Opinion | This Has Been the Best Year Ever (Published 2019)
For humanity over all, life just keeps getting better.
Current Affairs Post Your Links II: With A Vengeance
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*Capital and Ideology*, by Thomas Piketty - Marginal REVOLUTION
This book is more than 1000 pp., here are my impressions: 1. About 600 pp. of this book is a carefully done history of the accumulation and sometimes dissipation of wealth and property. You can evaluate that material without reference to any particular set of political views. 2. At some point...
marginalrevolution.com
Blue Roo
Player Valuation: £20m
Definitely seems there's some clumsy reductionist assertions made by Picketty on non Western stuff but would suggest to anyone put off by the above review, and the comments below it, to consider Branko Milanovic's review of Capital and Ideology.*Capital and Ideology*, by Thomas Piketty - Marginal REVOLUTION
This book is more than 1000 pp., here are my impressions: 1. About 600 pp. of this book is a carefully done history of the accumulation and sometimes dissipation of wealth and property. You can evaluate that material without reference to any particular set of political views. 2. At some point...
Its much more considered and balanced. The data sets used by Picketty are of such breadth and depth and his ability to pull it together is of such magnitude, that as Milanovic suggests, social scientists will be standing on Picketty's shoulders for years to come.
Thomas Piketty's New Book Brings Political Economy Back to Its Sources - ProMarket
In the same way that Capital in the Twenty-First Century transformed the way economists look at inequality, Piketty’s new book Capital and Ideology will transform the way political scientists look at their own field. Thomas Piketty’s books are always monumental. Some are more monumental than...
promarket.org
Blue Roo
Player Valuation: £20m
Branko Milanovic - the guy that came up with the elephant graph on inequality - has come out with a new book, Capitalism, Alone – the future of the system that rules the world.
He comes up with a very good and useful conceptualisation - making a differentiation between two forms of capitalism in a capitalist world.
From https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/inequal...talism-in-conversation-with-branko-milanovic/
(written + 25min audio)
Could you explain the distinction between Liberal and Political Capitalism?: Liberal Capitalism was born in the West through bourgeois revolutions. Chinese capitalism is different – it was born out of communism, which abolished the feudal institutions. Gradually, China and Vietnam have developed indigenous forms of capitalism.
In Liberal Capitalism, economic power dominates and leads to political influence – the problem of plutocracy. In Political Capitalism, it’s the other way around – you leverage political power in order to get wealth.
I wanted to distinguish myself from those people who think we will end up with one world with Liberal Capitalism, with a middle class – Acemoglu and Robinson; Fukuyama. It’s a very special reading of history, that sees the terminus of history as having arrived on 9th November 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. You can have various possibilities, e.g. both could converge on plutocracies, as the Western and Chinese systems are currently doing. [DG: Echoes of a nice joke, via Ha-Joon Chang: ‘under Capitalism, man exploits man; under Communism, it’s the other way around’]
Another interesting Q&A with Branko -
promarket.org
He comes up with a very good and useful conceptualisation - making a differentiation between two forms of capitalism in a capitalist world.
From https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/inequal...talism-in-conversation-with-branko-milanovic/
(written + 25min audio)
Could you explain the distinction between Liberal and Political Capitalism?: Liberal Capitalism was born in the West through bourgeois revolutions. Chinese capitalism is different – it was born out of communism, which abolished the feudal institutions. Gradually, China and Vietnam have developed indigenous forms of capitalism.
In Liberal Capitalism, economic power dominates and leads to political influence – the problem of plutocracy. In Political Capitalism, it’s the other way around – you leverage political power in order to get wealth.
I wanted to distinguish myself from those people who think we will end up with one world with Liberal Capitalism, with a middle class – Acemoglu and Robinson; Fukuyama. It’s a very special reading of history, that sees the terminus of history as having arrived on 9th November 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. You can have various possibilities, e.g. both could converge on plutocracies, as the Western and Chinese systems are currently doing. [DG: Echoes of a nice joke, via Ha-Joon Chang: ‘under Capitalism, man exploits man; under Communism, it’s the other way around’]
Another interesting Q&A with Branko -
“Avoiding Plutocracy Would Require a Political Change”: Branko Milanovic on the Future of Capitalism - ProMarket
In an interview with ProMarket, CUNY Graduate Center economist Branko Milanovic discussed the differences and similarities between US-style and China-style capitalism and explained why, without major reforms, liberal capitalism could lead to plutocracy. Since 2008, the view that capitalism is in...
promarket.org
All kopites are horrible people,but not all horrible people are kopites
Socrates
Player Valuation: £6m
A must read by Kevin A. Carlson
“To grasp the enormity of the process, we must understand that the nobility's rights in land under the manorial economy were entirely a feudal legal fiction deriving from conquest. The peasants who cultivated the land of England in 1650 were descendants of those who had occupied it since time immemorial. By any standard of morality, it was their property in every sense of the word. The armies of William the Conqueror, by no right other than force, had compelled these peasant proprietors to pay rent on their own land....
...Another form of expropriation, which began in late medieval times and increased drastically in the eighteenth century, was the enclosure of commons--in which, again, the peasants communally had as absolute a right of property as any defended by today's "property rights" advocates. Not counting enclosures before 1700, the Hammonds estimated total enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at a sixth or a fifth of the arable land in England [Village Labourer 42]. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude estimated enclosures between 1750 and 1850 alone as transforming "something like one quarter of the cultivated acreage from open field, common land, meadow or waste into private fields...." [Captain Swing 27].
The ruling classes saw the peasants' right in commons as a source of economic independence from capitalist and landlord, and thus a threat to be destroyed. Enclosure eliminated "a dangerous centre of indiscipline" and compelled workers to sell their labor on the masters' terms. Arthur Young, a Lincolnshire gentleman, described the commons as "a breeding-ground for 'barbarians,' 'nursing up a mischievous race of people'." "[E]very one but an idiot knows," he wrote, "that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious." The Commercial and Agricultural Magazine warned in 1800 that leaving the laborer "possessed of more land than his family can cultivate in the evenings" meant that "the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work." [Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 219-220, 358]. Sir Richard Price commented on the conversion of self-sufficient proprietors into "a body of men who earn their subsis- tence by working for others." There would, "perhaps, be more labour, be- cause there will be more compulsion to it." [Marx, "The Expropriation...."].
Marx cited parliamentary "acts of enclosure" as evidence that the commons, far from being the "private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords," actually required "a parlia- mentary coup detat... for its transformation into private property." ["The Expropriation...."]. The process of primitive accumulation, in all its brutality, was summed up by the same author:
These new freedmen [i.e. former serfs] became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire ["Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation," Capital Vol. 1].
Even then, the working class was not sufficiently powerless. The state had to regulate the movement of labor, serve as a labor exchange on behalf of capitalists, and maintain order. The system of parish regulation of the movement of people, under the poor laws and vagrancy laws, resembled the internal passport system of South Africa, or the reconstruction era Black Codes. It "had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer," Marx wrote, "as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunov on the Russian peasantry." ["The Expropriation..."] Adam Smith ventured that there was "scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age... who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settle- ments." [Wealth of Nations 61]...
...The working class lifestyle under the factory system, with its new forms of social control, was a radical break with the past. It involved drastic loss of control over their own work. The seventeenth century work calendar was still heavily influenced by medieval custom. Although there were long days in spurts between planting and harvest, intermittent periods of light work and the proliferation of saints days combined to reduce average work-time well below our own. And the pace of work was generally determined by the sun or the biological rhythms of the laborer, who got up after a decent night's sleep, and sat down to rest when he felt like it. The cottager who had access to common land, even when he wanted extra income from wage labor, could take work on a casual basis and then return to working for himself. This was an unacceptable degree of independence from a capitalist standpoint.
In the modern world most people have to adapt themselves to some kind of discipline, and to observe other' people's timetables, ...or work under other people's orders, but we have to remember that the population that was flung into the brutal rhythm of the factory had earned its living in relative freedom, and that the discipline of the early factory was particularly savage.... No economist of the day, in estimating the gains or losses of factory employment, ever allowed for the strain and violence that a man suffered in his feelings when he passed from a life in which he could smoke or eat, or dig or sleep as he pleased, to one in which somebody turned the key on him, and for fourteen hours he had not even the right to whistle. It was like entering the airless and laughterless life of a prison [the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:33-34].
The factory system could not have been imposed on workers without first depriving them of alternatives, and forcibly denying access to any source of economic independence. No unbroken human being, with a sense of freedom or dignity, would have submitted to factory discipline. Stephen Marglin compared the nineteenth century textile factory, staffed by pauper children bought at the workhouse slave market, to Roman brick and pottery factories which were manned by slaves. In Rome, factory production was exceptional in manufactures dominated by freemen. The factory system, throughout history, has been possible only with a work force deprived of any viable alternative...
...The origin and success of the factory lay not in technological superiority, but in the substitution of the capitalist's for the worker's control of the work process and the quantity of output, in the change in the workman's choice from one of how much to work and produce, based on his preferences for leisure and goods, to one of whether or not to work at all, which of course is hardly much of a choice.
Marglin took Adam Smith's classic example of the division of labor in pin-making, and stood it on its head. The increased efficiency resulted, not from the division of labor as such, but from dividing and sequencing the process into separate tasks in order to reduce set-up time. This could have been accomplished by a single cottage workman separating the various tasks and then performing them sequentially (i.e., drawing out the wire for an entire run of production, then straightening it, then cutting it, etc.).
Without specialization, the capitalist had no essential role to play in the production process. If each producer could himself integrate the component tasks of pin manufacture into a marketable product, he would soon discover that he had no need to deal with the market for pins through the intermediation of the putter-outer. He could sell directly and appropriate to himself the profit that the capitalist derived from mediating between the producer and the market.
This principle is at the center of the history of industrial technology for the last two hundred years. Even given the necessity of factories for some forms of large-scale, capital-intensive manufacturing, there is usually a choice between alternate productive technologies within the factory. Industry has consistently chosen technologies which de-skill workers and shift decision-making upward into the managerial hierarchy. As long ago as 1835, Dr. Andrew Ure (the ideological grandfather of Taylorism and Fordism), argued that the more skilled the workman, "the more self-willed and... the less fit a component of a mechanical system" he became. The solution was to eliminate processes which required "peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand... from the cunning workman" and replace them by a "mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it." [Philosophy of Manufactures, in Thompson 360]. And the principle has been followed throughout the twentieth century. William Lazonick, David Montgomery, David Noble, and Katherine Stone have produced an excellent body of work on this theme. Even though corporate experiments in worker self-management increase morale and productivity, and reduce injuries and absenteeism, beyond the hopes of management, they are usually abandoned out of fear of loss of control.
Christopher Lasch, in his foreword to Noble's America by Design, characterized the process of de-skilling in this way:
The capitalist, having expropriated the worker's property, gradually expropriated his technical knowledge as well, asserting his own mastery over production....
The expropriation of the worker's technical knowledge had as a logical consequence the growth of modern management, in which technical knowledge came to be concentrated. As the scientific management movement split up production into its component procedures, reducing the worker to an appendage of the machine, a great expansion of technical and supervisory personnel took place in order to oversee the productive process as a whole [pp. xi-xii].
The expropriation of the peasantry and imposition of the factory labor system was not accomplished without resistance; the workers knew exactly what was being done to them and what they had lost. During the 1790s, when rhetoric from the Jacobins and Tom Paine were widespread among the radi- calized working class, the rulers of "the cradle of liberty" lived in terror that the country would be swept by revolution. The system of police state controls over the population resembled an alien occupation regime. The Hammonds referred to correspondence between north-country magistrates and the Home Office, in which the law was frankly treated "as an instrument not of justice but of repression," and the working classes "appear[ed]... con- spicuously as a helot population." [Town Labourer 72]
... in the light of the Home Office papers, ...none of the personal rights attaching to Englishmen possessed any reality for the working classes. The magistrates and their clerks recognized no limit to their powers over the freedom and the movements of working men. The Vagrancy Laws seemed to supercede the entire charter of an Englishman's lib- erties. They were used to put into prison any man or woman of the working class who seemed to the magistrate an inconvenient or distur- bing character. They offered the easiest and most expeditious way of proceeding against any one who tried to collect money for the families of locked-out workmen, or to disseminate literature that the magistrates thought undesirable [Ibid. 80].
Peel's "bobbies"--professional law enforcement--replaced the posse comitatus system because the latter was inadequate to control a population of increasingly disaffected workmen. In the time of the Luddite and other disturbances, crown officials warned that "to apply the Watch and Ward Act would be to put arms into the hands of the most powerfully disaffected." At the outset of the wars with France, Pitt ended the practice of quartering the army in alehouses, mixed with the general population. Instead, the manufacturing districts were covered with barracks, as "purely a matter of police." The manufacturing areas "came to resemble a country under military occupation." [Ibid. 91-92].”
~Kevin A. Carlson
Link to full text and audio file below
www.filmsforaction.org
“To grasp the enormity of the process, we must understand that the nobility's rights in land under the manorial economy were entirely a feudal legal fiction deriving from conquest. The peasants who cultivated the land of England in 1650 were descendants of those who had occupied it since time immemorial. By any standard of morality, it was their property in every sense of the word. The armies of William the Conqueror, by no right other than force, had compelled these peasant proprietors to pay rent on their own land....
...Another form of expropriation, which began in late medieval times and increased drastically in the eighteenth century, was the enclosure of commons--in which, again, the peasants communally had as absolute a right of property as any defended by today's "property rights" advocates. Not counting enclosures before 1700, the Hammonds estimated total enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at a sixth or a fifth of the arable land in England [Village Labourer 42]. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude estimated enclosures between 1750 and 1850 alone as transforming "something like one quarter of the cultivated acreage from open field, common land, meadow or waste into private fields...." [Captain Swing 27].
The ruling classes saw the peasants' right in commons as a source of economic independence from capitalist and landlord, and thus a threat to be destroyed. Enclosure eliminated "a dangerous centre of indiscipline" and compelled workers to sell their labor on the masters' terms. Arthur Young, a Lincolnshire gentleman, described the commons as "a breeding-ground for 'barbarians,' 'nursing up a mischievous race of people'." "[E]very one but an idiot knows," he wrote, "that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious." The Commercial and Agricultural Magazine warned in 1800 that leaving the laborer "possessed of more land than his family can cultivate in the evenings" meant that "the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work." [Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 219-220, 358]. Sir Richard Price commented on the conversion of self-sufficient proprietors into "a body of men who earn their subsis- tence by working for others." There would, "perhaps, be more labour, be- cause there will be more compulsion to it." [Marx, "The Expropriation...."].
Marx cited parliamentary "acts of enclosure" as evidence that the commons, far from being the "private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords," actually required "a parlia- mentary coup detat... for its transformation into private property." ["The Expropriation...."]. The process of primitive accumulation, in all its brutality, was summed up by the same author:
These new freedmen [i.e. former serfs] became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire ["Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation," Capital Vol. 1].
Even then, the working class was not sufficiently powerless. The state had to regulate the movement of labor, serve as a labor exchange on behalf of capitalists, and maintain order. The system of parish regulation of the movement of people, under the poor laws and vagrancy laws, resembled the internal passport system of South Africa, or the reconstruction era Black Codes. It "had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer," Marx wrote, "as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunov on the Russian peasantry." ["The Expropriation..."] Adam Smith ventured that there was "scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age... who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settle- ments." [Wealth of Nations 61]...
...The working class lifestyle under the factory system, with its new forms of social control, was a radical break with the past. It involved drastic loss of control over their own work. The seventeenth century work calendar was still heavily influenced by medieval custom. Although there were long days in spurts between planting and harvest, intermittent periods of light work and the proliferation of saints days combined to reduce average work-time well below our own. And the pace of work was generally determined by the sun or the biological rhythms of the laborer, who got up after a decent night's sleep, and sat down to rest when he felt like it. The cottager who had access to common land, even when he wanted extra income from wage labor, could take work on a casual basis and then return to working for himself. This was an unacceptable degree of independence from a capitalist standpoint.
In the modern world most people have to adapt themselves to some kind of discipline, and to observe other' people's timetables, ...or work under other people's orders, but we have to remember that the population that was flung into the brutal rhythm of the factory had earned its living in relative freedom, and that the discipline of the early factory was particularly savage.... No economist of the day, in estimating the gains or losses of factory employment, ever allowed for the strain and violence that a man suffered in his feelings when he passed from a life in which he could smoke or eat, or dig or sleep as he pleased, to one in which somebody turned the key on him, and for fourteen hours he had not even the right to whistle. It was like entering the airless and laughterless life of a prison [the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:33-34].
The factory system could not have been imposed on workers without first depriving them of alternatives, and forcibly denying access to any source of economic independence. No unbroken human being, with a sense of freedom or dignity, would have submitted to factory discipline. Stephen Marglin compared the nineteenth century textile factory, staffed by pauper children bought at the workhouse slave market, to Roman brick and pottery factories which were manned by slaves. In Rome, factory production was exceptional in manufactures dominated by freemen. The factory system, throughout history, has been possible only with a work force deprived of any viable alternative...
...The origin and success of the factory lay not in technological superiority, but in the substitution of the capitalist's for the worker's control of the work process and the quantity of output, in the change in the workman's choice from one of how much to work and produce, based on his preferences for leisure and goods, to one of whether or not to work at all, which of course is hardly much of a choice.
Marglin took Adam Smith's classic example of the division of labor in pin-making, and stood it on its head. The increased efficiency resulted, not from the division of labor as such, but from dividing and sequencing the process into separate tasks in order to reduce set-up time. This could have been accomplished by a single cottage workman separating the various tasks and then performing them sequentially (i.e., drawing out the wire for an entire run of production, then straightening it, then cutting it, etc.).
Without specialization, the capitalist had no essential role to play in the production process. If each producer could himself integrate the component tasks of pin manufacture into a marketable product, he would soon discover that he had no need to deal with the market for pins through the intermediation of the putter-outer. He could sell directly and appropriate to himself the profit that the capitalist derived from mediating between the producer and the market.
This principle is at the center of the history of industrial technology for the last two hundred years. Even given the necessity of factories for some forms of large-scale, capital-intensive manufacturing, there is usually a choice between alternate productive technologies within the factory. Industry has consistently chosen technologies which de-skill workers and shift decision-making upward into the managerial hierarchy. As long ago as 1835, Dr. Andrew Ure (the ideological grandfather of Taylorism and Fordism), argued that the more skilled the workman, "the more self-willed and... the less fit a component of a mechanical system" he became. The solution was to eliminate processes which required "peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand... from the cunning workman" and replace them by a "mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it." [Philosophy of Manufactures, in Thompson 360]. And the principle has been followed throughout the twentieth century. William Lazonick, David Montgomery, David Noble, and Katherine Stone have produced an excellent body of work on this theme. Even though corporate experiments in worker self-management increase morale and productivity, and reduce injuries and absenteeism, beyond the hopes of management, they are usually abandoned out of fear of loss of control.
Christopher Lasch, in his foreword to Noble's America by Design, characterized the process of de-skilling in this way:
The capitalist, having expropriated the worker's property, gradually expropriated his technical knowledge as well, asserting his own mastery over production....
The expropriation of the worker's technical knowledge had as a logical consequence the growth of modern management, in which technical knowledge came to be concentrated. As the scientific management movement split up production into its component procedures, reducing the worker to an appendage of the machine, a great expansion of technical and supervisory personnel took place in order to oversee the productive process as a whole [pp. xi-xii].
The expropriation of the peasantry and imposition of the factory labor system was not accomplished without resistance; the workers knew exactly what was being done to them and what they had lost. During the 1790s, when rhetoric from the Jacobins and Tom Paine were widespread among the radi- calized working class, the rulers of "the cradle of liberty" lived in terror that the country would be swept by revolution. The system of police state controls over the population resembled an alien occupation regime. The Hammonds referred to correspondence between north-country magistrates and the Home Office, in which the law was frankly treated "as an instrument not of justice but of repression," and the working classes "appear[ed]... con- spicuously as a helot population." [Town Labourer 72]
... in the light of the Home Office papers, ...none of the personal rights attaching to Englishmen possessed any reality for the working classes. The magistrates and their clerks recognized no limit to their powers over the freedom and the movements of working men. The Vagrancy Laws seemed to supercede the entire charter of an Englishman's lib- erties. They were used to put into prison any man or woman of the working class who seemed to the magistrate an inconvenient or distur- bing character. They offered the easiest and most expeditious way of proceeding against any one who tried to collect money for the families of locked-out workmen, or to disseminate literature that the magistrates thought undesirable [Ibid. 80].
Peel's "bobbies"--professional law enforcement--replaced the posse comitatus system because the latter was inadequate to control a population of increasingly disaffected workmen. In the time of the Luddite and other disturbances, crown officials warned that "to apply the Watch and Ward Act would be to put arms into the hands of the most powerfully disaffected." At the outset of the wars with France, Pitt ended the practice of quartering the army in alehouses, mixed with the general population. Instead, the manufacturing districts were covered with barracks, as "purely a matter of police." The manufacturing areas "came to resemble a country under military occupation." [Ibid. 91-92].”
~Kevin A. Carlson
Link to full text and audio file below
The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege
The empirically definitive critique of our economic system since its beginning to the present day.
The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the ‘Brexit Election’
The simultaneous embrace of markets, and of rules and regulations, represents the soul of what’s sometimes called “centrism.” It’s a decidedly unlovely combination. Nobody truly likes it. But the talking classes had reached an absolute consensus that no politicians who departed significantly...
Fascinating summary of a war that many never knew was fought:
Disgruntledgoat
Player Valuation: £50m
Nice little piece on the place I call home. I live right in the car free part. It's boss.
www.theguardian.com
How a Belgian port city inspired Birmingham's car-free ambitions
Ghent’s overnight transformation produced shorter journeys, cleaner air and a cycling explosion
Disgruntledgoat
Player Valuation: £50m
Black Belt Jones
Player Valuation: £25m
Good piece from John Gray in the New Statesman from a couple of weeks back:
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/01/why-left-keeps-losing
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/01/why-left-keeps-losing
Black Belt Jones
Player Valuation: £25m
What is the reality of riding your bike round Belgian cities if you want to go faster than 11 mph? I quite like commuting in to work here at a decent tempo, unimpeded by the whole world tying to ride bicycles slowly.Nice little piece on the place I call home. I live right in the car free part. It's boss.
How a Belgian port city inspired Birmingham's car-free ambitions
Ghent’s overnight transformation produced shorter journeys, cleaner air and a cycling explosion
They put a bike lane in to the main arterial route into my work and it sucks tbh - jammed with students riding BSOs and the road (which was safe) is now narrower with loads of right of way issues.
Disgruntledgoat
Player Valuation: £50m
Depends where you're riding and when.
Gent is a bit of a mare on account of the main volume of traiffic being bikes, my commute is 35km on segregated cyclelanes and I hardly see anybody.
In the cities the majority of people aren't cyclists... They're people on bikes who treat it like they're walking and, therefore, don't have to signal or look where they're going.
Black Belt Jones
Player Valuation: £25m
You must wear cycling gear for 35 km I imagine? My commute is more like 10 and I could in principle wear my work clothes and ride slowly, but it feels so much less safe.
That Belgian cycling infrastructure must let you ride round the towns safety, wearing normal clothes - which seems to be key to promoting cycle commuting. If I bimbled in on a sit up and beg wearing a suit I'd lay money on getting knocked off in a year, but blast it in wearing lycra generally feels pretty safe to me - closer to the speed of the traffic.
Disgruntledgoat
Player Valuation: £50m
Yeah, I get dressed up like the Michelin man at this time of year
You're normally segregated from the traffic, in fairness. Also it's always their fault if they hit you so they're looking. Like I say, most people here are not what you'd term cyclists. They just ride a bike to get places. The school my girlfriend works in send the kids on school trips within the city by bike also. it's just the way you get places in the city.
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