Good point about extended names. Yet one more operation that can be done with reputation tokens.

As for the spelling, I've tried to fix what I could. Feel free to point out any remaining typos.

I am not an economist, so it's hard to me to judge the quality of the paper. In fact, I was just trying to show the kind of argument made for bank independence at the time. Feel free to check the paper for yourself: https://debis.deu.edu.tr/userweb//yesim.kustepeli/dosyalar/alesinasummers1993.pdf Section 2. is about measuring the central bank independence.

Wouldn't that create the same election-cycle-dependent behaviour seen with politically appointed boards?

The reference comes from Prof. Wolfram Pyta from University of Stuttgart. However, given that Wikipedia disagrees and that the fact doesn't add any added value to the article anyway, I am removing it.

This is something I would like to study one day. There seems to have been a turn in German public attitude at some point. As far as I can say from what I've read, it haven't yet happened in early 50's. Denazification programme and Nurnberg trials were felt to be a farce a it's unclear whether they could have contributed to the change. Some public figures (e.g. Adenauer) may have lead by example, but frankly, I don't know.

If people here, especially Germans, have any insights on the topic, it would be great if they could share.

Fair enough. I've just wrote what I've been taught in school. I'll remove the sentence.

Point taken.

Still, it feels a bit different. The 9/11 memorial is honoring the good Americans killed by the bad terrorists. But the inscriptions in the Reichstag are definitely not honoring the good Germans killed by bad Soviets. They were, after all, whether willingly or not, fighting for the Nazis. But neither are they honoring the Soviets. They were fighting for Stalin, for the Stasi, for Berlin families being separated by the Wall. It's hardly a memorial at all. If there's any moral to be taken, then it is that history is, in the end, not about the good and the bad, but about Alexey from Pskov and Hans from Göttingen, maybe neither of them a particularly good person, but both of them being swept alike by the uncaring forces of history.

Yes, I am from Eastern Europe. That made me wonder whether the densification of the road system has slowed down in the west.

Here are statistics for the US:

In short, there's a slowdown, but it starts in '90.

Source

Air miles per capita seem to tell a different story though:

Source

I was speaking from personal experience.

In 1980's it took 6 hrs to get to my grandmothers place. Today it is more like 3 hrs. All that not because of better cars but because there's a highway covering most of the distance.

In 1980 people rarely traveled by plane. A holiday by seaside meant a 12 hour ride by car to Yugoslavia. Today, everyone's flying to Turkey and Canary Islands.

As for transportation, I would say the average time to get to a place have dropped considerably in past 50 years, not because of any specific invention, but because airplanes has become less toys for the rich and more of buses with wings available to everyone. Similarly, densification of the motorway system made it faster to go places by car.

It's not clear, of course, whether that kind of thing counts as technological progress. But if not so, what kind of progress is it?