Category: Cycling
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Rwanda rising
In a letter of advice to his son Eduard, Albert Einstein wrote ‘Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.’ He wasn’t wrong but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It is hard to find the resolve to move forward when faced with overwhelming suffering. Yet this is exactly what…
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There were nine million bicycles in Beijing
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century discusses how wealth becomes concentrated over time, leading to social and economic instability. That topic has long interested me but one paragraph left a particularly strong impression. Piketty describes how, in the 1880s, the cheapest bicycle in France cost half the average worker’s annual income. And this was for a…