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Cato Weekly Podcast: Chelsea Follett on The Grim Old Days
Host: Paul Meany Guest: Chelsea Follett, Research Fellow, Cato Institute (HumanProgress.org)
Paul Meany: It seems like there are a lot of things to be pessimistic about today. We worry about the cost of housing, health care, groceries, energy, and raising a family.
[Audio clips]: Trump told voters repeatedly he would save them thousands of dollars and bring down inflation on day one of his second term, but a CBS review finds consumers are currently facing sharply higher costs for many, if not all, of the things he promised he would make more affordable. The average rate on a 30-year mortgage is back above 7% for the first time in 20 months. It’s rough news for the housing market and for home buyers already struggling with rising prices elsewhere. While new technologies like artificial intelligence bring their own anxieties about work and the future. The AI anxiety that has been building all year has spilled, perhaps inevitably, into the midterm elections. A Center Square poll from June found roughly 70% of registered voters were concerned AI could replace their livelihood. Whistleblowers sound the alarm once again over the potential threat of artificial intelligence, representatives from OpenAI, Google, and other big companies also testifying as city lawmakers consider new AI safeguards.
Paul Meany: Chelsea Follett’s new book, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Pre-Industrial Past, asks us to widen the frame. For most of human history, life was defined by dangers and discomforts that modern people can barely imagine. In the past, even a king surrounded by servants would still have no antibiotics, refrigeration, flush toilets, or even reliable medicine. Chelsea’s book strips the veil off the past and asks us to appreciate just how extraordinary the modern escape from it has been.
I’m Paul Meany and this is the Cato Weekly Podcast. Today I’m joined by Chelsea Follett, research fellow at the Cato Institute working with HumanProgress.org. She is the author of the new book, The Grim Old Days. Chelsea, welcome to the podcast.
Chelsea Follett: Thank you so much for having me on.
Paul Meany: So working with a platform like HumanProgress that is literally all about cataloging and explaining the momentous amount of progress that we’ve made as a species, as a kind of group, in the past two centuries, why are people so pessimistic? Every single day you come out with a new article, a new statistic that shows how the world has gotten immensely better, but seemingly people just don’t want to believe that the world is getting better. Why is that?
Chelsea Follett: There are so many different reasons why. It seems to be part of human psychology to be interested in the negative, the grim, the gruesome, the unusual, the disturbing, the dramatic, rather than study long-term trends about how many people have risen out of poverty today, about how children are living longer, are less likely to die, how people are living longer. These long-term, steady improvements don’t attract the same kind of attention that a disgusting, disturbing story would. If you ask people, do they prefer positive news or negative news, they’ll often say positive. But if you look at their revealed preferences, their behavior, they tend to click on stories that are very much negative.
So how do we work with rather than against this aspect of human nature, this interest in the negative, to help people realize how far we’ve come and to recognize the reality of human progress? That was the idea behind this book, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Pre-Industrial Past.
Paul Meany: Your last book was called Centers of Progress, and it was about all the wonderful places in the world that have made a massive difference to culture, art, humanity. This book is almost like the inverse. This is like the opposite. And you kind of explained it already, your thought process and why you wanted to write a book like this. But I kind of want to go a little further in it to say, hey, what even got you interested in the pre-industrial world to begin with? Because many people I know, their idea of history is quite short. They don’t go back too far. Anything before 1776 almost feels like an ancient foreign land. So why do you think it’s so important that people understand the history of times gone past, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, if not thousands in some cases?
Chelsea Follett: If you look at human history as a story of economic growth, what you come up with is what is considered the famous hockey stick chart of history: a long flat line where for hundreds upon hundreds of years, economic growth was so slow as to be almost imperceptible. And then suddenly, around the time of the Industrial Revolution, it shot straight up. Exponential growth is truly difficult to wrap the mind around. The central question of economic history is, what changed? Why did the Industrial Revolution occur when and where it did? But that huge upswing in economic growth transformed nearly every aspect of life.
Today, it is very fashionable on both the right and the left to question the value of GDP, to question the value of economic growth, to see this as just an abstraction, a line on a chart. But economic growth is not an abstraction. It is a revolutionary transformation in the living standards of everyday people. And that’s what I wanted to show with this book. I wanted to provide a window into everyday lives prior to modern economic growth, prior to that huge upswing, what Deirdre McCloskey, our colleague, calls the great escape from poverty. What was life like for the vast majority of our ancestors throughout much of history before this transformation?
Paul Meany: I think that’s wonderful because it’s a great antidote to a lot of the crazy trends you see on social media that romanticize the past. I think it depends what kind of social media you’re on. But if you flick through for a while on Instagram or X or whatever it may be, you might eventually find someone who is a traditional housewife. You might find someone talking about cottagecore. You might even find some crazy people talking about how industrial society and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race and all these kinds of things.
So I think a lot of what your book is doing is an antidote to this romanticization of the past. The vast majority of history that we learn about, even in school, is not from the perspective of the average person. It’s from the perspective of leaders, the elites, those who are in charge, those with the most access to education, to health. Your book puts that on its head and says, actually, let’s see what the average person lived like. And I would love the answer to be “nice,” but how the average person lived was not very nice for most of history. It was pretty terrible, pretty miserable stuff.
Chelsea Follett: Absolutely. And only amid early industrialization, as some people did start to rise out of poverty, did that become visible to many people. I think part of why we have such a negative view of living conditions during industrialization is because prior to the Industrial Revolution, extreme material deprivation was simply accepted without question. It was everywhere. It was like water to fish. It was unnoticed. But once some people did begin to finally escape extreme poverty, these long-standing horrific practices, like child labor, lengthy work days, employers being able to physically beat their employees with impunity, all of these practices started to be called into question. Poverty started to be questioned for the first time.
Our late colleague David Boaz once pointed out that when people ask the question, “Why are some people poor?” they’re asking the wrong question. The correct question is, why are some people rich? Why is anyone even middle class? Poverty was the default throughout most of human history. Wealth is what’s unusual. And in the early days of industrialization, when people finally did start to rise out of poverty and thus to recognize how damaging poverty is, when they started to see it as a problem rather than something that you simply had to accept as inevitable, that gave rise to many of the views that we now unfortunately hold about the Industrial Revolution.
You alluded to the words of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, but it’s not just radicals like him or a couple of trad wife influencers somewhere on the fringes of the internet who like the aesthetics of the past, who are idealizing the days of old. This, unfortunately, is a very widely held view. If you ask the average person what they think of the Industrial Revolution, they will tell you about terrible working conditions, meager meals, worker exploitation, pollution. The view will be extremely negative. And if you ask someone to imagine the pre-industrial world, you’re more likely to end up with a beautiful image of the Shire, peaceful, hobbit-like people living contented lives, breathing clean air, eating wholesome, delicious food, having happy family lives, dancing around maypoles.
Paul Meany: The impression I get from people is this idea that during the Industrial Revolution, everyone lived like a Charles Dickens character, and that it was basically miserable all the time. I think some way to put it in relief and show why that’s not true is to go through some areas of life. I like that your book is broken up into many different chapters about all sorts of different things, whether it be health care, sleep, death, all these different parts of human life and how they used to look. So I want to go through what it looks like today and how people complain about it, and then you can talk a little bit about the pre-industrial past and possibly put us on the right angle.
Food is a really good example.
[Audio clips]: A poll from the AP and NORC shows 41% of Americans last month reported being concerned about being able to afford groceries over the next few months, up from 24% in April.
New York City, it is time for a grand experiment once again. Just as LaGuardia used government to respond to the challenges of the Great Depression, we will use government to respond to rising prices and unaffordable groceries.
Paul Meany: It’s been all over. The cost of living crisis that people talk about, grocery bills are rising. And so people say, this is terrible. There used to be abundant and cheap food in the past. Everyone was a farmer.
[Audio clip]: I think our foods were definitely cleaner back in the day than now because there’s so much pesticides, so many hormones and additive things that they’d be adding. I mean, I grew up on a farm. Did I have food? Yes. I got as many eggs as I wanted to because we raised eggs. Could I have a steak on Saturday? Probably not.
Paul Meany: Kind of like what you said, everyone had access to their own organic, healthy, wholesome, crunchy, all kinds of food. But I don’t think that’s how ordinary families lived. They weren’t all running around maypoles during harvest season.
Chelsea Follett: There’s a grimmer reality to what the pre-industrial world actually looked like. Unfortunately, the reality of the pre-industrial diet was monotonous, thin, insipid, flavorless gruel, day in, day out, and frequently grumbling stomachs. Famine could occur every three or four years. And in times of famine, people turned to consuming non-food items like candle tallow, grass, and in some cases, even cannibalism. In the 17th century, there was one famine in Burgundy, France, that was said to have put an end to over 10,000 families and resulted in some even turning to eat human flesh. This is a level of material deprivation that is difficult for a modern person to imagine. If you were to tell one of our pre-industrial ancestors that, in the modern day, or to them in their future, the most impoverished people in society, unhoused people, are often obese, it would be mind-boggling, incomprehensible to them.
Paul Meany: One thing that’s kind of hard to put into terms today: we’re talking right now about this crisis in the cost of living. But without dismissing contemporary concerns, what would the cost of living look like for a pre-modern person? It’s always impossible. You can’t put pre-modern prices to a modern price point. It’s hard to explain that. But how much of someone’s income in the pre-industrial world simply went to matters of survival, of subsistence?
Chelsea Follett: The cost was often paid in physical labor and pain. Again, the average person was a subsistence agricultural laborer. Pre-industrial society is often considered to be a synonym for agricultural society. Money often didn’t come into the picture at all. Rather than receiving an income, you would be working by the sweat of your own brow, producing the bare minimum to survive. Taxes were often paid in kind. A part of your harvest was given away. A pre-industrial peasant might go their entire life without ever touching currency.
Paul Meany: One of the most dramatic contrasts I can think of is health care. Whenever I’m with my family and friends, this is a very morbid game, but I like to play the game of “What is your medieval death date?” When would you have died if you only had medieval-level health care? Normally, it’s a grim thing to say, but most people go around the room and they have minor issues. They had an infection or they had asthma, and it’s like, sorry, your medieval death date would have been very, very early. There’s a lot of things to complain about in health care, very justifiable things to complain about, but it is one of the miracles that we have access to such amazing health care.
One of the things that really shocked me, you go to this one section of the book where you go through a long list of the richest and most powerful people and they all succumbed to relatively minor health issues that today would be standard procedures. Can you explain a little bit about our version of health care versus the pre-modern version of health care?
Chelsea Follett: The people in the pre-industrial past who faced the worst odds of anyone, we have to remember, were children. Roughly half of children did not make it to adulthood, and this was true across social classes. Being a prince or a princess would not save you.
Toward the end of writing this book, my own daughter, a toddler at the time, developed this terrible spotty rash over her face and a fever and was crying. And we became terrified that it might be measles, because she was not yet at the age where she would receive the vaccine for that. She was close but had not yet received it. And we rushed her to an ER and were told that it was not measles. Thankfully, that disease is blessedly rare now thanks to widespread vaccination, this technological miracle that we have. It was scarlet fever. And when you hear that term—
Paul Meany: Ye olde.
Chelsea Follett: It does feel like some sort of throwback from a distant and terrifying past. We’re familiar with that term from books like Little Women, all of these old pieces of literature where scarlet fever features as a deadly ailment, something quite serious. But in the modern day, we have antibiotics and she was fine after taking antibiotics for a week. In the pre-industrial past, people were not so lucky.
But the omnipresence of death, more than anything, I think, defines that change between the pre-industrial world and the modern world. In addition to that hockey stick chart of GDP, there is a chart in the same shape showing life expectancy throughout time that you can look up. Flat throughout most of history, barely any progress from the days of the Roman Empire all the way until just prior to the Industrial Revolution, people continued to live very short lives on average, and then suddenly, a huge upswing.
Paul Meany: And people lived short lives on average because the most dangerous part of your life was the first five years.
Chelsea Follett: That is definitely true. However, there is a modern myth that the reason for high rates of mortality in the past, the reason for such a low average life expectancy in the past, was entirely due to high rates of childhood death. If you could just make it to age 50, you would have as good a chance of reaching age 60 as you do today, goes the thinking. This is not true. In reality, at every single age, mortality rates were higher in the past. For children and for infants in their first year of life in particular, mortality rates were astronomical. But for every age group, mortality rates were higher.
Paul Meany: As you point out, prior to antibiotics, the simplest infection, a small scrape, could result in your death. And of course, people were often malnourished, itching from fleas. Dental care forms its own chapter in this book because the state of dentistry was abominable.
Chelsea Follett: Most people had toothaches and teeth actually ground down to the point that you could see the wiggling nerve endings from under the teeth, resulting in a very widespread belief across different cultures in tooth worms as the cause of toothaches. This theory lasted for quite a long time.
Paul Meany: Okay, but for the people who love the fantasy: health care was worse. Housing was miserable. No dentistry. Food was pretty bland, pretty hard to get. Possibility of famine around the corner. Let’s grant you all that. Human society might be pretty terrible. But one thing some people might say is, human society might not have been so hot, but the environment was cleaner.
[Audio clips]: I think there’s no question that it was cleaner. We simply had fewer people, we had less industrial, which means not natural kinds of things that happened in the world. I mean, Earth was a natural entity and we have created other things. So it’s probably degraded.
So we have less regulation and more just corporations doing whatever they want. If you have corporations just dumping into the ocean, dumping into the environment, fuel being not managed correctly, polluting the atmosphere, and definitely it’s a danger to us environmentally.
Paul Meany: We have this idea that today we’re doing unique harm and damage that’s irreparable to our environment, and in the past, people never did anything like that. I think one of the most shocking parts of your book is that people have been doing that since we’ve organized into societies.
Chelsea Follett: This is correct. If you look at the Domesday Book, a survey of England from the 11th century, at that point in time something like 15% of England was covered in forest area. And by the mid-14th century, that had shrunk to 6%. Deforestation is just one example of how human beings have been engaged in environmental harm for far longer than many realize. The idea of environmental conservation did not even enter their minds.
And because the world was not only incredibly poor, and backbreaking agricultural labor defined most of people’s lives, but also incredibly boring, people sought out entertainment where they could. Slaughtering animals on the farm became an amusement, and people found all sorts of creative and horrific ways to kill animals rather than simply getting the task over with quickly. The fact that torturing animals was in some cases actually legally required before you could sell their meat, I think, really puts current debates into perspective. The people of the past truly did not care about animal welfare or protecting the natural world.
Paul Meany: One other angle that a lot of the defenders of the past, the nostalgic, like to talk about is: yes, the world was poor in many ways, but we had community. They always talk about, you had your village, you had strong families, everyone was very religious, and the modern world, by comparison, people are atomized, they don’t have strong families, they tend not to be as religious. And so as a result, we live with less communal ties, less fellow feeling, and we’re more miserable people. Is that a nostalgic, kind of rose-tinted view of the past, or is there some truth to that idea, that they did live in strong communities that worked together that gave a great sense of meaning?
Chelsea Follett: I do not see a world where practically every parent has firsthand experience of child loss as a happier world. Almost everyone would have lost a child, a sibling. It was common for parents to predecease their children in childhood as well, because of the astronomical rate of death in childbirth, among other things. And if you look at the way our ancestors treated one another, it was not always this warm, fuzzy picture that we might like to imagine.
In London, in 1595, a law was passed saying, “No man shall after the hour of nine at night keep any rule whereby any such sudden outcry be made in the still of the night as making any afraid or beating his wife or servant,” which meant no beating your wife after nine p.m. That was a noise regulation. It was in a list of laws that also forbade using a hammer after nine p.m., because it was just accepted that beating your spouse until she screamed was as ordinary as using a hammer. Domestic violence, beating of wives and children, were very widely tolerated throughout the pre-industrial past.
Most people, because they never left their small, insular villages, would have also had very limited partner choices when it came to marriage. The only people available to wed might all be your first cousins. There might be wide age gaps. Their personalities might simply have been very incompatible with yours. But economic necessity motivated many marriages. The ideal of marriage for romantic love actually only arose around the time of the Industrial Revolution, as greater prosperity enabled people to raise their standards.
If you look at records of church attendance in the past, it’s also not clear that our ancestors were quite as religious as some imagine. There are some people today who idealize old theocracies and believe that if you mandate religion in a top-down way, this causes the population to become more religious. This does not actually seem to necessarily hold. If you look at the work of our colleague Mustafa Akyol, even today, you can see that in countries that mandate a religious faith, such as the modern-day theocracy of Iran, a far smaller share of their population is actually religious than in a country such as the United States that guarantees, constitutionally, freedom of religion and of belief.
So I think that someone who idealizes the communities, the families, the faith, and so on of our ancestors should acquaint themselves with how people actually acted and how they actually treated one another throughout much of history. And I think that the picture that would emerge of violence, grief, and so on that becomes apparent when you read the firsthand accounts of people of the past is starkly different from the romanticized view of a Shire-like community.
Paul Meany: So we talked about the hockey stick graph, and that the vast majority of human history is described as kind of a flat, straight line, not really much economic growth. Then all of a sudden, at some point in the 1800s, the line goes up, we become immensely richer. But I think a lot of people are under the impression that yes, we are immensely richer, but this leads to more immense challenges. One of the examples I think a lot of people talk about today is large language models and AI becoming an existential threat. And kind of like the way people talked about the Industrial Revolution, that it’s going to make everyone poor and more miserable, that’s how people are starting to discuss AI. So obviously, we’re fans of technology and convenience and making life better. But is there any sort of case that technology can become harmful to people and can lower their standard of living?
Chelsea Follett: New technologies bring trade-offs, sure. But the problems that we have today differ so dramatically from the problems that our ancestors faced throughout much of history. Our problems today are champagne problems compared to what they went through.
I’m glad that you brought up AI, because so many people today compare the AI revolution, the rise of AI, with the Industrial Revolution. It’s almost cliché at this point to make that comparison. If AI is the next Industrial Revolution and the average person has an incredibly negative view of the first Industrial Revolution, that is going to shape how they respond to AI. And unfortunately, if the response is to try to slow down or stop technological change because technological progress is seen as a net negative for the average person, we could be losing out on further transformational change in living standards. If AI can bring about even a small fraction of the economic growth that some predict, it has the potential to raise living standards so much that one day our descendants will look back at the 2020s and think, now those were the grim old days. How did those people even survive? Their lives were so hard. And that’s my hope. I hope that my great-grandchildren look back on today, on our era, with pity, because compared to their much higher living standards, our lives seem as gruesome to them as the pre-industrial era seems to us.
Paul Meany: I think throughout the book, there’s kind of an obvious question that’s coming up on the surface, which is, how did we get so rich? I think this is what a lot of people wonder: how we went from living in, kind of, huts and caves and then castles to modern skyscrapers today. And I think a lot of people, when they think of this, they think, well, we created new technology. And once we had new technology, everything became easier. But how do you explain how we got to the modern world? Is it simply economic growth? Is it technological factors, or is it something a little bit deeper under the surface?
Chelsea Follett: That, again, is the central question of economic history, isn’t it? What changed? Our colleague Deirdre McCloskey believes that it was a change in how people thought about commerce and merchants, a change in ideas. Steven Pinker of Harvard University, who has kindly provided a blurb for this book, believes it was the Enlightenment, a change in values, and how we thought about human welfare. We became more humane and relied more on reason and rationality. Others have suggested that maybe because Europe was fragmented politically, competition and technological innovation were encouraged through this geopolitical competition, whereas in areas of the world that were united in empires, there was an incentive to suppress new technologies. Others have emphasized the role of institutions.
Whatever the case may be, these different theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Somehow a classical liberal revolution occurred. The key thing to take away is that the modern world that we’ve been born into and that we take as the default, that we take for granted, is actually anomalous. This is a very unusual moment in time. Most of human history up to this point has looked very different, and the world we live in is the strange, unusual aberration. And the conditions under which we live may be far more fragile than we think. So correctly identifying the policies and institutions that do uphold this wonderful modern world we enjoy, even with its problems, we have come a long way. Identifying what allows us to maintain this modern world is paramount. And I hope that reading this book will not only provide people with more historical perspective, but will spark some curiosity about why things have changed so dramatically since the grim old days.
Paul Meany: It’s one of those things where I feel like the answer is always, well, it’s going to be a mystery. You can research into it. Academics can look into it forever. But what I feel is the most interesting about it is that this massive economic growth comes at the same time as moral revolutions across the world. And I view the economic growth as only one part of a larger story about how people changed the world dramatically. And when I see the story of classical liberalism and its rise from the 18th century into the 19th century, what I see is that it’s not about just unleashing purely economic forces. It’s unleashing all the human potential that up until this point had laid suppressed and dormant in the vast majority of societies throughout human history. And it’s only with the Enlightenment ideal of the universal rights of man, and then eventually, with some additions, the universal rights of women as well, and then even going down to the rights of children. What I see is that in the Enlightenment era, the 18th and 19th century, we begin with this small circle of concern for just ourselves and our own society, and over time, it expands further and further out until people start to think deeper about every issue.
But maybe there’s another book in there about what caused us to become so rich. For now, I would urge everyone to check out The Grim Old Days to see how bad the past actually was and how we live in a wonderful modern society that we should be appreciating every single day. And for that, Chelsea, thank you very much for joining us and explaining how the modern world is a miracle.
Chelsea Follett: Thank you so much.
Paul Meany: And thank you all for listening to the Cato Weekly Podcast. If you enjoyed today’s discussion, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about the ideas and research discussed in this episode, visit Cato.org. The Cato Weekly Podcast is a production of the Cato Institute dedicated to advancing individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace. Join us next time for more insights and conversations on the issues shaping our world.
