America Became Rich Because of Liberalism

By Peter J. Boettke.

"March 9, 2026, was the 250^th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. July 4, 2026, was the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. These two documents are pillars of the great liberal tradition: free trade and economic freedom, the natural rights of each individual, and political freedom. Given the timing of publications, one cannot draw a direct line of influence from Smith’s scientific tract to the practical political demands of the Declaration. However, there is a great deal of evidence that the founding fathers knew of Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment and drew inspiration from their works. My task here is not to revisit this question of influence, but to seek to find the common ground between the two documents we are celebrating this year, and to suggest how that common ground influenced the development of liberal political economy in the 20^th century in the hands of F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, the latter who won the Nobel Prize for Economics 50 years ago.

The great historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, argued in The Radicalism of the American Revolution that what is most overlooked in discussions is the radical transformation of society that resulted. Colonial America was a society of status, of privileges, of station. Patronage and personal favoritism by those with power played a major role in social mobility—to the extent that it existed. This social system would all be transformed by the Revolution.  One prominent example of the legal transformation was the abolition state by state of the practice of primogeniture between 1777 to 1798.  Not only did this change the laws of inheritance, but transformed the meaning and use of property, encouraged entrepreneurship, credit markets and social and geographic mobility. Legal distinctions based on rank disappeared, and economic opportunities were based in interest, aptitude and talent rather than birth. Certainly not perfectly, it must be acknowledged. But in a far more sweeping nature than anywhere else in the world, ordinary individuals were enabled to “give it a go,” as the historian Deirdre McCloskey likes to stress about the ascendancy of the Bourgeois Era. Almost overnight, Wood argues, Americans became “the most liberal, most democratic, most commercially minds, and most modern people in the world.”

As a result, America became the richest country in history over the next 250 years. It did so without an aristocracy, and without central planning or a comprehensive blueprint by the governmental authorities. The Revolution succeeded because it created the institutional conditions for commercial civilization. It unleashed the creative powers of a free people to a greater degree than had ever been experienced before. As Hayek would stress, the transformation for a society of status to one of contract is critical to experiencing modern economic growth. And this is only possible if the governing system seeks to eliminate privileges and instead binds itself to the rule of law.

The American Constitution, democratic self-governance, geographic advantages, and abundance of resources all played a role, but it was the transformation of society that drove progress. The system of social hierarchy, deference, patronage, and inherited privileges was transformed into a system of equality before the law, civil society consisting of voluntary association, social mobility, entrepreneurship and dignity and respect for ordinary work. Commercial activity ceased being morally suspect and the marketplace was characterized by entrepreneurs, shopkeepers and independent participants rather than clients dependent on the good graces of the privileged and powerful elite.

It might make sense to pause for a minute and reflect on Smith’s choice of words for the title of his great treatise: “An Inquiry,” not “The Theory,” followed by “Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” not merely “Into the Wealth of Nations.” Smith’s work was no doubt concerned with material abundance, but not exclusively so. The division of labor, as reflected in Adam Smith’s depiction of the production of a common woolen coat, wasn’t merely about productive specialization, but the establishment of peaceful social cooperation among strangers. Rather than the traditional society of domination, commercial society is based on mutually beneficial exchange. Commerce rewards prudence, trustworthiness, reliability, reputation, and self-command. The market process in this regard is a civilizing influence by taming the passions and encouraging cooperation with others of great social and physical distance. Trading, not raiding, characterizes commercial life; just as making, not taking, is recognized as the way to generate wealth.

Smith was writing at the dawn of liberty. The American experience in the centuries after that Revolution is the realization of that liberty. Again, it has never been perfect and is still not perfect, but it always strives and bends toward that Smithian liberal plan of liberty, equality and justice. In the 20^th century, the two most important political economists pressing these Smithian points and the exemplary importance of the American project were Hayek and Friedman, perhaps most importantly in their works The Constitution of Liberty and Free to Choose.

My choice of books to link these two together is somewhat unusual because most writing an article such as this would focus instead on the relationship between Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom and the intimate connection between economic freedom and political freedom. These works, of course, are foundational to any discussion of the liberal principles of political economy and justice. But I chose The Constitution of Liberty and Free to Choose because both can be read as making significant contributions to the field of constitutional political economy (most associated with another University of Chicago product and fellow Nobel Prize winner, James M. Buchanan).

Critical to this specialized field of inquiry is how the establishment of general rules creates the conditions conducive the progress. To Hayek, America’s uniqueness was in creating a constitution and embracing institutions that formed the “machinery of government,” where millions of economic and social experiments could be going at the same time. America—however imperfect—embodied the principles of an open commercial civilization where individuals will discover opportunities, tinker and innovate, and develop new technologies. Economic freedom is not merely permission to give it a go, but a discovery procedure to learn what is worth going for in a way that nobody can know outside of the market process itself.

Friedman rightly contrasts the power of the market with the tyranny of control. The maintenance of commercial society requires limits on political power, competition to limit coercion, and choice to preserve and protect liberal pluralism. Economic freedom is not only efficient, it disperses power in society. It erodes privileges. It creates space for ordinary individuals to achieve extraordinary things. Economic freedom results from the security of property rights, freedom of contract and association, stable money and fiscal responsibility, all embodied in the rule of law.

This to me is the enduring lesson in political economy that we should derive from reflecting on the twin 250^th anniversaries and allow to guide us through our contemporary debates which too often seem to have forgotten these. Let me add one other aspect that is too often overlooked. When Hayek founded the Mont Pelerin Society, one of the names he toyed with was the Acton-Tocqueville Society. This was rejected by the original group for a variety of reasons, but it does reflect Hayek’s thinking. In the context of this article, I think we can argue that Alexis de Tocqueville provides a bridge between Wood’s historical account of the American Revolution and Hayek and Friedman’s theoretical accounts of economic and political freedom. Tocqueville observed what Wood described as the transformation of American society: a social order characterized by vibrant civil society of voluntary associations, social mobility, local initiative, and unbounded energy. Hayek explains to us why this decentralized dynamism is a source of discovery and continuous learning how to better pursue productive specialization and realize the gains from peaceful social cooperation. Friedman explains how the constitutional structure of government, by limiting power and privileges, preserves the open society and its properties of creativity, innovation and social and material progress.

Both the left and right in our current political and intellectual culture have abandoned these principles, at least in their rhetoric. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Vice President J. D. Vance have recently gone out of their way in respective speeches to dismiss the ideas of Hayek and Friedman. Critics of neoliberalism repeatedly target Hayek and Friedman without seemingly any sense of understanding the subtleties and nuances in their arguments. Post-liberals are even worse. Thinkers like Patrick Deneen argue that free market policies result in the erosion of community, destroy the social fabric, and increase inequality.  The individual becomes isolated and lacks any great purpose as a result. The remedy offered is the abandonment of the free market system with its emphasis on material growth and the adoption of public policies that stress virtue, local obligations, and the moral community.  Scholars under the New History of Capitalism movement see the coercion and abuse of corporate and state power as attributes inherent in capitalism. To both groups of critics, support for capitalism must either elide over these abuses or even justify them as the lesser evil to growth.

These criticisms are grounded in a misunderstanding of the argument for the liberalization of markets from David Hume and Adam Smith to F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman.  Markets are no doubt vehicles for efficiency in exchange and production and the creation of great material abundance, but that isn’t the side of markets that was stressed by Hayek and Friedman, let alone Smith. Smith was a champion of the doux commerce thesis that commerce civilized. Thomas Paine, of American Revolution fame, wrote that: “If commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable of, it would extirpate the system of war…” Commercial life civilizes people. Peaceful social cooperation among strangers replaces violence and conquest. Montesquieu wrote that “wherever the ways of man are gentle, there is commerce; and wherever there is commerce, there the ways of men are gentle.”

And certainly, by solving the violence trap, humanity was able to generate the wealth of nations, and this has been a boon to the flourishing of people everywhere that should be celebrated, but which capitalism’s critics so often seem to overlook or read as evidence of rapacity. In recent history, capitalism and trade has led to the great escape from abject poverty. When I was first learning economics in the 1980s, around 40% of the global population lived in extreme poverty (less than $2/day). Today that number is under 10%. Again, there is still work to be done to achieve Smith’s liberal plan of liberty, equality and justice for all. But we are farther along the path to that achievement than at any time in recorded history. The arguments of the great classical liberal economists from Smith to J. S. Mill, as well as the refinements that were made by great liberal economists of the 20^th century such as Frank Knight, Ludwig Mises, F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, are critical to our scientific understanding and our practical appreciation of freedom and free enterprise. These ideas of property, contract and consent are embedded deeply in the American Project, and the promise of that project is one of the Open and Opportunity society.  The direction forward is not to turn our backs on the American Project and reject the principles of free markets and entrepreneurialism, but to encourage the principles on which our democracy was founded and that, for all of its imperfections and momentary regressions, has created one of the wealthiest, free, and, yes, egalitarian nations in the history of civilization."

Why Capitalism Is the Most Moral Economic System

"Success comes from meeting the needs and wants of others," says businessman and publisher Steve Forbes.

From John Stossel. 

"I've failed!

I make the case for free markets. Young people elect socialists!

What are they thinking? Do they even think? Do they pay any attention to history? Or economics? Socialism always fails. Only markets create environments that let people prosper.

"Getting the right environment—this country's done it better than anyone else," says Steve Forbes in our full interview. "Give people a chance to be creative, experience liberty, and humanity moves forward."

His magazine has made that point for years.

"You and I are failures," I tell him. "We've tried to convince people about the benefits of free enterprise….[Yet] they embrace socialism," believing "posts from people like actor Mark Ruffalo: 'Capitalism today is failing us, killing us, and robbing from our children's future.'"

"Capitalism has done just the opposite!" replies Forbes. "Deaths from famines are down 99 percent in the last 60 years. Standard of living, 10 times better than it was 50 years ago around the world."

Can Socialists Support Commerce But Not Capitalism?

By Chris Freiman.

"Socialists often criticize US trade restrictions on Cuba. A recent example is the flotilla organized by activists attempting to deliver aid to the island that aimed to draw attention to the embargo. Participants and commentators often frame Cuba’s poverty as a direct result of US policy: lift the embargo, the argument goes, and Cuba will prosper.

What should we make of this argument? For one, the primary driver of Cuba’s persistent poverty is the Cuban government’s own economic policies, including state control, chronic misallocation, and long-standing restrictions on private enterprise. These institutional mistakes would keep Cuba poor even without the embargo.

That said, there’s little doubt that trade barriers cause economic harm, and socialists are right to recognize this. But here one might wonder: can socialists coherently object to trade restrictions while also opposing free market capitalism more broadly?

Many think the answer is yes. The socialist target isn’t free exchange as such, but private ownership of productive property. Socialists object to an economy where capitalists own the means of production and workers sell their labor for wages or a salary. Socialism, by contrast, would create a kind of “workplace democracy,” where firms are owned and operated by workers themselves. They’d collectively make decisions about production, investment, and distribution rather than take orders from a single boss. This could mean workers directly voting on major business decisions or periodically electing managers to act on their behalf. Suppose, for example, that a worker-owned pizzeria is deciding whether to shift from traditional pizza to a more upscale artisanal menu. In a traditional capitalist firm, the owner would have the final say. In workplace democracy, the cooks, servers, and other employees would collectively decide how to proceed. While there might be some conflicts between growth and equality, writes Mike Beggs at Jacobin, such a model would aim to “harmonize firm-level democracy with macroeconomic expansion and a solidaristic wage.”

Under this style of socialism, markets would still play an important role. Central planners wouldn’t decide how to allocate resources to the pizzeria or determine how many pizzas it has to bake. Instead, the pizzeria would compete with rival restaurants for customers just as it would under capitalism. The goal is to retain the information markets provide in the form of prices, profits, and losses while “socializing” ownership of firms.

At first glance, it seems as though this version of socialism is perfectly compatible with free trade. You could have an economy in which firms are democratically owned and still allow free trade both within and across borders.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But there’s a tension lurking in the background. Consider that a central justification for free trade is that it enables all parties to voluntarily enter into an economic agreement in the expectation of mutual benefit. As Adam Smith puts the point:

Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of.

If I want the apples you have, and you want the oranges I have, we’re both better off as a result of a trade. Trade barriers — tariffs, quotas, embargoes, and the like — block these sorts of exchanges. That’s why critics of the Cuba embargo argue that it makes people worse off: it prevents them from engaging in mutually beneficial exchange, which an abundance of research shows is a source of human prosperity.

Once you see trade in this light, it becomes harder to draw a bright line between the kinds of exchanges socialists want to allow and the kinds they want to prohibit. As I mentioned earlier, to qualify as socialist, an economy must not permit capitalists to own the means of production and hire wage laborers. This means that a socialist economy must prohibit freely agreed-upon, mutually beneficial capitalist labor agreements. For instance, suppose Barry doesn’t want to take on the risks and responsibilities that come with being a co-owner of a coffee shop; he’d rather work for a steady wage as a barista for a corporate giant. Nevertheless, a socialist economy wouldn’t allow him to do so. (Otherwise, it would start drifting toward capitalism.)

It’s not clear why trading barista labor for money is all that different from trading apples for oranges. In both cases, people are making voluntary agreements in the expectation that they’ll be better off as a result. Here, then, is the tension. On the one hand, socialists criticize trade restrictions on the grounds that they block mutually beneficial exchange and thereby make people worse off. On the other hand, they want to restrict or eliminate capitalist employment of wage laborers — even when workers voluntarily choose those arrangements.

So something has to give. You can’t easily say, “Let people trade as they see fit because they expect it to benefit them,” while also saying, “But don’t let them sell their labor as they see fit, even when they expect it to benefit them.”

If mutual benefit justifies freely trading apples for oranges, it’s hard to see why it doesn’t also justify freely trading labor for wages. And if workers may trade their labor freely, they may trade it to capitalists — a conclusion that socialist defenders of free trade are sure to find unwelcome."

The Enclosures and the Industrial Revolution

By Don Boudreaux.

"Here’s a letter to someone who (I boast) reports that he’s greatly enjoying reading Phil Gramm’s and my book, The Triumph of Economic Freedom.

Mr. M__:

Thanks for your email and for your kind words about Phil Gramm’s and my book. They’re much-appreciated.

Our book’s chapter on the industrial revolution prompts you, understandably, to write:

A critique may say that one reason why people left rural areas to go to the cities was due to Britain’s enclosure laws that forced rural workers off their traditional land (which they presumably wished to stay on), causing them to have nowhere else to go except the cities and factories. This undermines the argument that rural people voluntarily left rural areas for the cities and factories due to the latter being more appealing than rural life.

Sen. Gramm and I did not explicitly address this particular point, although we should have done so. Had we done so, we’d have simply summarized the work of the eminent economic historian Deirdre McCloskey. In her remarkable 2010 volume, Bourgeois Dignity, McCloskey writes on page 154 that, in attempting to explain the industrial revolution, Karl Marx

instanced enclosure in England during the sixteenth century (which has been overturned by historical findings that such enclosure was economically minor) and in the eighteenth century (which has been overturned by findings that the labor driven off the land by enclosure was a tiny source of the industrial proletariat, and enclosure happened then mainly in the south and east where in fact little of the new sort of industrialization was going on, and where agricultural employment in newly enclosed villages in fact increased).

A few pages later (pages 172-173), McCloskey adds:

By now, though, several generations of agricultural historians have argued (contrary to the Fabian theme first articulated in 1911, which followed Marx) that eighteenth-century enclosures were in many ways equitable and did not drive people out of the villages…. Contrary to the pastoralism of [Oliver Goldsmith’s 1770] poem – which as usual reflects aristocratic traditions in poetry back to Horace and Theocritus more than evidence from the English countryside – the commons was usually purchased rather than stolen from the goose. One can point with sympathy to the damaging of numerous poor holders of traditional rights without also believing what appears to be false – that industrialization depended in any important way on the taking of rights from cottagers to gather firewood on the commons. Industrialization, after all, occurred first in regions to the north and west, mainly enclosed long before, such as Lancashire or Warwickshire, and especially (as Eric Jones pointed out) in areas bad for agriculture, not in the fertile East Midlands or East Anglia or the South – the places where the parliamentary acts of the eighteenth century did transform many villages, though non “deserted.” In such freshly enclosed areas, I repeat, the local populations increased after enclosure."

Marian Tupy disabuses American socialists of their economically ignorant belief that successful entrepreneurs steal their wealth from workers and consumers

From Cafe Hayek.

"Marian Tupy disabuses American socialists of their economically ignorant belief that successful entrepreneurs steal their wealth from workers and consumers. Two slices:

Early economists, such as James Mill and David Ricardo, theorized that the physical labor exerted to create a good is the real measure of its value. Karl Marx took the concept to its extreme: If labor creates all value, then profit must require unpaid labor, making every employer an expropriator and every fortune a crime.

Then, beginning in 1871, economists countered the labor theory of value. Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons and Léon Walras demonstrated independently that value resides not in hours of toil but in the judgments of consumers. Writing a 500-page novel takes the same amount of physical labor as typing out 500 pages of the word “banana” repeatedly. Only the novel commands a price. Value is created whenever someone rearranges the world into a shape that others want. It is measured by the buyer, not the worker.

Entrepreneurs are the arrangers. Economist Israel Kirzner argued that entrepreneurship is alertness — noticing an opportunity that nobody else has found. The entrepreneur sees that resources combined in a certain way and priced at a certain level can be recombined into something consumers will value even more. The gap between the two is profit. Nothing is taken from workers, who are paid the wage they agree to, or from customers, who buy the product only when the purchase leaves them better off.

…..

A movement that believes wealth is stolen will tax it, cap it and make everyone poorer. Ideas drive growth, and ideas come from people who can profit from them. A world that cherishes entrepreneurs will enjoy advanced chips and revolutionary cures. A world that punishes its innovators will at least enjoy plenty of slogans."

Socialism and the Decline of the Black Family

Children need fathers, but social fragmentation gives an advantage to those who seek centralized power

By Jason Riley. Excerpts:

"socialism’s impact on the traditional family structure is no less concerning. Children from intact families are more likely to finish school and avoid poverty. The absence of fathers is strongly correlated with teen parenthood, drug addiction and involvement with the criminal justice system. The cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote that “every known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behavior of men” and that civilization “depends upon social inventions that will make each generation of males want to nurture women and children.”"

"socialists such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dismissed the traditional family as a tool of oppression"

"many of the social and economic problems in low-income black communities stem from the sad fact that some 70% of black children are born to unwed parents and nearly 45% live with a single mother."

"Asians are the highest earners, followed by whites, Hispanics and blacks. Similarly, Asians have the highest marriage rates, followed by whites, Hispanics and blacks. Maybe it’s no coincidence."

"Following emancipation, one of the first things black people did was seek out spouses and children from whom they had been forcibly separated during slavery."

"Between 1890 and 1950, black men and women married earlier and were more likely to be married by 35 than their white peers, Mr. Squires writes. That suggests black attitudes toward marriage and child rearing today are the product of incentives and circumstances that developed long after the end of slavery. “More than 70 percent of black children were born to married parents in 1965—a century after the abolition of slavery,” Mr. Squires writes. “Today, only 30 percent are."

"The black family was more intact after three centuries of chattel slavery than after three generations of the federal government’s ‘war’ on poverty.”" 

Chronicle of Cuba’s Ruin Foretold

Little has changed since a leftist writer described the disaster on the island in 1970

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady. Excerpts:

"The basic creature comforts she (Alma Guillermoprieto) had taken for granted in New York, where she lived before departing to teach dance in Havana in 1970, were hard to come by"

"Cuban blackouts and brownouts date back decades. Even when fuel was readily available, a decrepit electrical grid caused regular power outages and daily life was consumed by the search for necessities."

"the ruling elite’s corrupt military conglomerate (Gaesa) controls the hard currency that comes into the country."

"Even the government isn’t allowed to audit those accounts."

"Fidel Castro had seized private property, instituted price controls, ended judicial certainty and imprisoned, executed or exiled the island’s most valuable human capital."

"The confiscation of farms, haciendas and ranches triggered an immediate contraction of the food supply. By 1960 there was a meat shortage"

"Per capita consumption of meat in 1958 was 112 pounds per year. The collectivization of the cattle industry created such disruption that not even a meager ration of 0.75 pounds of meat per week (39 pounds per year) could be met. This also applied to dairy products such as milk, butter, and cheese.”"

"in Castro’s utopia some pigs were more equal than others. Foreign guests of the regime enjoyed a privileged diet of fruits, vegetables and cheeses while in the school cafeteria she and her students met with “starch, grease and gruel.”"

"In June 2005 the national electricity system (SEN) was working at half capacity and blackouts lasted from 7 to 12 hours daily" 

Live Free and Prosper

Socialists claim they haven’t experienced American prosperity. All you have to do is look around

By Andy Kessler. Excerpts:

"Last month’s trial results of Lilly’s one-time gene-editing therapy showed it can lower LDL, “bad cholesterol,” by almost two-thirds. Could this be a heart-attack vaccine? It’s certainly a sign of a prosperous society." 

"Columbia University researchers successfully demonstrated base editing of “early human embryos” to replace specific genetic letters."

"the ability to identify and eliminate debilitating diseases—for example, hereditary blindness—is nothing short of amazing."

"GLP-1s may also help stroke, kidney and fatty liver diseases as well as sleep apnea, and research is under way to treat substance abuse, psychiatric and even neurodegenerative disorders."

"women 45 to 80 “who took GLP-1 medications were about 30 percent less likely to develop breast cancer"

"Palantir tapped AI to lower early death rates from sepsis at Tampa General Hospital by more than two-thirds." 

Who Wants to Be a Trillionaire? The SpaceX IPO is a credit to Elon Musk and American capitalism

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"The company raised $75 billion in its public debut, nearly three times more than the previous largest IPO (Saudi Aramco in 2019). It will need that money and multiples more to achieve Mr. Musk’s ambition of colonizing Mars and mining asteroids."

"Mr. Musk’s wealth largely consists of shares in SpaceX and Tesla."

"Mr. Musk’s wealth is a tribute to U.S. entrepreneurship and innovation, which are byproducts of its free-market system."

"Mr. Musk, an immigrant from South Africa, launched the rocket company in 2002 with money he made from his PayPal startup."

"NASA awarded SpaceX a contract to supply the International Space Station. SpaceX later developed reusable rockets that greatly reduce launch costs"

"Its success, which came through trial and failure, has ended U.S. reliance on Russia to transport astronauts to the space station and launch American satellites."

"In 2015 SpaceX launched Starlink, an internet satellite company that has helped Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion and dissidents living under authoritarian regimes like Iran to communicate."

"SpaceX has created thousands of jobs in working-class communities"

"Its workers . . . receive stock options, which has allowed them to share in the company’s success." 

"the IPO has made millionaires of 4,400 SpaceX current and former employees" 

Mamdani vs. Bodegas

His socialist supermarkets could put New York’s little grocers out of business

By Faith Bottum of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Many bodega owners say the mayor has betrayed them by pushing ahead with his plan to create city-owned supermarkets. The government “should be working with us,” says Francisco Marte, 59, owner of Green Earth Food in the Bronx and president of the Bodega and Small Business Association of New York. “That type of business run by the government, they never succeed. They always fail, and they fail big and with a lot of money that could have been used for something better.”"

"But five grocers are already within a two-block radius of that proposed Harlem store, with 10 more within five blocks."

Free market policies lowered poverty in Peru

See The Left Aims for an Andean Comeback by Mary Anastasia O’Grady. Excerpt:

"Peru’s shift over the past 20 years toward policies that support open markets, private initiative and macroeconomic stability has dramatically improved living standards. The share of Peruvians living below the poverty line fell to 25.7% in 2025 from 58.7% in 2004." 

Capitalism Delivers for Zohran Mamdani

His budget-balancing cuts to pension payments are made possible by strong stock-market returns

By Austin Berg. Excerpts:

"the single largest line item in his deficit-reduction plan: cutting the city’s payment to its pension funds by $2.3 billion over the next two years."

"The justification for changing this payment schedule is that New York City pension-fund investments have been booming"

"Investments held by New York City’s five pension systems have exceeded expectations for 10 years running, earning 10% returns last year and 7.7% over the past decade, compared with a 7% benchmark."

"What could have produced a boom of that scale? Not socialism."

"continued outperformance of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ stocks" (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla)

"Democratic socialists decry the evils of capitalism, yet they depend on strong economic growth as a magic beanstalk to pay down legacy debt" 

 

The Case Against Socialism, Part V

By Dan Mitchell. Excerpts: 

"here is the most compelling comparison of a pure socialist economy and a mostly capitalist economy."

 

The chart is based on the Maddison database, and there are data gaps during World War II as well as several decades of missing North Korean data.

But the lesson is blindingly obvious. South Korea has become a rich nation while North Korea is mired in grinding poverty. Heck, you can see the difference from outer space.

It makes the East Germany-West Germany comparison seem trivial by comparison.

South Korea is definitely not perfect and its long-run outlook is worrisome because of demographics.

But pretty good is definitely better than totally awful.

Another win for capitalism over socialism.

You can peruse previous editions in this series by clicking here, here, here, and here."

The World’s Most Surprising Capitalist Makeover Is Under Way in Sweden

The shake-up of cradle-to-grave care is lowering government spending, spurring innovation and stirring fears about those left behind

By Tom Fairless of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"nearly half of primary healthcare clinics are privately owned"

"One in three public high schools is privately run"

"The capitalist makeover has allowed Sweden to . . . shrink the size of the state. That has enabled the government to sharply lower taxes and . . . sparked a surge in entrepreneurship and economic growth."

"Its total public social spending bill . . . has fallen to 24% of gross domestic product, similar to the U.S. and well below the over 30% for nations like France and Italy."

"Sweden’s economy is expected to grow by around 2% a year through 2030, roughly the same pace as the U.S. and double the growth rates of France and Germany"

"Sweden didn’t always have a big public sector. The country climbed from being one of the poorest to the third-richest country in Europe over 100 years through 1970 without high levels of taxation. 

But starting in the 1960s, the center-left Social Democratic Party—which dominated the country’s postwar politics—sharply raised taxes and spending, ultimately taking government spending as high as 70% of GDP by the 1990s. 

The changes triggered a long period of weak growth, stagnant after-tax incomes and ballooning budget deficits and debt that culminated in a banking crisis in the early ’90s."

"the government instituted sweeping economic reforms over the next two decades. They included cuts to unemployment benefits and housing subsidies and the privatization of public services, as well as tax cuts and a reform of the pension system to make it more affordable. Strict limits were imposed on government debt. (Sweden’s debt to GDP is a meager 36%, compared with 129% for the U.S.) In the mid-2000s, the government eliminated wealth and inheritance taxes."

"Wealthy entrepreneurs who had fled Sweden’s high taxes have been returning"

"The country saw more than 500 initial public offerings over the 10 years through 2024, more than Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain combined"

"It has now moved ahead of the U.S. in the number of billionaires per capita"

"healthcare spending per capita in Sweden grew around 1% a year on average between 2014 and 2024 after adjusting for inflation—roughly half the pace in the U.K. and a third of the pace in the U.S."

"Stefan Fölster, an economist and former Finance Ministry official, argues that the vast majority of Swedes have benefited from the reforms. Households’ inflation-adjusted incomes have doubled on average since the 1990s, after stagnating during the 1970s and ’80s under high taxation, Fölster noted."

"Sweden has recently fallen down international education rankings, a shift that proponents of free schools attribute to high levels of immigration." 

More capitalist countries have lower income inequality

Tweet from Vlad Tarko. 

"More capitalist countries have lower income inequality, not higher. High income inequality is caused by cronyism which goes hand in hand with highly regulated markets. Welfare states also lower inequality, but you need free markets wealth to have generous welfare states."

 

"You can't derive causality from raw data. Those scatter plots are just a description of reality. If your causal picture of the world makes you expect the opposite patterns, you should re-evaluate. The cronyism comment is an alternate causal theory that fits the pattern.

In any case, if you think I'm deriving my whole world view from a few scatter plots, that's a very uncharitable interpretation. No, that's not what I'm doing. While, yes, empirical evidence is very important. Too many people have theories that are intuitive but flat out wrong.

The correlations on the upper-left and lower-right are actually quite strong. The other two less so, which further enhances the point! 1 Size of govt weakly correlated with equality, unless in rich country. 2 Even in rich countries, capitalism doesn't increase inequality."   

Capitalism does a far better job than socialism of feeding people.

A tweet from Chris Freiman. 

 

The Warmth of Cooperation

By Chris Freiman.

"New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently caused something of an uproar when he contrasted the “the frigidity of rugged individualism” with the “warmth of collectivism.” This framing echoes the familiar criticism that capitalism forces people to go it alone as “atomistic individuals.” The thought goes like this: markets do real damage to the social fabric and our relationships because they organize our economic lives around competition and self-interest. Organizing our lives around competition encourages people to see each other as rivals rather than partners. In brief, capitalism pits us against each other, while socialism brings us together. Setting aside the fact that collectivist regimes haven’t exactly been warm to those living under them, this view gets capitalism backward.

Start with a simple observation about your own economic life under capitalism. Think about this week: how many cooperative interactions have you had, and how many competitive ones?

You probably didn’t compete with anyone when you bought coffee at Starbucks this morning. You didn’t enter a zero-sum struggle when you paid your phone bill, purchased groceries and gas, or caught a movie. Instead, you took part in a series of mutually beneficial, voluntary transactions. You gave someone money and they gave you something you wanted more than the money. Everyone walked away better off. In the words of Adam Smith, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Competition, by contrast, rarely pops up in your day-to-day economic life. A business competes with other businesses for customers and you’ve probably competed with others for a job at some point. But you cooperate far more often than you compete. And notice what market competitions really are—they’re competitions to see who’s best at serving others. You might say that they’re competitions to discover the best ways to cooperate and who the best cooperators are (more on this below).

Unsurprisingly, Smith understood the cooperative nature of markets well. He writes that a wool coat

is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! How much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world!

Smith goes on, but I’ve got a word limit here—the point is that markets don’t atomize us. On the contrary, they lead strangers all over the world to cooperate.

Think back to the last time you bought a coffee. Starbucks has to coordinate with bean farmers, shipping companies, truck drivers, warehouse workers, roasters, equipment manufacturers, electricians, plumbers, accountants, and baristas. None of these people know you, and yet they manage, every day, to cooperate in ways that reliably get caffeine in your hand at 7:43 a.m. And this isn’t accidental—the prices provided by markets give people the information they need to figure out what others want, and they provide the incentive to give it to them.

There’s no denying that markets involve competition. You can go to the business section of a bookstore and find titles like Business Warfare and The Warfare of Business. But businesses are competing with each other to see who can best serve consumers. Netflix beat Blockbuster by figuring out a better way to give viewers what they wanted: convenience, selection, no late fees, and eventually streaming. In brief, Netflix won because consumers preferred cooperating with Netflix over Blockbuster.

A similar point applies to competition in the job market. Maybe you don’t merely want to buy coffee from Starbucks, you want to work there, too. But this means you’ll have to compete with other applicants who also want the job. Here again, let’s look at what it takes for an applicant to win this competition. They need to demonstrate that they’ll do the best job of making customers better off—say, by being more punctual, more efficient at making mochas, or more likely to serve drinks with a smile. Market competition is competition to see who can cooperate most effectively with others.

In any case, democratic socialists can’t be opposed to all competition. After all, democracy requires competition, and democratic socialists want democracy in the workplace as well as in politics. If competing for dollars is frigid, it’s hard to see why competing for votes would be any warmer. Market competition enables millions of people with different values, plans, and priorities to work together without agreeing on much of anything by helping them to coordinate many different choices. You and your barista don’t need to agree on the principles of justice to cooperate and make each other better off. Far from being atomizing or frigid, the free market is a system of interdependence that brings strangers together to cooperate for their mutual benefit."

Recent papers make airtight case against socialist growth

By Justin Callais. He the Chief Economist with the Archbridge Institute. Excerpts:

"Recent work by JP Bastos, Jamie Bologna Pavlik, and Vincent Geloso shows that Cuba severely underperforms “synthetic Cuba,” or what Cuba’s growth trajectory would have been if not for the socialist policies post-Revolution. Notably, they conduct their analysis based on reported GDP per capita numbers, adjusted (to account for fabricated data) GDP per capita, and adjusted for aid from the Soviet Union."

"Using the corrected data, Cuban GDP per capita was 48.3% below the synthetic counterfactual by 1972, and 44.3% below by 1989. When Soviet subsidies are stripped out, the picture is even grimmer: by 1972, Cuba’s GDP per capita fell 55.5% below the counterfactual, with that gap persisting through 1989.

Is this really just the US’s fault because of embargos? The authors account for this with specifications that are generous to inflate the embargo’s damage. Even so, the verdict is clear: the embargo can account for at most 8% to 10% of the difference between Cuba’s actual GDP and the counterfactual, a trivial share of the Revolution’s total effect."

"Before the Revolution, Cuba (much like Venezuela, which is covered in another great paper by Kevin Grier and Norman Maynard) was one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America. In just four years after the Revolution, Cuba returned to roughly the same living standards it had in 1937, effectively erasing more than two decades of economic growth."

"Louis Rouanet studies the impact of François Mitterrand’s 1981 election, who ran on a platform of “rupture with capitalism.” The findings are drastic: by 1996, France’s GDP per capita was roughly 26% lower than that of the synthetic counterfactual, a gap of about $7,300 in constant 2017 dollars. Investment collapsed relative to the counterfactual, and the employment rate underperformed by more than two percentage points."

"Even though Mitterrand somewhat reversed course after 1983, Rouanet argues that the policies persisted. The policies that expanded welfare spending, created hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs, and restructured the labor market were not reversed, and they locked in institutional arrangements that outlasted the President himself. France’s centralized, bureaucracy-dominated politics made bad policies stickier than they would have been elsewhere.

It is important to note that this wasn’t the type of social democracy (large welfare state complemented with a market economy) that exists in Scandinavia. The French Socialist Party in 1981 openly declared its goal to be the “socialization of the means of investment, production, and exchange.”"

"The broadest of the three, this paper by Andreas Bergh, Christian Bjørnskov, and Luděk Kouba, asks the question most directly: what does socialism do to economic growth, across countries and time? The authors draw on a dataset covering 192 sovereign countries from 1950 to 2020 and focus on the 22 countries that made a decisive transition to socialist planned economies after independence, countries like Tanzania, Zambia, Vietnam, Sudan, and Venezuela.

They use neighbor comparisons (China vs. Taiwan, Czechoslovakia vs. Austria, Yugoslavia vs. Greece) as a first cut, then apply more formal panel methods. The neighbor comparisons are striking:

Taiwan’s annual growth rate between 1950 and 1990 was on average 2.7 percentage points higher than China’s, Austria’s was 1.6 percentage points higher than Czechoslovakia’s, and Greece’s was .7 percentage points higher than Yugoslavia’s despite Greek instability, coups and a period of military dictatorship.

The results are consistent across every specification: adopting socialism is associated with a decline in annual growth rates of approximately two percentage points during the first decade after implementation. That sounds modest, but compound it over decades and it’s the difference between prosperity and stagnation. Let’s make a simple comparison. Assume two countries both have GDP per capita of $10,000. One goes socialist and grows at 2 percentage points less than the non-socialist country (assume 1% versus 3%). After 10 years, the socialist country has a GDP per capita of $11,046; the non-socialist one has GDP per capita of $13,439. After 20 years? Just $12,202 versus $18,061, a nearly $6,000 per capita difference!" 

Cuban Regime Wants Diaspora to Own Businesses on the Island

In a diplomatic overture, the Communist regime is aiming to open up its moribund economy to the affluent Cuban-American diaspora

By Deborah Acosta, Vera Bergengruen and José de Córdoba of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Cuba’s communist regime wants to open up its moribund economy to the Cuban-American diaspora, allowing foreign-based entrepreneurs to open up businesses and buy property"

"the government is open to having a fluid commercial relationship “with Cubans residing in the United States and their descendants.”"

"also open to having a relationship with U.S. companies. He said Cuba wants to energize sectors of the Cuban economy ranging from real estate to tourism and infrastructure."

"Under Cuba’s current law, Cuban-Americans can invest in the island only if they re-establish residency in Cuba, which leaves them at the mercy of a totalitarian regime. Removing this and other hurdles could transform the diaspora into a recognized foreign investor class." 

The Grim Truth About the “Good Old Days”

Preindustrial life wasn’t simple or serene—it was filthy, violent, and short

Chelsea Olivia Follett of Cato. 

"When Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online.

Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era. Some are even claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past. “The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages,” journalist Amanda Mull wrote in a piece for The Atlantic. Samuel Matlack, managing editor of The New Atlantis, observed that there is currently an “endless debate around whether the preindustrial past was clearly better than what we have now and we must go back to save humanity, or whether modern technological society is unambiguously a forward leap we must forever extend.”

In the popular imagination, the Industrial Revolution was the birth of many evils, a time when smoke-belching factories disrupted humanity’s erstwhile idyllic existence. Economics professor Vincent Geloso’s informal survey of university students found that they believed “living standards did not increase for the poor; only the rich got richer; the cities were dirty and the poor suffered from ill-health.” Pundit Tucker Carlson has even suggested that feudalism was preferable to modern liberal democracy.

Different groups tend to idealize different aspects of the past. Environmentalists might idealize preindustrial harmony with nature, while social traditionalists romanticize our ancestors’ family lives. People from across the political spectrum share the sense that the Industrial Revolution brought little real improvement for ordinary people.

In 2021, History.com published “7 Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution,” an article reflecting much of the thinking behind the popular impression that industrialization was a step backward for humanity, rather than a period of tremendous progress. But was industrialization really to blame for each of the ills detailed in the article?

“Horrible Living Conditions for Workers”

Were horrible living conditions a result of industrialization? To be sure, industrial-era living conditions did not meet modern standards—but neither did the living conditions that preceded them.

As historian Kirstin Olsen put it in her book, Daily Life in 18th-Century England, “The rural poor . . . crowded together, often in a single room of little more than 100 square feet, sometimes in a single bed, or sometimes in a simple pile of shavings or straw or matted wool on the floor. In the country, the livestock might be brought indoors at night for additional warmth.” In 18th-century Wales, one observer claimed that in the homes of the common people, “every edifice” was practically a miniature “Noah’s Ark” filled with a great variety of animals. One shudders to think of the barnlike smell that bedchambers took on, in addition to the chorus of barnyard sounds that likely filled every night. Our forebears put up with the stench and noise and cuddled up with their livestock, if only to stave off hypothermia.

Homes were often so poorly constructed that they were unstable. The din of collapsing buildings was such a common sound that in 1688, Randle Holme defined a crash as “a noise proceeding from a breach of a house or wall.” The poet Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote that in 1730s London, “falling houses thunder on your head.” In the 1740s, “props to houses” keeping them from collapsing were listed among the most common obstacles that blocked free passage along London’s walkways.

“Poor Nutrition”

What about poor nutrition? From liberal flower children to the “Make America Healthy Again” crowd, fetishizing the supposedly chemical-free, wholesome diets of yore is bipartisan. The truth, however, is stomach-churning.

Our ancestors not only failed to eat well, but they sometimes didn’t eat at all. Historian William Manchester noted that in preindustrial Europe, famines occurred every four years on average. In the lean years, “cannibalism was not unknown. Strangers and travelers were waylaid and killed to be eaten.” Historian Fernand Braudel recorded a 1662 account from Burgundy, France, that lamented that “famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families . . . and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to eat wild plants. . . . Some people ate human flesh.” A third of Finland’s population is estimated to have died of starvation during a famine in the 1690s.

Even when food was available, it was often far from appetizing. Our forebears lived in a world where adulterated bread and milk, spoiled meat, and vegetables tainted with human waste were everyday occurrences. London bread was described in a 1771 novel as “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.” According to historian Emily Cockayne, the 1757 public health treatise Poison Detected noted that “in 1736 a bundle of rags that concealed a suffocated newborn baby was mistaken for a joint of meat by its stinking smell.”

Water was also far from pristine. “For the most part, filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water,” according to environmental law professor James Salzman. This ensured that each swig included a copious dose of human excreta and noxious bacteria. Waterborne illnesses were frequent.

“A Stressful, Unsatisfying Lifestyle”

Did stressful lifestyles originate with industrialization? Did our preindustrial ancestors generally enjoy a sense of inner peace? Doubtful. Sadly, many of them suffered from what they called melancholia, roughly analogous to the modern concepts of anxiety and depression.

In 1621, physician Robert Burton described a common symptom of melancholia as waking in the night due to mental stress among the upper classes. An observer said the poor similarly “feel their sleep interrupted by the cold, the filth, the screams and infants’ cries, and by a thousand other anxieties.” Richard Napier, a 17th-century physician, recorded over several decades that some 20 percent of his patients suffered from insomnia. Today, in comparison, 12 percent of Americans say they have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia. Stress is nothing new.

Sky-high preindustrial mortality rates caused profound emotional suffering to those in mourning. Losing a child to death in infancy was once a common—indeed, near-universal—experience among parents, but the loss was no less painful for all its ordinariness. Many surviving testimonies suggest that mothers and fathers felt acute grief with each loss. The 18th-century poem, “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth,” by Mehetabel “Hetty” Wright—who lost several of her own children prematurely—heartrendingly urges her infant to look at her one last time before passing away.

So common were child deaths that practically every major poet explored the subject. Robert Burns wrote “On the Birth of a Posthumous Child.” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote multiple poems to his deceased son. Consider the pain captured by these lines from William Shakespeare’s play King John, spoken by the character Constance upon her son’s death: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child. . . . O Lord! My boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!” Shakespeare’s own son died in 1596, around the time the playwright would have finished writing King John.

Only in the modern world has child loss changed from extraordinarily common to exceedingly rare. As stressful as modern life can be, our ancestors faced forms of heartache that most people today will never endure.

“Dangerous Workplaces” and “Child Labor”

Dangerous workplaces and child labor both predate the Industrial Revolution. In agrarian societies, entire families would labor in fields and pastures, including pregnant women and young children. Many preindustrial children entered the workforce at what today would be considered preschool or kindergarten age.

In poorer families, children were sent to work by age 4 or 5. If children failed to find gainful employment by age 8, even social reformers unusually sympathetic to the plight of the poor, would express open disgust at such a lack of industriousness. Jonas Hanway was reportedly “revolted by families who sought charity when they had children aged 8 to 14 earning no wages.”

For most, work was backbreaking and unending. A common myth suggests that preindustrial peasants worked fewer days than modern people do. This misconception originated from an early estimate by historian Gregory Clark, who initially proposed that peasants labored only 150 days a year. He later revised this figure to around 300 days—higher than the modern average of 260 working days, even before factoring in today’s paid holidays and vacation time.

Physically harming one’s employees was once widely accepted, too, and authorities stepped in only when the mistreatment was exceptionally severe. In 1666, one such case occurred in Kittery, in what is now Maine, when Nicholas and Judith Weekes caused the death of a servant. Judith confessed that she cut off the servant’s toes with an axe. The couple, however, was not indicted for murder, merely for cruelty.

“Discrimination Against Women”

The preindustrial world was hardly a model of gender equality—discrimination against women was not an invention of the early industrialists but a long-standing feature of many societies.

Domestic violence was widely tolerated. In London, a 1595 law dictated: “No man shall after the houre of nine at the Night, keepe any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the Night, as making any affray, or beating hys Wife, or servant.” In other words, no beating your wife after 9:00 p.m. That was a noise regulation. A similar law forbade using a hammer after 9:00 p.m. Beating one’s wife until she screamed was an ordinary and acceptable activity.

Domestic violence was celebrated in popular culture, as in the lively folk song “The Cooper of Fife,” a traditional Scottish tune that inspired a country dance and influenced similar English and American ballads. To modern ears, the contrast between its violent lyrics and upbeat melody is unsettling. The song portrays a husband as entirely justified in his acts of domestic violence, inviting the audience to side with the wifebeater and cheer as he beats his wife into submission for her failure to perform domestic chores to her husband’s satisfaction.

Sexist laws often empowered men to abuse women. If a woman earned money, her husband could legally claim it at any time. For instance, in 18th-century Britain, a wife could not enter into contracts, make a will without her husband’s approval, or decide on her children’s education or apprenticeships; moreover, in the event of a separation, she automatically lost custody. Mistreatment of women, in other words, long predated industrialization. Arguably, it was the increase in female labor force participation during the Industrial Revolution that ultimately gave women greater economic independence and strengthened their social bargaining power.

“Environmental Harm”

While many of today’s environmental challenges—such as climate change and plastic pollution—differ from those our forebears faced, environmental degradation is not a recent phenomenon. Worrying about environmental impact, however, is rather new. Indeed, as historian Richard Hoffmann has pointed out, “Medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to . . . humankind.”

Consider deforestation. The Domesday Survey of 1086 found that trees covered 15 percent of England; by 1340, the share had fallen to 6 percent. France’s forests more than halved from about 30 million hectares in Charlemagne’s time (768–814) to 13 million by Philip IV’s reign (1285–1314).

Europe was hardly the only part of the world to abuse its forests. A 16th-century witness observed that at every proclamation demanding more wood for imperial buildings, the peasants of what are today the Hubei and Sichuan provinces in China “wept with despair until they choked,” for there was scarcely any wood left to be found.

Despeciation is also nothing new. Humans have been exterminating wildlife since prehistory. The past 50,000 years saw about 90 genera of large mammals go extinct, amounting to over 70 percent of America’s large species and over 90 percent of Australia’s.

Exterminations of species occurred throughout the preindustrial era. People first settled in New Zealand in the late 13th century. In only 100 years, humans exterminated 10 species of moa in addition to at least 15 other kinds of native birds, including ducks, geese, pelicans, coots, Haast’s eagle, and an indigenous harrier. Today, few people realize that lions, hyenas, and leopards were once native to Europe, but by the first century, human activity eliminated them from the continent. The final known auroch, Europe’s native wild ox, was killed in Poland by a noble hunter in 1627.

Progress Is Real

History bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination—that is, a beautiful scene of idyllic country villages with pristine air and residents merrily dancing around maypoles. The healthy, peaceful, and prosperous people in this fantasy of pastoral bliss do not realize their contented, leisurely lives will soon be disrupted by the story’s villain: the dark smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution’s “satanic mills.”

Such rose-colored views of the past bear little resemblance to reality. A closer look shatters the illusion. The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific.

A popular saying holds that “the past is a foreign country,” and based on recorded accounts, it is not one where you would wish to vacation. If you could visit the preindustrial past, you would likely give the experience a zero-star rating. Indeed, the trip might leave you permanently scarred, both physically and psychologically. You might long to unsee the horrors encountered on your adventure and to forget the shocking, gory details.

The upside is that the visit would help deromanticize the past and show how far humanity has truly come—emphasizing the utter transformation of everyday lives and the reality of progress."