, or hotel. Personal networks, and the reputations that move along them, make markets work and give market actors a competitive edge.
Seeking to alter the terms of his contest with Hella, Hayek leveraged his power and connections to get a better vantage, to see further than Hella and to make the world work for him. He knew he couldn’t take the job at Chicago without resolving his divorce, but he couldn’t put Chicago off indefinitely. With his network of academic friends and private donors, he secured a temporary appointment at the university for the winter quarter of 1950. That bought him time. It also involved considerable subterfuge, toward his wife, friends, and colleagues and supervisors at the London School of Economics, who were led to believe that he would return to Britain.
To get a divorce in America, Hayek needed to establish residence in a state other than Illinois, which had restrictive divorce laws. There could be no whiff of his using the state simply to get the divorce; he’d have to get a job there and give up his appointment at L.S.E. He secured a temporary post at the University of Arkansas for the spring quarter of 1950. He arranged for his mother to move to London, if necessary, to help take care of the children and make sure Hella made no sudden moves.
“The choreography was precise,” Caldwell and Klausinger write. In the course of two days in February, while he was in America, Hayek resigned from L.S.E. and informed Hella that he was leaving her. If she wanted him to support her and the children, she had to grant him the divorce. On the advice of a lawyer, Hayek gathered more evidence of their incompatibility. He hired a handwriting expert from Vienna, who determined, from letters written by Hella and Hayek, that she was “remote from the facts of life” and he “prevails in life and knows how to master it.” In July, they were divorced. A month later, he was married to Lenerl.
The story has a final Hayekian twist. Responding to the Labour government’s drastic devaluation of the pound, Hella’s attorneys had wisely stipulated that Hayek’s alimony payments be set out in dollars. Hayek agreed, though not without sniffing that her lawyers “were interested solely in their fees.” Hayek’s L.S.E. colleague, the economist Lionel Robbins, tussled with him over whether he had got a raw deal. Robbins, once Hayek’s best friend, had sided with Hella during the divorce and become one of her close advisers. He dismissed Hayek’s complaints: “Your conception of justice is very different from mine.”
Where is Central Europe now?
With Babiš and Orbán (and interestingly the Austrians) joining forces after the EU elections, the whole debate about Central Europe as the real defenders of European values has gained more actions. So, this essay by the historian Timothy Garton Ash has become even more timely. It shows the difficult process of finding identity in a region that has been historically deprived of this very discourse—and is still geopolitically so much in flux that most of its identity comes from Othering.
Interesting throughout but hard to extract from, so make sure to skim through it and pick up the most relevant bits and pieces! These discussions will become more and more relevant as the West itself is in a transition period.
One of the most influential political interventions made by a novelist in our time, Milan Kundera’s essay on Central Europe appeared four decades ago. The fact that it was republished in book form last year speaks to its enduring influence.
Writing from Paris, the exiled Czech novelist argued that countries such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland were part of a cultural and historical West that had found itself imprisoned since 1945 in a political East, under Soviet-Russian domination. Together with fellow writers such as the Hungarian essayist György Konrád and the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, Kundera insisted that this region should be called Central – not Eastern – Europe.
His intervention came at a moment when opposition movements such as Solidarity in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia were about to gain new hope through the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Kremlin in 1985, followed by the end of communism in those countries just four years later, in 1989. Soon the foreign ministries of the West would be rebranding their East European departments as Central European ones.
Kundera’s essay provoked a passionate response from Russian writers such as Joseph Brodsky, furious at what they saw as Russian culture being consigned to a semi-barbaric, non-European East. This debate has acquired a new topicality in the light of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war against Ukraine. Ukrainian intellectuals today, like their Czech, Polish and Hungarian colleagues four decades ago, define their country as everything that Russia is not. And people have started talking of Ukraine as … Central Europe.
Central Europe is thus a moveable feast. When you look carefully you find multiple versions. Most of them are defined, as identities often are, by reference to an Other. So here are nine Central Europes in search of an Other. My notes explore both the extraordinary impact of Kundera’s essay and the pitfalls into which this still influential idea can lead us.
Central Europe vs Politics
Kundera asserts the primacy of culture. His essay was originally published as “Un Occident kidnappé, ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale” in Le Débat in November 1983. Two English-language versions followed in spring 1984, in the New York Review of Books, titled “The Tragedy of Central Europe”, and in Granta, where it appeared as “A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out”. He starts by saying that Europe was “always” divided into two halves, the Roman and Catholic West vs the Byzantine and Orthodox East. Central Europe was the West that, after 1945, “woke up to discover” that it was now in the East. Kundera’s argument carries a strong hint of cultural determinism: your cultural past is your political future. “Western”? Aha, your natural political condition is liberal democracy. “Orthodox”? It’s authoritarianism for you, my lad. Exceptions are to prove the rule.
Then Kundera argues, quite rightly, that writers, thinkers and artists played an extraordinary part in keeping alive a distinctive, multicultural and original Central European culture in the twentieth century. But it was precisely through the long history of political domination by neighbouring empires (Russian, German, Austrian, Ottoman), including the Russian Empire’s latest manifestation as the Soviet bloc, that the intelligentsia came to play the exceptional role that Kundera finds lacking in the West. The writer as hero, intellectuals as a “spiritual government”, the playwright-president, the poet-liberator – these are not needed in the same way in well-established liberal democracies. As Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo retorts to his disappointed disciple: “Unhappy the land that has need of heroes.”
Finally, Kundera laments the state of culture in the West. This, according to him, is where culture has “bowed out”. For here, in the West, there are no literary and cultural reviews of the kind he describes in a footnote as “written not by journalists but by writers, historians and philosophers”. Yet his own essay was published in two English-language reviews of the highest quality, the New York Review of Books and Granta, not to mention Le Débat in France and similar journals in many other European languages, thus furnishing what philosophers might call an ostensive refutation of his own claim.
Central Europe vs the Present
One of the most frequently encountered and superficially charming Central Europes is that of nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kundera calls that empire “irreplaceable”.
Thus, for example, the former Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel sits genially face to face with Hungary’s authoritarian ruler Viktor Orbán, in the latter’s book-lined office in Budapest, to interview him for the first issue of European Voices, an interesting Vienna-based journal launched this year. Schüssel quotes the Czech historian and politician František Palacký, writing in 1848 to the Frankfurt Parliament in defence of the Habsburg Empire: whereas Russia sought the minimum plurality in the maximum space, the Habsburg Empire guaranteed maximum plurality in the minimum space. Austro-Hungarian self-satisfaction fills the room like a cloud of cigar smoke.
What one might call the “Blue Danube” version of Central Europe has lots of charm, but only limited utility. This variation helpfully reminds us that the outlines of old European empires – not just Austro-Hungarian, but also German, Russian and Ottoman – are still clearly visible under today’s political map of Europe, re-emerging in patterns of electoral behaviour or attitudes to the war in Ukraine.
[…]
Central Europe vs the Big
Another familiar trope is Central Europe as a region of small nations, each fearing for its identity and even survival as it is squeezed or crushed by neighbouring empires. The notion is there already in the writings of the early-twentieth-century founding president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who identified “a peculiar zone of small nations extending from the North Cape to Cape Matapan” – but including neither Germans nor Austrians nor Russians.
Kundera plays this tune too. But noticing that Poland is actually a rather large country, he offers this definition: “the small nation is one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear and it knows it”. And he points to the first line of Poland’s national anthem, “Poland has not yet perished”. In an interview in the same issue of Granta he tells the novelist Ian McEwan, “you see, if you’re English, you never question the immortality of your nation …”. (Maybe England has become a bit more Central European in the meantime.)
Interestingly from today’s perspective, Kundera has a footnote on Ukraine. “One of the great European nations (there are nearly forty million Ukrainians) is slowly disappearing. And this enormous event, which is almost unbelievable, is something Europe doesn’t realize!” If anything, at that time Ukraine was rather reappearing than disappearing, as its intellectuals and dissidents insisted on its distinct national identity. To be sure, Ukraine’s national anthem, echoing Poland’s, declares that “Ukraine’s glory has not yet perished, nor her will to freedom [volia]” – and the nation’s very existence is again threatened by Russian aggression today. But small it isn’t.
Central Europe vs Eastern Europe
In aiming to liberate countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary from the “Eastern Europe” label, the political-intellectual enterprise of “Central Europe” in the 1980s (in which I was also engaged) was directed against the continued acceptance of the Cold War division. At the same time it targeted much older stereotypes of what may be called intra-European Orientalism: the long-standing tendency of West Europeans to regard the lands to their east as backward, chaotic, congenitally authoritarian and vaguely barbaric. The origins of these stereotypes are brilliantly dissected in the historian Larry Wolff’s book Inventing Eastern Europe: The map of civilization on the mind of the Enlightenment (1994).
In contemporary West European discourse about nationalist populism in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, intra-European Orientalism is back in force. Superficial observers make sweeping observations about “Eastern Europe”, failing to notice that the nationalist populist politics of Marine Le Pen in France would be completely at home in Poland’s Law and Justice Party, and those of Spain’s Vox party in Hungary, while England’s Nigel Farage would make a perfect recruit to the East German wing of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
Central Europe vs Russia
Behind Eastern Europe, of course, is Russia, the single most salient constitutive Other for identity statements about Central Europe, which in this version is the Europe that not only defines itself against Russia, but also wants to get away from it as fast as possible. Shortly before he died last year Henry Kissinger declared: “Ukraine has become a major state in Central Europe for the first time in modern history”. The oracle had spoken. Ukraine had arrived. As with Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and Slovenia in the 1980s and 1990s, so now again, the shift in external, geopolitical perception both reflects and reinforces the push from the nations concerned – not just Ukraine, but also Moldova, the pro-European demonstrators on the streets of Georgia and the anti-Lukashenko opposition in Belarus – to get out from under the Russian yoke. Ukrainians, like Poles, Czechs and Hungarians in Kundera’s time, first demanded full recognition as belonging to the West and subsequently, thanks to a major geopolitical shift – in 1989 the end of the Cold War; in 2022 the start of a hot war – belatedly received it even from Kissinger, the ultimate Realpolitiker.
Now, as then, a key question is the relationship between Russia’s culture and its politics. When Kundera identified deep roots of the Soviet oppression of his native land in the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brodsky tartly retorted that “the political system that put Mr. Kundera out of commission [ie communism] is as much a product of Western rationalism as it is of Eastern emotional radicalism”.
[…]
Today I hear echoes of Kundera and Konrád in Kyiv and Lviv. A decade of Russian aggression, occupation and brutality since Putin began the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014 has generated an utter rejection of everything Russian. Pushkin Street in Kyiv has been renamed. Students write “russia” with a small r. In an essay entitled “No Guilty People in the World? Reading Russian literature after Bucha” (TLS, April 22, 2022), the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko approvingly quoted Kundera against Brodsky on Russian literature. She even connected the brutality of Russian forces in Ukraine to the disloyal behaviour of Natasha Rostova towards her fiancé in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The fury of an assaulted people is more than understandable, but to associate poor, foolish Natasha with the atrocities in Bucha is to take an essentializing discourse about Russia beyond parody. Yes, traces of imperialism run through much Russian literature, including Pushkin – witness his poem “To the Slanderers of Russia” (1831), denouncing westerners for daring to support a Polish rising against the Russian Empire. And it is a significant fact that Putin’s forces have put Pushkin’s face on posters justifying the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine. But it doesn’t follow that Pushkin is to blame for Putin.
[…]
Central Europe vs Western Europe
The Hungarian prime minister and Putinesque amateur historian Viktor Orbán loves talking about Central Europe, but his version is the precise opposite of that embraced by the Hungarian intellectuals at whose feet he sat thirty-five years ago. Extending a metaphor used by the early-twentieth-century Hungarian poet Endre Ady, they saw it as a ferry to carry Hungary from Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe to a liberal democratic Western Europe. Orbán, by contrast, defines Central Europe as a bastion of traditional Christian, conservative national values against today’s liberal Western Europe.
In a 2021 speech that he subsequently presented in his personal blog (outrageously called Samizdat) as a riposte to my criticism of his illiberal regime, Orbán told students at the Mathias Corvinus College in Budapest that Western Europe is sinking under a “Muslim demographic, political and economic flood”. It is “rich and weak”, swamped not just by migration, but also by atheism and perverse, decadent ideas about gender. Turning back to Central Europe, Orbán wrote, “My advice to those who are more intrigued by this question – which I also advise to my Western colleagues – is this: Read Kundera, or perhaps [Sándor] Márai”. Kundera, who died last year, must be turning in his grave.
Central Europe vs Mitteleuropa
What about another historic counterpoint, Germany? Whereas Russians have never articulated their own imperial ambitions in the name of Central Europe, it was the German version of Mitteleuropa elaborated by the liberal imperialist Friedrich Naumann [SG: Ooops!], in his 1915 book of that name, that provoked Masaryk to spell out his competing East Central European vision of “a zone of small nations”, not including Germany or Russia.
Obviously most people today reject both German imperialist and anti-German visions, since countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are close partners of Germany in the EU and Nato. Yet there is the ghost of a question lurking here. Naumann’s idea was not a formal colonial occupation, but a German- and Austrian-led common economic area rising from the ashes of the First World War. What has emerged after the end of the Cold War is a Central Europe in which German (and, on a much smaller scale, Austrian) investments and trade play a leading role in the economies of their eastern neighbours. At a seminar I attended in Kraków a few years ago, a Polish economist remarked, as if it were self-evident, that “of course the Polish economy is part of the German economy”. Much the same might be said in the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Hungary.
This economic Mitteleuropa has been achieved by consent, in a non-hegemonic EU framework, and it has largely been to mutual advantage. But there is one catch. Orbán has demolished democracy in Hungary, yet the German car industry is happy to go on investing billions of euros there, knowing that it can always be sure of favourable treatment from Orbán’s regime – more sure than it could be if Hungary were really a democracy. That German business should be so comfortable with an electoral authoritarian regime just next door is at least a faint echo of that old tension between an interest-based German Mitteleuropa and the values-based Central Europe of East Central European intellectuals.
Central Europe vs Central Europe
Forty years ago Central Europe was an idea that brought together Poles, Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks. They shared a common purpose of leaving the geopolitical East to rejoin the West, but also of overcoming the petty nationalist differences that had been the region’s curse before 1945. Russian writers such as Tolstaya were surprised, and American politicians such as Kissinger delighted, by this unity of purpose. Its most concrete political product was the so-called Visegrád group of Central European states, created as early as 1991, even before the final disintegration of the Soviet Union. But today the dividing lines run as much between and within the Visegrád states as between them and anyone else. There are profound differences between the Poland of the liberal, pro-European new prime minister Donald Tusk and the Hungary of the nationalist, Trump-supporting Orbán, between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The group could not be less united over military support for Ukraine. It’s Central Europe against Central Europe now.
Envoi
“I’m confused, but at a higher level”: the old end-of-seminar quip applies here too. Geopolitically “Central Europe” is a ferry that has taken countries such as Poland and Slovakia, but also Slovenia and Lithuania, from the geopolitical East to the West. Now Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia are embarking on that ferry, perhaps one day to be joined by Armenia and Belarus. This is, with all due caveats, one of the more inspiring stories in recent European history.
As the geopolitical sense of Central Europe goes east it becomes increasingly detached from any geographical, historical or cultural – above all, Austro-Hungarian – core. Yet Ukrainians, Moldovans and Georgians, like those who have gone before them, use historical and cultural claims about their European belonging to bolster their geopolitical ones. This brings with it some of the dangers that have accompanied the debate about Central Europe for the past forty years: cultural determinism; essentialism; explicit or implicit assumptions of civilizational superiority over some Other. Can we keep the positive while shedding the negative? Or should this concept, which promotes a transition, itself be transitional?
Of course we will continue to use all sorts of regional subdivisions, each of them generating interesting and sometimes valuable discussion, not least because of the inherent oversimplification. Yet our overarching objective as Europeans should be that, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Kundera’s essay, we will have one Europe, whole, free and at peace. Along that path we must recognize that the dangers that have accompanied the debate about Central Europe apply also to our discourse about Europe itself, as it relates to the rest of the world.
The Adoption of ChatGPT
Well, the not-so-esoteric reading of this is this: Already productive people become more productive—while laggards will fall further behind. So, brace yourself for more inequality in the workforce. It’s technological change, baby!
Plus, if your employer isn't all-in on embracing the use of generative AI, consider finding one who does.
Abstract
We study the adoption of ChatGPT, the icon of Generative AI, using a large-scale survey experiment linked to comprehensive register data in Denmark. Surveying 100,000 workers from 11 exposed occupations, we document that ChatGPT is widespread, but substantial inequalities have emerged. Women are 20 percentage points less likely to have used the tool. Furthermore, despite its potential to lift workers with less expertise, users of ChatGPT earned more already before its arrival. Workers see a substantial productivity potential in ChatGPT but are often hindered by employer restrictions and the need for training. Informing workers about expert assessments of ChatGPT shifts workers’ beliefs but has limited impacts on actual adoption.
The world’s most, and least, walkable cities
The American mind can’t comprehend this :P
On a more serious note, walkability is one of the key features of what makes a great city great (see here & here). That’s why I am not an EV-accelerationist but rather embrace the development of autonomous vehicles—which will free up immense spaces in our inner cities (e.g. parking). That’s probably the only way to take our cities back. Lots of interesting charts behind the link. Check out Asia where public transport is much more widespread and a great equalizer in society—as it is the main transport system regardless of income.
Cars can be a nuisance. Just ask anyone stuck on London’s M25 motorway or Houston’s Katy Freeway. More cars create more polluting traffic jams, and the amount of space needed to drive them, park them and re-fuel them could be used for more pleasant purposes, such as parks and recreational areas. It is no wonder, then, that plenty of urban visionaries hype up walkability, or what is sometimes called a “15-minute city”, where residents can fulfil most of their needs without driving.
And yet the world can’t seem to kick the driving habit. A study of around 850m people from 794 cities across the world found that more than half of the respondents still commute to work by car every day. Variations in transport tend to follow regional patterns.
[…]
The surveys show where people use the most active forms of travel (see table). The 100 least active cities in the study are all found in North America—a result of decades of pro-car policies and subsidies by governments. The least active city outside of North America is Birmingham, in Britain’s West Midlands, a region long associated with the country’s carmaking industry. The most active city is Quelimane, a small seaport in Mozambique. Other cities in the top ten are all in Europe, including four in Spain.
[…]
But elected officials in the rich world increasingly want to ditch cars in favour of cheaper, healthier and greener options. Places from Singapore to Paris have, over several decades, used carrot-and-stick policies to encourage more people to go car-free (eg, by building pedestrian zones or enforcing congestion charges). Only 30% of people drive to work in Singapore, while just 20% do in Paris. Even America appears to be slowly changing: younger generations are driving less and more cities are building walkable neighbourhoods. (Though it will be difficult to connect sprawling suburbs in places where cars have shaped urban planning.)
Globally, the number of cars continues to rise. But so too does congestion. And with it, a recognition of the need for change. Peak car—the point from which the number of motor vehicles in the world begins to decline—may not be that far away.
Peace,
SG