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."

Yes, Americans Probably Are About 46 (or Maybe 65) Times Richer Than in 1776

By Jeremy Horpedahl.

"My post and chart from last week showed the phenomenal growth of average income in the US since the Founding. Using GDP per capita historical estimates and adjusting for inflation, this figure is about 46 times greater today than right around the time we declared independence.

It will probably not surprise you that some folks were skeptical. Could this really be true? Two major objections were raised to using GDP per capita. First, wouldn’t it be better to use a median income value rather than a mean (simple average)? Second, wouldn’t a measure of wages be better than GDP per capita?

I really would like to show you an annual series of median income data back to 1776, but unfortunately it just doesn’t exist. Good median income data are hard to find much before the 1950s, much less the 1770s. However, while median values are often better for showing levels, the growth rates of median wages and mean wages aren’t that different for periods when we have comparable data. Consider the following chart, which compares median wages (as calculated by EPI using CPS data) and mean wages (from BLS’s series for non-supervisory workers) since 1973. I have stated these in nominal terms, so don’t take this as real growth rates, but rather it is a raw comparison of two series (we could apply the same inflation adjustment to both, but that won’t change the picture, only the numbers).

 

Median wages increased by 667% and mean wages increased by 657%, almost identical. Again, these aren’t inflation adjusted, but that’s not the point of this exercise. The point is that whether you use mean or median wages, at least since 1973, the growth rates are the same. Was this true if we went back another 200 years? We can’t say for sure. But many people have this same skepticism about mean wages in recent decades. I think it is better to use median values when you have them, but we shouldn’t throw up our hands and claim we know nothing if all we have is mean wages.

Next, consider the following chart. It begins in 1790, but instead of using GDP per capita, as I did last week, it uses a measure of average wages from economic historian Lawrence Officer. This measure is for “production workers in manufacturing,” and it is a total compensation measure, meaning that it will include the value of fringe benefits as well — though these aren’t noticeable in the data until the 1930s. This is still an average value, but because it is for manufacturing laborers, it won’t be distorted by the wages of managers and owners in that industry, and it won’t be affected by the growth of new industries that might require more years of education (indeed, manufacturing wages are lowering than overall average wages today, so this is taking the hard case). I have also included a second line, which only includes manufacturing wages (not benefits) that I have blended with Officer’s compensation series starting in the 1930s, in case you think including benefits is somehow “cheating.” (Note the log scale again, as in last week’s chart.)

 

The trends here are very much in the ballpark from the GDP per capita chart I created last week. Using total compensation, wages are 65 times higher than in 1790. Using only wages, they are 49 times higher. Notice that these are both better than the 46 times multiplier using GDP per capita. How is that possible, since I am using the same price deflator in both cases? First, average hours of work have fallen significantly since the 18th century, so incomes haven’t risen quite as much as wages. Second, there was a bit of a decline in GDP per capita during the Revolutionary War, and if we use 1790 as the baseline for GDP per capita, the multiplier is 63. But again, these numbers are all in the ballpark: whether the true figure for a typical American is 46x, 49x, 63x, or 65x, this is a tremendous amount of economic growth.

If you want to look at that chart pessimistically, you will see that there is some reduction in growth rates in the past few decades. That’s true whether we use wages or compensation. This is a well known issue, and has been discussed endlessly in academic papers and on social media. I don’t want to glaze over it here, but I mostly will: the long-run trend of growth in the US is amazing. That’s true whether you use GDP per capita, or wages or compensation for production workers.

So once again, Happy 250th Birthday to the USA and all of you living in the wake of that amazing 250 years of economic growth!"

The China dish industry claimed it was a militarily strategic good in 1951

Tweet from Daniel J. Smith.

"A representative from the fine China dish industry lobbying for protectionism as a militarily strategic good during congressional testimony in 1951"

  

Keeping Cool: The Air Conditioner That Changed America

The time price of air conditioning has fallen 98.6 percent since 1952. That ordinary luxury saves lives every summer.

By Gale L. Pooley. He teaches US economic history at Utah Tech University. Excerpt:

"One of the great triumphs of entrepreneurial capitalism is how quickly air conditioning traveled the familiar path from luxury to necessity. What began as an expensive convenience for a tiny elite became, within a generation, affordable to ordinary families. The market did not merely invent comfort — it democratized it.

In their report Time Well Spent: The Declining Real Cost of Living in America, Michael Cox and Richard Alm found that a 5,500-BTU air-conditioning unit cost about $350 in 1952. At the time, entry-level workers earned roughly 83 cents an hour, putting the time price at 422 hours.

Today, Walmart sells a far more efficient 6,000 BTU air-conditioning unit (with a remote control) for only $115. The current hourly wage for limited-service restaurant workers is around $19 an hour, putting the time price at six hours.

The time price has decreased by 98.6 percent. For the time it took US workers to earn the money to buy one unit in 1952, they get 70 today.

If air conditioning saves lives, why don’t more Europeans have it?

Europe’s electricity prices are typically much higher than the US, driven by higher taxes, network costs, renewable energy mandates, and energy import dependence. Customers in the US pay 17 to 19 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) compared to 25 to 32 cents in Europe. This means Europeans pay roughly 47 to 68 percent more per kWh than US customers.

Americans are also much richer than Europeans. According to World Bank data, American gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was $84,809 in 2024, while the European Union’s was 25 percent lower at $63,585. That $21,224 difference could buy a lot of comfortable cooling.

The European Union also prioritizes environmental targets over human comfort by imposing strict regulations for heating and cooling, making these amenities much more costly. The commission encourages citizens to use fans instead of air conditioning. Imagine the government doing that in Phoenix and Atlanta in July. Italy, Greece, and Spain even announced temperature limits in public spaces during the 2022 heatwave in an effort to meet these environmental objectives. Spain limited air conditioners to be set no lower than 80°F. No wonder European productivity is 38 percent lower than the US.

Historic preservation laws and strict landlord rules frequently ban exterior window units to maintain aesthetic uniformity.

While air conditioning ownership increases households’ electricity consumption, it may be a small price to pay for comfort and avoiding death.

The problem is not the climate but the policy mindset. Too many European regulators approach energy and technology through the ideological lens of scarcity rather than creative innovation and human flourishing. One reason such policies persist is that the officials who design them are largely insulated from the consequences of their decisions and rarely experience their costs directly. Instead, those costs are borne by millions of ordinary citizens.

Air conditioning is not ultimately a story about cooling. It is a story about knowledge. It transformed oppressive heat into comfort, inhospitable regions into thriving communities, and summer misery into year-round productivity. Coal, copper, and electricity become valuable only after humans discover how to harness them. The history of air conditioning is the history of knowledge triumphing over nature’s constraints.

The ultimate resource is neither energy nor matter. It is the infinite capacity of human beings to learn, create, and discover."

Human aspiration is a disposition, not an exhaustible resource. Mokyr showed that civilizations which honor that aspiration grow, and those that suppress it stagnate

See The Lump of Labor Fallacy in the Age of AI by David Hebert.

"In conclusion, the problems with the lump of labor fallacy were settled long before AI arrived. Smith understood that human aspiration is a disposition, not an exhaustible resource. Mokyr showed that civilizations which honor that aspiration grow, and those that suppress it stagnate. The lump of labor fallacy gets the economics wrong because it makes fundamental errors in human nature and economic history.

But wrong ideas with organized constituencies do not stay defeated. The longshoremen’s contract shows what happens when the fallacy wins a political victory. If AI policy follows the same template, the damage will be measured not in port fees but in trillions of dollars of foregone growth and millions of jobs that never get created. The fallacy is intellectually bankrupt. Whether it remains politically solvent is the question that actually matters."

‘How to Win a Trade War’ Review: The Times of Tariffs

Germany before World War I provoked backlash because of its rise in exports and overproduction, similar to China today.

By Theodore Bunzel. He is the head of Lazard Geopolitical Advisory. He has worked in the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and at the U.S. Treasury Department. Excerpts:

"“How to Win a Trade War” shows us that, even in the age of Trump, many of today’s trade tensions are a historical rerun. Germany before World War I provoked backlash because of its sharp rise in exports and overproduction, similar to China today. Its cornering of an “extraordinary 90 percent of global production” of chemicals and dyes sparked fears of dependency among the Allies. Even the White House’s coercive Liberation Day tariffs have an echo in history: 1870s France hiked tariffs 24% on its neighbors and demanded they negotiate more favorable trade deals within six months, a gambit that—like Mr. Trump’s—largely succeeded in forcing trade partners to submit to new treaties.

With protectionism becoming more fashionable, Ms. Keynes and Mr. Bown provide a helpful reminder that tariffs are, generally speaking, economically destructive and rarely achieve their stated goals. Such policies impede growth, chill investment and—outside of commodities—are overwhelmingly paid for by the importing country. Even on trade deficits, the authors remind us, tariffs have historically had largely insignificant effects. While the evidence on tariffs and their effects on industrialization is more mixed, for every Japan or South Korea—which used barriers to turbocharge manufacturing in the postwar era—there are the smoldering examples of Brazilian personal computers or Indian autos."

Hamilton’s Economic Vision Had One Crucial Blind Spot

Hamilton recognized the importance of manufacturing but overlooked the market processes that create lasting prosperity

By Donald J. Boudreaux. 

"Speaking in January at Davos, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said that President Trump’s protectionism revives the policy first proposed by Alexander Hamilton. Like countless attempts to justify US protectionism and industrial policy, Greer’s effort praises Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures (“Report“). 

More recently, Scott Bessent, now holder of a job first held by Hamilton — US Treasury Secretary — also boasted of the administration’s Hamiltonian creed. Given the fame of Hamilton’s Report, and Hamilton’s key role in America’s founding, a close look at his Report is warranted.

Impetus for the Report

Requested by the US House of Representatives in January 1790, Hamilton submitted his Report on December 5, 1791. It was the longest and most famous of four major reports submitted to the House by Secretary Hamilton.

According to Hamilton, the House requested that he devote attention to “the subject of Manufactures; and particularly to the means of promoting such as will tend to render the United States, independent on foreign nations, for military and other essential supplies.” He complied.

America’s Economy Should Have a Strong Manufacturing Sector

The Report opened by making the case that America would benefit from a larger manufacturing sector despite America being unusually rich in land. Without naming Thomas Jefferson, the Report‘s opening was a challenge to Jefferson’s conviction that America should remain a nation mostly of yeomen farmers.

Offering this challenge, Hamilton relied on Adam Smith (also without naming him) to expose the errors of physiocracy — that is, the belief that net economic value is produced only by agriculture. Yet Hamilton went further, arguing that manufacturing can be more productive than agriculture. In making this argument, Hamilton was impressive; one might even sense in it an anticipation of some insights revealed by economists’ marginal revolution of 80 years later.

Regardless of how much or little Hamilton intuited of marginalism, he deserves credit for emphasizing the reality and significance of opportunity costs. To produce some increment of agricultural output requires that some increment of manufacturing output not be produced. And that increment of agricultural output is worthwhile to produce only if its value exceeds that of the foregone manufacturing output. Thus did Hamilton defuse the arguments of persons who believed that, to establish the case for keeping America an agricultural nation, it’s sufficient to point to the positive market value of agricultural output.

In this way, and some others, Hamilton revealed a keen ability to think insightfully about economic matters. Nevertheless, on a full assessment, Hamilton in the Report got more wrong about economics than he got right. Not content to support only the removal of artificial barriers in the US against domestic manufacturing, Hamilton argued strenuously that the government must actively promote American manufacturing. That promotion should consist chiefly of subsidies (“bounties”) supplemented by protective tariffs.

Hamilton Respected But Rejected Adam Smith

The renown of Smith’s Wealth of Nations obliged Hamilton to try to refute Smith’s argument that, in Hamilton’s summary, “industry, if left to itself … without the aid of government will grow up as soon and as fast, as the natural state of things and the interest of the community may require.” For Hamilton, what Smith called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” was too simple, at least for a young country without much industry. Here’s Hamilton:

Against the solidity of [Smith’s] hypothesis … cogent reasons may be offered. These have relation to — the strong influence of habit and the spirit of imitation — the fear of want of success in untried enterprises — the intrinsic difficulties incident to first essays towards a competition with those who have previously attained to perfection in the business to be attempted — the bounties premiums and other artificial encouragements, with which foreign nations second the exertions of their own Citizens in the branches, in which they are to be rivalled.

The first-mentioned impediment to American manufacturing was Americans’ alleged lack of entrepreneurship. Habit-bound and excessively risk-averse, too many Americans would stick with familiar agricultural pursuits and refrain from launching new manufacturing endeavors. Further discouraging Americans from venturing into manufacturing were the established competitors abroad who would out-compete upstart rivals. 

For Hamilton, simply being long-established was, in free markets, a nearly insurmountable competitive advantage. But in addition, foreign manufacturers might also practice what we today call “predatory pricing,” as well as enjoy their own subsidies. Therefore, Hamilton believed that manufacturing would arise and thrive in America only if the rates of return on these enterprises were boosted by the government.

Hamilton here forgot his own counsel to attend to opportunity costs. He simply presumed that whatever additional manufacturing activities were encouraged by the government would increase the net value of US economic output. He also ignored both the knowledge problem (How do politicians know which particular industries to encourage?) and the public-choice problem (With subsidies and protection being doled out by politicians, what prevents this doling from being distorted by interest-group politics?).

Hamilton also had a cramped understanding of economic competition. (In fairness, this understanding still infects economics textbooks today.) For him, competition consisted of firms producing a largely given set of outputs with largely identical technologies. Although he can’t be faulted for not reading Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 work on creative destruction, even in 1791 evidence was growing that the major source of economic growth was entrepreneur-driven creative destruction. Such innovation introduced not only new products, but also completely new and improved means of producing existing products. 

In such an innovative economy, being long-established wasn’t the great advantage that Hamilton assumed it to be. Just ask, for example, the American millers whose traditional manner of milling flour was rendered obsolete starting in the 1780s in Delaware by Oliver Evans‘s automated flour mill.

Hamilton’s Curious Evidence

Attempting to augment his case for active government encouragement of manufacturing, Hamilton offered curious evidence. Responding to opponents who insisted that America’s economy was unfit for manufacturing, he boasted that America’s economy was already demonstrating an impressive ability to support manufacturing.

Writing about the prospects of profitable investment in manufacturing, Hamilton said that “it is certain that the United States offer a vast field for the advantageous employment of capital; but it does not follow, that there will not be found, in one way or another, a sufficient fund for the successful prosecution of any species of industry which is likely to prove truly beneficial.” He continued: In addition to America’s “multiplying” banks, another ready source of funding for manufacturing was foreign capital, which he wisely welcomed as “a precious acquisition.” Indeed, “the attraction of foreign Capital for the direct purpose of Manufactures ought not to be deemed a chimerical expectation. There are already examples of it.”

Question for Hamilton: If it was certain that the US offered vast opportunities for profitable investments in manufacturing, and if such investment was already occurring, why did such investment need to be further stimulated by the government? Hamilton’s inconsistency is evident.

Another example of Hamilton’s inconsistency is worth mentioning. When he argued for subsidies and protective tariffs for goods produced with iron, his evidence for the worth of such government assistance was the fact that such manufacturing had significantly grown in the US since the American Revolution and was flourishing. His argument was that this industry deserved protection precisely because it had proven itself capable and successful. Presumably, Hamilton would defend this inconsistency by maintaining that, without government assistance, this industrial growth — and that of other critical manufacturers — would stop short of its optimal point.

Here’s where Hamilton-as-economist faltered most seriously. He made the incorrect presumption that markets fail to generate optimal economic growth because, in the end, he didn’t appreciate just how effectively resources are allocated by market signals and incentives — by competitively determined prices, profits, and losses. 

At least for fledgling nations with relatively little industrial capacity, he believed that intervention from the top was required.

The Lasting Lesson

Studying the Report on Manufactures makes clear that Hamilton, contrary to the assertions of Greer and Bessent, was far from being a protectionist in the mold of Donald Trump. 

Not only was Hamilton’s case for protection confined to the need to stimulate industrial capacity in a country lacking such capacity, he also preferred subsidies over tariffs (because tariffs, unlike subsidies, reduce supplies of targeted goods), and he welcomed, rather than bemoaned, net inflows of foreign capital. 

Nevertheless, Hamilton ultimately had too little confidence in free markets. The late Gordon Wood’s assessment of Hamilton-as-economist is accurate:

Hamilton was so wedded to a hierarchical view of society that he could only imagine industrial investment and development coming from the top down. Thus he was incapable of foreseeing that the actual source of America’s manufacturing would come from below, from the ambitions, productivity, and investments of thousands upon thousands of middling artisans and craftsmen who eventually became America’s businessmen. Hamilton’s historical reputation as the prophet of America’s industrial greatness therefore seems somewhat exaggerated. He certainly wanted a powerful and glorious nation, but he was no more capable of accurately foretelling the future than the other American leaders."

Private Property, Liberalism, and Human Flourishing

Private property enables individuals to pursue happiness through their own free choices. It also shields our individual and institutional projects from arbitrary power

By Alexander William Salter. Excerpt:

"For thousands of years, human living standards were basically stagnant: in inflation-adjusted terms, world GDP per capita fluctuated around $1,500 per year. In the nineteenth century, commercial innovations, including widespread protection for private property rights, gave rise to the Industrial Revolution. This resulted in history’s only sustained reduction in human poverty. In the United States, for example, GDP per capita in 1800 had risen to approximately $2,500 per year. It more than tripled over the next century, to $8,000 per year. Near-continuous economic growth yielded a figure of nearly $50,000 per year by 2000, and nearly $70,000 today. 

Other western nations that embraced capitalism enjoyed similar increases in material prosperity. Asian nations, such as Japan, South Korea, and (more recently) China, have also benefited from embracing private property rights. These successes strongly suggest there is something universal about the relationship between private property and economic wellbeing. It’s not culturally contingent.

Our historically unprecedented level of wealth only exists because private property enables an extensive division of labor. Exponential gains in per capita GDP would be impossible, and indeed, they have never occurred in a sustained way without productivity-enhancing specialization and trade. This decentralized process for creating and exchanging wealth requires coordination. As Ludwig von Mises recognized, private property rights are vital. Without private property, trade and markets could not exist. And without markets, there would be no market prices—critical indicators of resource value in varying lines of production. Profit and loss accounting could not be meaningful without prices, meaning businesses would have no reliable way to ascertain whether they were satisfying consumer wants. It is the system of market prices, adjusting in response to supply and demand changes, that gives commercial society its unique power to create wealth. Private property is the keystone: it holds the whole market edifice together.

The greatest benefits of the price system often emerge during times of turbulence. When war between the United States, Israel, and Iran choked off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz in early 2026, the price of crude oil spiked. Refiners, shippers, and drillers across the world rerouted and searched for new supply, responding to the price shock without needing to know anything about geopolitical stakes or possible resolutions. The price carried the knowledge so that they did not have to. 

It may seem strange to use hardship to illustrate the importance of private property and prices. But in fact, it reveals why they matter. Oil became scarcer as a result of the war. That made everyone in the world poorer. Nothing can change that so long as the conflict continues. Instead, the price system allows economic actors oceans apart to find and pursue least-cost adaptations. Non-market and non-price rationing work poorly on this scale. At least with property and prices, we know where we need to change.

Private property buttresses the market process in several other ways. Building on Mises, F. A. Hayek realized that prices allowed households and firms to benefit from each other’s private and often tacit information. The price system, founded on private property, thus functions as a powerful communication and feedback system. Ronald Coase argued that market values for owned resources allowed conflicting parties to resolve their disputes by bargaining. Armen Alchian, William Allen, and Harold Demsetz pointed out that firms’ property rights to their residual income aligned the interests of producers with consumers, and that the firm itself, as an organizational form, was possible only because private property allowed for the necessary contractual structures. The immense productive capacity of contemporary capitalism, which we often take for granted, relies on practices rooted in private property.

Human flourishing obviously depends on more than material wealth. “Man does not live by bread alone.” Yet he does need bread to live. The material abundance created by markets keeps us fed, sheltered, clothed, literate, healthy, and entertained. It also provides the means for us to pursue meaningful artistic, intellectual, and moral projects. Private property is the reason we can have all of these things."

Work and leisure over time

 Tweeted by Vincent Geloso.

 

Can De-Regulation of Branch Banking Improve Capital Allocation?

Evidence from the Great Depression

From Jeffrey Miron.

"The Great Depression led to dramatic increases in bank regulation.

One study looks at an instance of bank deregulation during this period: state-level sanctioning of

bank branching, which allowed banks to operate multiple offices within a state. … [S]tates with extensive branching in 1940 … experienced long-run gains in manufacturing productivity.

The study also

assessed the role of capital reallocation using bank and branch-level balance sheet data from 1937. … Branch offices located in capital-constrained counties … were twice as likely to receive funding on net from other banks and branches than comparable stand-alone banks in the same areas.

In addition, the new

branch networks improved capital allocation by directing funds to where they were most scarce, a function that stand-alone banks could not perform.

All in all, these

findings provide evidence that the institutional structure of branching—rather than simply expanded banking access—improved capital allocation and integrated financial markets to fuel manufacturing productivity growth, especially in underserved areas."

Earth Day’s Bad Bet Against Humanity

The Malthusian mind does not see the human capacity to cooperate, trade, discover, invent, and adapt

By Marian L. Tupy of Cato. Excerpts:

"Malthus had already lost his main argument before his essay even appeared in print. Between 1700 and 1798, the population of England rose from 5.2 million to 8.44 million, an increase of 62.3 percent. Over the same period, nominal GDP per person rose from 12.37 British pounds to 23.97 pounds, an increase of 93.8 percent. The nominal price of a four-pound loaf of bread, a staple that fed much of the poor, rose from 5.2 pence to 7.4 pence, or 42.3 percent. Because incomes rose much faster than the price of bread, the latter became 36.2 percent more abundant, not less."

"Human beings are not trapped in the same ecological logic as bacteria in a dish or buffalo on a plain. We exchange with one another. We build institutions. We create tools. We improve production methods. We substitute one material for another. We grow more from the same soil—sometimes much more. In other words, we create new knowledge."

"Higher prices signal a problem. Those higher prices then encourage knowledge creation, and new knowledge leads to greater abundance."

"The Simon Abundance Index, which Dr. Gale L. Pooley and I publish every year on Earth Day, is named after Julian Simon. It is a deliberate continuation of the quantitative analysis of the relationship between population growth and resource abundance that Simon’s bet with Ehrlich began. Unlike Simon and Ehrlich, who measured the abundance of resources in inflation-adjusted dollars, we look at “time prices.” Money prices are distorted by inflation and disputed deflators. Time prices solve that problem by dividing a good’s money price by hourly income, showing how long a person must work to buy it. They capture both falling prices and rising wages, require no inflation adjustment, and allow comparisons across countries and centuries. Time is universal, cannot be printed, and reflects the real cost people pay: hours of life. Time prices provide a clearer, simpler, and more meaningful measure of resource abundance than money prices for ordinary people."

 

"By this measure, the last 45 years have been a rout for the pessimists. The 2026 report says that the Simon Abundance Index stood at 636.4 in 2025, up from a base of 100 in 1980. That means Earth was 536.4 percent more abundant in 2025 than in 1980. All 50 commodities, including fuels, such as crude oil, coal, and natural gas, food, such as chicken, beef, and lamb, and metals, such as aluminum, copper, and gold (yes, even gold!), in the dataset were more abundant in 2025 than they were in 1980. The global abundance of resources increased at a compound annual rate of 4.2 percent, doubling about every 17 years. In the 42 countries tracked by the report—accounting for 85.9 percent of global gross domestic product and 66.3 percent of the world’s population—none saw lower resource abundance in 2025 than in 1980. That is not what a species trapped in Malthus’ arithmetic is supposed to produce.

The mechanics of that gain matter. Between 1980 and 2025, time prices for the 50 commodities fell by an average of 70.9 percent. What required an hour of work in 1980 required about 18 minutes in 2025. The same hour of work that bought one unit of a typical commodity in 1980 bought 3.44 units in 2025. That is a 244 percent increase in personal resource abundance. At the same time, the world population grew by 85 percent, from 4.44 billion to 8.21 billion. Put those two changes together and you get the index’s central finding: For every 1 percent increase in global population, population-level resource abundance grew by about 6.3 percent. Resources growing at a faster pace than the population is what Pooley and I call superabundance. It is the opposite of Malthus’ conjecture that each additional person leaves less for everyone else.

The critics sometimes retreat to complaining about the short-term noise, as though any temporary spike in prices confirms the Malthusian creed. Our report addresses that, too. In 2025, 27 commodities became more abundant, and 23 became less abundant. The abundance of oranges rose the most, by 65.6 percent, while coconut oil’s abundance fell the most, by 36.3 percent. But commodity markets always swing because weather changes, disease hits crops, wars disrupt transport, and investment arrives late or early. Simon never argued that every price falls every year in a straight line. He argued that scarcity signals provoke adjustment. A temporary setback is not a vindication of Malthus. It is often the first stage of a correction. That is why the long trend matters more than the annual changes.

Our findings do not show that pollution is imaginary or that every environmental question has been solved. It has not. But environmental problems should be addressed as side effects of human flourishing, not as evidence that human flourishing itself is a mistake. The Earth Day mentality blurred that distinction. It converted planetary stewardship into misanthropy. It taught millions to look at a growing population and see only a burden, never a contribution. It treated the human animal as uniquely destructive when, in fact, people are the only animals who can recognize ecological damage and fix it. It is new knowledge—human knowledge—that gives societies the capacity to clean rivers, regulate toxins, build sewage systems, improve fuel efficiency, and move from dirtier technologies to cleaner ones. A poor society burns what it can find and dumps what it cannot manage. A rich society can afford scrubbers, pipelines, wastewater treatment, research labs, and better rules.

The green extremists often speak as though abundance is the disease, when in fact abundance is usually what makes environmental improvement possible. And so, despite half a century of doomsaying, the Earth is not collapsing under the weight of humanity. It is supporting far more people who can command far more resources with far less labor than their predecessors could. That is not the picture of a planet in terminal decline. It is the picture of a planet made more habitable by the one species clever enough to improve it. The Earth is not a museum piece. It is a working planet inhabited by learning beings who desire and are entitled to flourish." 

Extractive Taxation and the French Revolution

Between 1750 and 1789, areas in France with heavier tax burdens experienced significantly more riots

By Tommaso Giommoni, Gabriel Loumeau, and Marco Tabellini. 

"The French Revolution dismantled the ancien régime and redefined state power and institutions. It transformed society by abolishing feudalism and establishing modern bureaucratic and legal frameworks, and its influence extended beyond France, shaping institutions worldwide. While the Revolution’s causes were complex, historical accounts have long emphasized the role of fiscal institutions, particularly the extractive nature of taxation under the ancien régime. However, systematic evidence on the role taxation played in shaping the Revolution remains limited.

Our research examines how taxation shaped the emergence and escalation of unrest and its influence on political behavior during the Revolution’s early years. Using data on local per capita tax burdens around 1780, we found that bailliages (administrative districts) with heavier tax burdens experienced significantly more riots between 1750 and 1789. Specifically, a shift from a bailliage in the bottom quarter of the tax-burden distribution to one in the top quarter—a difference of roughly 8 percent of per capita income at the time—more than doubled the number of riots during that period. High-tax bailliages were also more likely to be swept into the Great Fear of 1789, when rumors of aristocratic conspiracies spread rapidly across rural France, triggering attacks on manor houses and the destruction of feudal records and ultimately leading the National Assembly to abolish feudalism.

This relationship holds even after accounting for several factors commonly associated with revolutionary unrest, including the spread of Enlightenment ideas, increases in wheat prices, the local presence of aristocrats and clergy, and the size of tax police brigades. It also holds when we narrow the analysis to municipalities on either side of a tax border. One interpretation of these findings is that taxation depressed local economic development, impoverishing communities and thus leading them to revolt for material reasons.

The relationship between taxation and unrest stemmed primarily from taxes on goods rather than on income or profits. This aligns with historical accounts emphasizing popular hostility toward these taxes, viewed as especially regressive, enforced through intrusive state controls, and emblematic of the ancien régime’s fiscal inequities. Our research focuses on the salt tax and the traites, a system of internal customs duties. Together, these taxes accounted for over 20 percent of royal revenue by 1780, were deeply resented, and were among the first abolished in 1790.

Our findings provide evidence of widespread opposition to taxation. To examine this idea further, we analyzed the lists of grievances compiled and submitted to Versailles ahead of the Estates General in the spring of 1789. Areas with heavier tax burdens submitted more complaints against taxation, even after accounting for the total number of complaints submitted. This relationship holds only for the Third Estate and not for the nobility, consistent with the fact that commoners bore the brunt of taxation while the nobility was largely exempt. Our research also finds that inequality exacerbated opposition to taxation for reasons beyond its direct economic burden. Many complaints cited the unequal imposition of taxes across social groups and territories, as well as coercive extraction without corresponding public benefits.

The Enlightenment emphasized equality before the law and challenged inherited privilege and arbitrary power. Our findings show that riots were more common in areas with greater exposure to Enlightenment ideas, as measured by local book sales and subscriptions to the Encyclopédie. Local literacy rates do not seem to have played a significant role, indicating that the diffusion of ideas mattered more than access to reading per se.

Tax-related riots peaked in the 1780s, but the reason for this timing is unclear. Taxes on goods had existed for centuries, and the overall burden rose sharply between 1690 and 1760 but changed little thereafter. Instead, historians point to droughts that devastated harvests and drove up wheat prices in the 1780s. Our research uses historical data on temperature and precipitation and finds that hotter-than-average summers led to a larger increase in riots in high-tax municipalities than in their low-tax neighbors. Together with our evidence on tax disparities and Enlightenment exposure, these findings suggest that taxation created the structural foundations for unrest, while material hardship and ideological forces catalyzed long-standing grievances about fiscal inequality into open revolt.

While fiscal grievances fueled the Revolution from below, the decisions of representatives also drove the movement from above. We analyzed more than 60,000 legislative speeches delivered between May 1789, when the Estates General convened, and January 1793, when Louis XVI was executed. Our findings reveal that legislators from high-tax constituencies were about 70 percent more likely to discuss taxation, 60 percent more likely to criticize the ancien régime, and roughly 73 percent more likely to defend the Revolution in tax-related speeches than legislators from low-tax constituencies. These legislators were also more inclined to frame taxation as oppressive and call for fiscal reform.

Beyond fiscal debates, legislators from high-tax constituencies were more likely to demand institutional change, call for the abolition of feudal privileges, and criticize the monarchy in their speeches following the Great Fear of 1789. During the Legislative Assembly (1791–1792), legislators from heavily taxed constituencies were more likely to support abolishing the monarchy and to vote for the king’s execution during the National Convention in January 1793.

Note
This research brief is based on Tommaso Giommoni et al., “Extractive Taxation and the French Revolution,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 34816, February 2026."

Is each American generation doing better?

From Tyler Cowen. 

"We construct a posttax, posttransfer income measure from 1963 to 2023 based on the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement that allows us to consistently compare the economic well-being of five generations of Americans at ages 36–40. We find that Millennials had a real median household income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slowdown from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%). The slowdown for younger generations largely resulted from stalled growth in work hours among women. Progress for Millennials younger than 30 has also remained robust, though largely due to greater reliance on their parents. Additionally, lifetime income gains for younger generations far outweigh their higher educational costs.

That is from Kevin Corrinth and Jeff Larrimore in Demography.  Via the excellent Kevin Lewis."

A Look at Our Material Progress

Modern life is more affordable and abundant than nostalgic claims suggest

By Alex Tokarev. He grew up in Bulgaria. He teaches Economics and Classical Liberal Philosophy at Northwood University. Excerpt:

"Imagine having to sweat on an assembly line or in a dangerous mine for three or four hours every day just to cover your grocery bills. Not excited about this prospect? Sorry, but that’s probably what you’d be doing if you were born a century ago. Today? The typical jobs are not only better, but you can earn the same amount of calories in just 30 minutes. Affordability, baby!

For most of humanity, the historical pattern was daily malnourishment interrupted by periods of starvation. Today, we have an epidemic of obesity. A hundred years ago, Americans fared better than most. Yet, compared to you, they were appallingly poor. In 1925, meat was expensive. The produce was seasonal. There was no refrigeration, no global supply chain, no high-yield farming.

Despite our government’s “food pyramid” propaganda, diets are now much healthier. Despite our government’s theft of 99% of the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar (through unconstitutional Fed policies that cause inflation), I can now grab a pint of fresh blueberries from Chile at our Michigan Kroger store for just $1.99, even though my backyard is already frozen. Unaffordable?

Capitalist competition, free enterprise, profit maximization. These pursuits led to the age of plenty that you enjoy. CATO’s scholar M. Tupy and BYUH professor G. Pooley have estimated (read their 2022 book Superabundance) that even the unskilled American workers can afford dozens of common food items by working 10 times less today than a century ago. Some crisis!

My son loves Universal Orlando’s parks. As a student, he works as a lifeguard, a minimum wage job. Even that pays enough to cover his round-trip to Florida by working just 8 hours. A hundred years ago, that travel would have taken three days and cost a weekly salary. Today, he leaves home after breakfast and eats dinner at the Islands of Adventure after swimming at Volcano Bay.

Our cars are faster, safer, more comfortable, last longer, pollute less, need less maintenance, and cost less in real terms. An unskilled employee needs to work only half as much today as 50 years ago to buy a pickup truck. Most vehicles on the road today come with safety features, entertainment options, and navigation controls that were science fiction to drivers in the 1920s.

Average Americans take vacations that their grandparents couldn’t have dreamed of. Alternatives to hotels have multiplied. Competition has lowered travel costs for everyone. Climate control, clean water, countless restaurants serving exotic foods from around the world, and limitless recreational options. These are no longer luxuries. I still marvel while my kids take those things for granted.

Debt? When your parents were your age during the fall of the Berlin Wall, the average, inflation-adjusted net wealth (assets minus liabilities) per household in the bottom 50% was $33,000. Today, it’s almost double: $60,000. Homes too expensive? Today—perhaps. Blame government restrictions on the supply. Price per square foot between 1975 and 2015? Almost no change.

College tuition rising faster than inflation? Blame the government for messing with that market. When taxpayer money is channeled to consumers of goods or services, higher demand means higher prices. Econ 101. Do you need two salaries to raise two children? We saved enough on one modest salary in 7 years to buy a house in Midland, MI. We paid it all with cold, hard cash.

The world isn’t getting worse. Your spending habits might be. In every measurable way, life is getting better. No previous generation has had more physical comfort and such amazing chances to develop productively and prosper. Study some history. If you stop moaning about decline and start noticing the progress, you might even enjoy your lives as Gen X is enjoying ours."

AI, Unemployment and Work

By Alex Tabarrok.

"Imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 40% unemployment rate. Sounds bad, right? Catastrophic even. Now imagine I told you that AI was going to create a 3-day working week. Sounds great, right? Wonderful even. Yet to a first approximation these are the same thing. 60% of people employed and 40% unemployed is the same number of working hours as 100% employed at 60% of the hours.

So even if you think AI is going to have a tremendous effect on work, the difference between catastrophe and wonderland boils down to distribution. It’s not impossible that AI renders some people unemployable, but that proposition is harder to defend than the idea that AI will be broadly productive. AI is a very general purpose technology, one likely to make many people more productive, including many people with fewer skills. Moreover, we have more policy control over the distribution of work than over the pure AI effect on work. Declare an AI dividend and create some more holidays, for example.

Nor is this argument purely theoretical. Between 1870 and today, hours of work in the United States fell by about 40% — from nearly 3,000 hours per year to about 1,800. Hours fells but unemployment did not increase. Moreover, not only did work hours fall, but childhood, retirement, and life expectancy all increased. In fact in 1870, about 30% of a person’s entire life was spent working — people worked, slept, and died. Today it’s closer to 10%. Thus in the past 100+ years or so the amount of work in a person’s lifetime has fallen by about 2/3rds and the amount of leisure, including retirement has increased. We have already sustained a massive increase in leisure. There’s no reason we cannot do it again."

The time price of a family meal at McDonald’s is 25% lower than in 1958

Letter to The WSJ.

"Mr. Greene (Bob Greene’s op-ed “When McDonald’s Was an Inexpensive Treat” (March 21)) notes that his family’s entire meal—six hamburgers, four cheeseburgers, four orders of fries and three milkshakes—cost only $2.66 in 1958. With entry-level wages around $1.12 an hour at the time, that put the time price—the amount of labor time required to acquire a good or service—at two hours and 23 minutes.

Today, that same meal costs about $33.47 at my local McDonald’s. But wages have risen too. With average hourly earnings at limited-service restaurants around $18.69, the time price is now only one hour and 48 minutes. That’s a 25% decline in the time price. In other words, for the same amount of time, a worker today can buy 33% more from McDonald’s than in 1958.

McDonald’s isn’t a more expensive treat—it’s a more abundant one.

Gale L. Pooley (he teaches US economic history at Utah Tech University)"

Cray 1978 versus iPhone 2022 (and the astronomical drop in the cost of light over time)

By David R Henderson.

"On January 20, 2024, I posted on EconLog about the differences between a 1978 Cray computer, the most powerful computer at the time, and a 2022 iPhone 13. The latter dominates in every way, and by a very large margin. Here’s my post, edited slightly.

Cray 1978 versus iPhone 2022

If you want to see a truly amazing trip down 44 years of memory lane, check out this comparison of the 1978 Cray computer, at the time the most powerful computer in the world, and the 2022 iPhone. I won’t bother giving you the specifics because the narrator, Dave Darling, does a very good job in a short time.

In talks I gave in the early 2000s in which I highlighted the huge advances in computing, I said that if we had seen the same advances in, say, kidney surgery, you could have decided whether to get kidney surgery–or buy yourself a cup of coffee. Now the comparison would be way more extreme.

The video reminds me of the less spectacular, but still spectacular, effects of the lightbulb that William D. Nordhaus pointed out years ago. Interestingly, in granting him his half of the Nobel Prize in economics, the Nobel committee didn’t even bother to mention what I thought was one of his biggest contributions. Here’s what I wrote on the issue in my biography of Nordhaus in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

He showed that the price of light in 1992, adjusted for inflation, was less than one tenth of one percent of its price in 1800. Failure to take this reduction fully into account, noted Nordhaus, meant that economists have substantially underestimated the real growth rate of the economy and the growth rate of real wages." 

Average Wealth for Younger Generations Continues To Exceed Past Generations

By Jeremy Horpedahl.

"Today I am posting an update to the generational wealth chart that I have posted many times in the past. This update brings the data through the 3rd quarter of 2025 for the youngest cohort, which includes both Millennials and a growing part of Gen Z in the data from the Federal Reserve. I am somehow hesitant to post this chart, as it is starting to be data that is less useful as the younger generations age, for two reasons.

The first problem with the data is that the Fed is lumping everyone from ages 18-43 together as one generation. Given that the youngest Millennials were 29 in 2025, we are now including a significant part of Gen Z, which is OK in itself, but it becomes harder to compare with generations that encompass only 16 or 17 years of birth cohorts. Secondly, the data from the Fed’s Distributional Financial Accounts is only benchmarked every three years with the Fed’s more detailed Survey of Consumer Finances. Currently only the 2022 version of the survey is available, which is now probably a bit out of date. Based on past updates, it is entirely possible that it is underestimating wealth for the youngest cohort. But I think we will have much more certainty about this data once the 2025 SCF is available and used as a benchmark for the DFA data.

With all of those caveats aside, here is the updated chart:

 

As I am currently working on a book manuscript using the Survey of Consumer Finances, I will be very excited to finally have the 2025 data available. Until then, this is probably the best intergenerational comparison we can do, and it continues to look very positive for the youngest cohorts. With an average of almost $146,000 of wealth for the combined Millennial/Gen Z cohort, they are well ahead of where Gen X was even in their late 30s, and ahead of Boomers at around age 37 as well. All of this bodes well for young people, despite frequent expressions of pessimism, but we should hold off judgement until the 2025 data is fully updated." 

Can You Make the Case for the Drug War by Pointing out a Bad Effect of the Drug War?

By David R Henderson.

"Earlier this week, I was discussing the drug war with a free-market, very libertarian economist. I was opposing it. He said that although he used to favor legalizing drugs, he no longer does. What changed his mind? The horrible consequences of fentanyl in Oregon.

He pointed to the deaths that had occurred because fentanyl was relatively easy to obtain on the street. I responded that you can’t judge the effects of making something legal by pointing to a case where they’re illegal and just assuming that the effects of making them legal would be the same as the effects of keeping them illegal.

First, fentanyl is illegal, even in Oregon, and was illegal even before the legislature reversed some decisions in 2024. Second, the very fact that it’s sold on the street rather than in pharmacies or even Walmart is due to its illegality. If it were truly legal, consumers would know more about what they’re getting and would, therefore, be less likely to overdose.

A good way to see that is to look back to the Prohibition era. Very few people would say that the fact that people could easily get booze in speakeasies meant that producing and selling liquor were legal. They weren’t. Also, because liquor was illegal, you didn’t always know what you were getting. Producers had less incentive than otherwise to establish brand names and advertise. When the production and sale of liquor were legalized in 1933 (thanks, FDR, for one of the few good things you contributed to), deaths from alcohol poisoning fell. It’s reasonable to expect similar consequences from completely legalizing fentanyl."

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."