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What strikes me about the 1867-1914 period is how much the technological revolution of that time coincided with a huge flourishing of the arts and humanities and a dramatic improvement to the built environment that was driven by art and design, not only by technology. The music, visual art, architecture, and literature of that period all contain so much that remains outstanding and canonical today, that was impossible to do before and has rarely been done since. And that period also saw the rise of the streetcar suburb, one of the most pleasant forms of residential community ever devised, and arguably much pleasanter than any such innovation that came after it.

If we believe that the causation was not all one way-- that there were common cultural roots of the humanistic and technological advances of that period-- that should strengthen the view that stagnation is a choice.

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Indeed! I’ve been thinking about streetcar suburbs ever since our conversation on Friday. And I’m fascinated by the drive for self-improvement evident in the British institution building of the Victorian era. The Victoria & Albert museum in London remains my favorite, both in content and in architecture.

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