We hear about civilisational inadequacy all the time. Some people write whole books on it. But what about the opposite? What happens when a country acts rationally?
On April 30 1976, the French government approved a plan to build a high-speed rail link between Paris and Lyon, the first high-speed rail line in Europe. This line was to use completely new electric locomotives, also to be developed in France as part of the project. The ensuing line opened on September 26 1981, 1,975 days later.
On September 24 1996, the California High-Speed Rail Authority was formed. The completion of the first phase of California's high-speed rail project, a line connecting San Francisco and Anaheim, is currently estimated to happen in 2033, 37 years (i.e. around 13,000 days) after the authority was formed. Source: On the Fast Track.
Patrick Collison, Fast
The TGV, when the French aren't off striking, is amazing. You can arrive at the station 10 minutes before departure and not miss your ride. You get wifi and charging ports. It's cheaper than a plane, and the station is always at the center of the city. It feels cool to be inside a nuclear-powered bullet train.
Japan didn't build the Shinkansen as fast as France built the TGV. But it did so before France did, and operates it much better. In the last 2 decades, China seems to have built more high-speed rail than the rest of the world combined and then some. But in usual Chinese fashion, the impressive numbers are not attached to any particular Real Thing. Apart from vague political plans, most these rail lines seem mostly useless.
The CCP just loves big engineering projects. That's good, but also I like it when it's For Real.
Pointing and calling is a method in occupational safety for avoiding mistakes by pointing at important indicators and verbally calling out their status. It is especially common on Japanese railways, where it is referred to as shisa kanko (指差喚呼), shisa kakunin kanko (指差確認喚呼) or yubisashi koshō (指差呼称). Gesturing at and verbalizing these indicators helps with focus.
19th century Chicago (also see: "Paris on the prairie") decided it needed a sewerage system, but didn't want to drain the swamp Chicago sat on. They decided, instead, to raise the city by a meter and a half.
In January 1858, the first masonry building in Chicago to be thus raised—a four-story, 21-meter long, 680 metric-ton brick structure situated at the north-east corner of Randolph Street and Dearborn Street—was lifted on two hundred jackscrews to its new grade, which was 1.88 m higher than the old one, "without the slightest injury to the building." It was the first of more than fifty comparably large masonry buildings to be raised that year. (...)
Businesses operating in these premises were not closed down during the operation; as the buildings were being raised, people came, went, shopped and worked in them as they would ordinarily do. In five days the entire assembly was elevated 1.42 meters, by a team consisting of six hundred men using six thousand jackscrews, which made it ready for new foundation walls to be built underneath. The spectacle drew crowds of thousands, who were, on the final day, permitted to walk at the old ground level, among the jacks.
Under Louis XIV, who really liked big shiny things, Paris became the first city with public lighting. Like air conditioning or CO2 filtration, public lighting is a low hanging fruit no one thinks about that brings so much to an environment.
Social life and public opinion were also aided by the introduction, in September 1667, of 2,736 glass lanterns positioned throughout the 912 streets of Paris. The city thus became the first to be lit at night, an amazing concept at the time and an equally amazing achievement.
It was expensive (200,000 livres, $10 million annually for the candle wax alone) and had to be paid for by a new 'mud and lantern tax', with the Royal Academy of Sciences well placed to authorize the various reflect or devices introduced.
But the innovation more than paid for itself by creating a night life in Paris that had simply not existed before. The lighting changed the rhythm of the city in commercial terms (shopping did not have to end with the end of daylight), and the social life of the city would carry on until all hours, salon life included.
In December 1673, the Marquise de Sévigné records how she and her friends were delighted that their dinner party did not break until midnight and that they were able to help take one of their number home right across the city.
"We came home merrily, because of all the lanterns."
Peter Watson, The French Mind
Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency
While Europe was busy handing peasants swords and sending them to the East to kill people in the name of God, the Caliphate of Cordoba was busy writing, compiling, and translating books in the name of God. This was rather productive.
In the 10th century, Córdoba became one of the centers of culture and high society in the Islamic world. Al-Andalus's prosperity and the caliph's patronage attracted travelers, diplomats and scholars. Advances in science, history, geography, philosophy, and language also occurred during the Caliphate. During the reign of al-Hakam II, the royal library possessed an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 volumes. For comparison, the Abbey of Saint Gall in Switzerland contained just over 100 volumes.
The caliphate explicitly allowed Christians and Jews to live, study, and write freely within the Iberian peninsula (so long as they did so in Arabic). The Jewish Golden Age happened within its walls. This was a really, really big library.
There is exactly one country in the world that lets you trade your kidney for cash. It's also the only country with no-one on the kidney transplant waiting list.
Making kidney sales legal as Iran did might not be the takeaway here. We can take incremental steps too—the US doesn't even let donors get compensated for the loss of this major organ! In some European countries like France, it's illegal to give a kidney to a stranger!
(See also Scott Alexander for how the byzantine donation system works in the US.)
This is one of those places where deregulating the market (such that there even is a market) definitely does more good than the alternative, and we have solid evidence for it. Every year thousands die out of need for an organ everyone else has a spare for and whose transplant operation is known to be safe. Making transplants more attractive by simplifying bureaucracy, compensating donors, or otherwise not being generally extremely touchy about this, is low-hanging fruit for civilisations.
Good for Iran I guess?
If you have any contenders for the list, email me. It will grow in time.