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The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past

Cato Institute Book Forum, November 5, 2026

Speakers: Chelsea Follett, Research Fellow, Human​Progress​.org, Cato Institute (author and moderator); Emma Camp, Senior Newsletter Editor, Wall Street Journal; Dominic Pino, Editorial Writer, Washington Post

Opening remarks

Chelsea Follett: Hello and welcome to the Cato Institute. Thank you so much for joining us tonight for our book forum for The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past. My name is Chelsea Follett, and I’m a research fellow here at the Cato Institute in the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, working with Human​Progress​.org, and the author of The Grim Old Days. We also have joining us tonight Emma Camp of the Wall Street Journal, who’s come all the way from New York City to be here, and Dominic Pino of the Washington Post. You had a rather shorter commute, just a block over. They will help relate the message of this book to current debates that we’ve been having about the value of economic growth, rising skepticism of markets, whether the AI revolution may be a new industrial revolution, and more.

We will be taking questions from you, the audience, both in person and online. You can submit those questions now if you’d like; you do not need to wait until the Q and A. I would also like to remind everyone joining us here in person to please silence your phones if you have not already done so.

Before we get to Emma’s and Dominic’s remarks, I am going to speak for about ten minutes to just quickly orient you about the book, which takes the reader on a tour of a thankfully lost world of destitution, filth, and famine-induced cannibalism.

These days, it is increasingly popular across the political spectrum to question the value of economic growth and to dismiss it as merely a line rising on a chart, to ask whether economics itself may simply be fake. Economic history can be summarized by the famous hockey stick chart: a long, flat line continuing for centuries upon centuries, millennia, showing barely perceptible progress bordering on stagnation, and then a sudden upswing of exponential economic growth. The great enrichment.

An average person living just prior to the Industrial Revolution, or one living centuries prior in the days of the Roman Empire, would have found each other’s world surprisingly familiar, despite being separated by so many years, because life remained so similar for so long. For the average person, income was low. Half of all children did not make it to adulthood, and life expectancy was in the 30s. No amount of wealth or power could protect you, in an age when receiving medical care might be more dangerous than simply going without it. George Washington, the father of our country, woke up one morning at age 67 with a cough. Forty percent of the blood was drained from his body, and he was dead by that evening.

None of us appreciate the modern world enough, and yet the typical view of the Industrial Revolution is the exact opposite of what it was. Instead of an enormous takeoff in economic growth, when the world became wealthier and healthier and freer, a trend that I believe is closely related, we imagine that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, or worse, that the Industrial Revolution introduced terrible living conditions, worker exploitation, pollution, and all manner of other ills into the world.

Our Vice President, JD Vance, recently on the Joe Rogan podcast, made the comparison between the AI revolution and the Industrial Revolution that so many others have made before. And he said, to avoid what was broken about the Industrial Revolution from recurring during the AI revolution, we need strong labor unions, anti-monopoly measures, more government intervention into the economy, the kind of intervention that could risk derailing the future progress from AI. If we do not correctly identify the policies and institutions that have allowed us to create this wonderful modern world that we enjoy, we risk losing it all.

This moment in history is very unusual. The vast majority of your ancestors, no matter where they lived, inhabited a world that was very different. People who were born and died on one side of the great enrichment lived in a completely different world from those who lived on the other side, and the enemies and [unclear] of economic growth do not realize this. My book, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past, hits you over the head with so many cocktail party anecdotes and vivid firsthand accounts and gruesome details about the past that it shocks you into recognizing that the world that we live in today is not the default. Everyone takes the world that they were born into for granted as the default condition, but it is not. We live in a very anomalous moment in time. Stagnation is the rule; progress is the exception.

My late colleague David Boaz, when asked why are some people poor, would answer, that’s not the right question. The right question is why are some people rich? So I would add, why is anyone even middle class? Extreme material deprivation is the default condition of humanity. It was only with the prosperity of the modern world that everything has changed. And we have not just made material progress. Some people imagine that we were poor in the past, but we were happier, or we lived in harmony with nature. The preindustrial world was a world where beating of wives and children and servants was widely accepted, where environmental degradation was given nary a thought, and where animals were tortured for entertainment routinely.

Now, none of us fully appreciate how far we have come, and also how fragile it may be, if those on the far right, the postliberals who engage in nostalgia for feudalism, figures like Tucker Carlson, who claim that life was better under feudalism for the average person, or those on the far left who advocate for degrowth, shrinking the economy, using less, returning to an imagined simpler, more sustainable way of life, if they get their way, we could put all of this at risk. And it’s not just the political extremes. The average person has, again, an incredibly dim view of the effects of the Industrial Revolution. The reason that we associate so many terrible things, like child labor and lengthy workdays, with the era of industrialization is because that was the first time when a critical mass of people rose out of poverty, and these horrors, which had been accepted as inevitable features of life since time immemorial, first began to be questioned. Whereas before they had been invisible and taken for granted.

If we fail to correctly identify the policies and institutions that allowed the world to change so dramatically for the first time in history, secure property rights, free trade, the freedom to try new things, because without freedom to allow for change there is no possibility of positive change. Again and again, when we look at history, we see that moments of innovation, golden ages, were all too brief, and quickly any attempt to make progress was often suppressed and stamped down. If the AI revolution actually is a new industrial revolution, we could be on the precipice of such a dramatic change that one day our descendants could look back on our era, the 2020s, with as much disgust and dismay and horror as we feel when we look back on how people lived in the preindustrial past. And that is my hope. But it is not guaranteed. Stagnation is the general rule. Progress is the exception, and the conditions under which it flourishes may be far more fragile than we would like to think.

With that, I will turn the floor over to Dominic.

Dominic Pino: Thank you so much, Chelsea. I really appreciate it. Glad to be here today at Cato. And as Chelsea mentioned, I had a much shorter trip here than Emma did. I just walked over from the Washington Post, and I grew up in the suburbs, so I’m not really used to being able to walk-commute places. But if I had lived 200 years ago, or at any point in history before that, walking was the only way to get anywhere. It was the normal way to commute to anywhere, and even extremely rich people could not travel very long distances.

One of the funny ways to see this is to read old novels. If you look at, for example, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, one of the characters talks about how they need to go visit somebody, but they live 15 miles away and that’s just too far. How could anybody possibly go 15 miles? And mind you, these characters are among the wealthiest people in their society in early 1800s England, and they thought going 15 miles was a long way, whereas today even relatively poor people will drive 15 miles every single day to go to work. And so we see how a lot of these things have developed and grown, and we’ve gotten so much richer over time. But it totally blinds us to what is normal. Like Chelsea was saying, the normal thing is actually poverty. The normal thing is to not have economic growth. That is how most of human history went. And a lot of these things are so new and so recent that we still haven’t really adjusted to them.

One of them, I think, is the idea that farmland is this natural and amazing and wonderful thing, and shows a simpler, more noble way of life. We all sort of feel this. I think sometimes if you go out to the countryside and you see places where there’s lots of farmland, it’s nice, it’s beautiful. We look at this and we think, oh, to be closer to nature, as opposed to the cityscape that we see out here in Washington, DC, for example. But of course, farmland is just as artificial as the skyscrapers outside. If you’re in North America, most of North America, naturally, is forest. Humans went in and cut down the trees to farm the land there. One of the chapters in the book talks about deforestation as not something that just happened since industrialization, but has actually been going on for a very long time. And it’s so that we could farm. People would have been much more easy to acknowledge that fact previously, because everyone was a farmer. You didn’t really have much of a choice in your occupation. You were always out there working in the fields, and you were doing it just to have enough food to eat yourself, let alone to take food to market and sell it to others. Nowadays, of course, we only need a small fraction of the population to work on farming, and we have more food than we can eat. That’s one of the amazing transformations just since industrialization.

One of the other areas, I think, where we have a very warped view is the concept of enjoying the great outdoors. This is a really new idea in human history. This is not something people did previously. Just to give you an example, we have wonderful national parks in the United States, some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, and this is seen as the natural thing to do: get out of your city, get out of your day-to-day job, and go enjoy nature on a premarked path that experts went through and made for you, with maps that were printed out and planned in advance, and you drive on a really nice paved road to get there. If you go to the parks out west, you flew on an airplane to get there, and then you rent a car and you drive there. You park that car in a parking lot. Maybe you bring in some nice prepackaged snacks that you bought on the way. You do all of this wearing clothes that were made of synthetic materials in factories in Asia, and really nice, comfortable shoes made with those same synthetic materials, probably in a big factory in Asia as well. But this is nature. This is how we enjoy nature. No one was doing this before industrialization. I looked back at the history of even the word “hiking,” and you don’t even see this word being used before the early 1800s. And so this concept of enjoying the great outdoors, the outdoors was a punishment, actually, for much of human history. There’s a medieval Norse word that was a form of a criminal sentence that you could get. It was basically a death sentence, and it translates to “going to the woods,” because basically what they would do is they would exile you from the society, and the only place you could go was out in the forest, where you would eventually die of starvation or get eaten by a wild animal.

So all of this stuff is brand new, and it’s something we should be very grateful for: that we can enjoy the outdoors, that we can see some of these places and know that we don’t have to work on a farm from dawn to dusk every single day in order to just have enough food to eat, and that even the people who still do work on farms don’t have to work nearly as hard as the people did previously to industrialization.

And this was a process, industrialization, that happened in the United States 200 years ago, and it’s easy for us to take it for granted. But of course, it’s playing out in real time in many different parts of the world right now. One of those places where it has had the most immediate effect is in India. If you look at the GDP per capita in India, it’s a perfect example of the hockey stick graph, and the bend in the hockey stick where it starts to go up only happened in about 1990 in India. It was, of course, a poor medieval society like everywhere else. Then it was a British colony. And then after it stopped being a British colony, it was socialist, and that didn’t work super well either. It wasn’t until the 90s that they did market reforms there, and growth has really taken off.

And when we look at those hockey stick graphs, the point of the graph is not just that a line going up on a graph is a good thing. There’s so many different things that go with that, and I want to read off some of those too. I apologize for not having these memorized, but since 1991 in India, the consumption or income per day for the median Indian has nearly doubled. So just in one generation, twice as much income for the average Indian. The percentage of Indians living in extreme poverty has declined from roughly half to roughly one-eighth. The percentage of Indians living on less than $3.65 a day went from 80 percent to just 44 percent, and the percentage living on $1 per day went from 4 percent to basically zero. Life expectancy in India went from 59 to 72. Again, that’s just since 1991. The child mortality rate, the percentage of children who die before the age of five, has declined from 12 percent to 3 percent. One of the things that we take for granted today is that a funeral for a child is an extremely sad and rare occasion. It used to be very, very normal, and it still is in many parts of the world. The share of Indian children who are malnourished went from 53 percent to just 32 percent. The share of India’s population with access to electricity went from about half to basically everyone. Put differently, the number of Indians without access to electricity went from 400 million to just 30 million, and the electricity per Indian went four times larger. The percentage of Indian deaths attributed to unsafe water went from 14 percent to just 3 percent. All of these numbers are so incredible, and they happen because of industrialization. They happen because of markets finally being adopted in a place that didn’t have the freedom to do that for a very long time. And of course, India is still a poor country by American standards today, but it’s going in the right direction.

I just got back from a trip to Poland about a month ago, and Poland is another place that has had an incredible transformation since the fall of communism there in 1991. Poland basically has gone from a Brazilian standard of living to a Japanese standard of living in the space of one generation, and they did it because they didn’t have communism anymore. It’s amazing: if you turn off communism, it’s just like flipping a switch from bad to good. The life expectancy there now is basically the same as it is in the United States. It was stuck around 70 for decades under communism. And so you see this story play out time and time again. And one of the things that we can do is learn from history and learn from other countries that are experiencing it right now, and hopefully communicate to Americans why this stuff is important, why it matters, and why it’s so much better today than it was in the grim old days. Thank you. Now I’ll turn it over to Emma.

Emma Camp: First of all, I want to say thank you for having me. I had such a good time reading Chelsea’s book. I’m basically exactly the target audience for it, which is that I love learning about the past. I love a good period drama, but I do so with a strong appreciation for how awesome it is to live right now. So when I was reading through her book, I wasn’t incredibly surprised with a lot of the things that I was reading, whether it’s about how high and terrible the infant mortality rate was, or all of the horrible maladies that could befall you, how disgusting city streets were, or how bad the dentistry was. All of this, I was like, okay, this is terrible, but I sort of expected it. But something that took me by surprise was her chapter on lighting.

I think it’s one thing to know intellectually that before electricity, all artificial light came from fire, and so that meant that people used candles or fires to see things at night. But I don’t think I quite grasped how expensive candles were and the ramifications of that for everyday people. People used to just die all the time from tripping over stuff at night, because they would only have one tiny candle and they would just fall down, or their houses would burn down because they had to light things with candles and a candle would knock over, and then all of a sudden their house and the houses of all of their neighbors were gone.

Something that really brought this home for me, and when I’ve talked about her book with friends, is the thing I always bring up. There is a point in the lighting chapter where she is discussing the invention of spermaceti candles, which come from whales. It’s kind of gross, but these candles were a great improvement on the kind of tallow or maybe beeswax candles that people had access to, but they were so expensive. How expensive, you ask? Well, for George Washington to burn one spermaceti candle for five hours a night for one year cost him the equivalent of $15,000 today. So I will think about that next time I’m paying my Con Edison bill.

So as you can probably guess, I am very optimistic. I feel incredibly grateful to live right now, but that view is not particularly common. So why do so many people feel as though they’re living in a uniquely bad time? I think part of how we got here is that people are only looking at their problems in a very small range. There is, in my opinion, genuinely something of an affordability crisis in America. I think housing is the key driver of this. Housing costs too much. And I think when you’re looking at it on a very small time scale, like how much did housing cost for me versus my parents, I’m paying more, and I think that’s bad. And the reason why we have that is because of an insufficient degree of capitalism, not too much capitalism. We basically made it illegal to build new houses in most of America starting around the 1970s. But okay, you’re looking at that problem, and if you’re a young person like me, you’re going, my life seems kind of hard. Something must be going wrong. It was probably better in the past. But the problem with that is that the way that we improved human lives so much on such a short time frame was not the kind of socialist solutions that are becoming incredibly popular right now, but through free markets and technological innovation.

So that is sort of the problem that I have with the way people are reacting to our current problems. I think that when you have an insufficient appreciation for the present that we live in, it’s very easy to get bogged down in these sort of throw-over-the-apple-cart solutions. And so when someone like Zohran Mamdani comes in and says, okay, I know why you are suffering, I know why you feel like you can’t afford the necessities of life, and it’s because some person over here took it from you, it’s because other people have too much, you’re losing sight of that question posed by David Boaz, which is: why is anybody rich? And the answer, again, is this economic innovation.

So I’m really obsessed with grocery stores. This has become sort of a calling card for me, talking about an insufficient appreciation of, or, I mean, you can never have too much appreciation of, the modern grocery store. I sometimes joke that if you gave me a medieval peasant and I needed to try to blow their minds as quickly as possible, the first thing I would do is take them to a modern grocery store. You walk into one room and you see more food than our ancestors could have ever imagined seeing in one place. It’s safe. It’s fresh. It comes from all over the world. You get strawberries in December, which is something that would have blown people’s minds even just a couple decades ago. And we end up spending less of our income on food than our ancestors ever did. Again, even in the span of just a couple of decades, Americans now spend much less of their income on food than their grandparents did. But when you’re only looking at something like inflation, which, again, I don’t want to discount the ways in which people feel themselves to be struggling right now, but when you’re looking at it through the lens of inflation, you’re going, things are bad. Everything has become terrible because food is slightly more expensive than it used to be. You’re losing sight of: but food used to be so expensive. How did we get to the situation where this is the problem that we have? I think why I’m so grateful to live in the present is that I take that we have problems, but I would rather have the problems of the present than the problems of any other time in history.

And so what I would like to see our leaders do is to have somebody try to communicate that. Something that is incredibly frustrating to me is that we sort of have this rising socialist movement on the left, but we also have a lot of denial of economics on the right. You have someone like JD Vance essentially saying that economics is fake. You have tariffs that are driving up prices as well. The way that I would put it in an overly simplistic framing is that the left says billionaires are why things cost too much, and the right says immigrants are the reason why things cost too much. And both are these sort of resentment-driven narratives that are just totally detached from economic reality. I just want to see someone hold up a supply and demand curve and say, this is actually how we fix things, and maybe put the hockey stick graph of the quality of human life right next to it. So that is why I love this book so much, and this is why I think we can take a lot of lessons from it for the future. Thank you.

Audience Q&A

Chelsea Follett: Thank you both so much for those remarks. Again, we will be taking questions both from our in-person audience and online. If you are joining us online, you can submit your questions directly on the event web page, through Facebook, through YouTube, or through X. If you are asking a question in person, please speak clearly and directly into the microphone. Please wait for the microphone to reach you, and don’t ask your question until it does so that everyone in the auditorium and online can hear the question. And if possible, please state your name and affiliation before the question as well.

I’d like to start off with a question that we’ve received online. Bryan Ayres in Tampa, Florida, asks: Will there be a futuristic follow-up about what the world might look like 250 years from now? What are your predictions for 2276, based on your research into the preindustrial days? To that, I must answer, honestly, I don’t know. I think that if reading about how different the world was prior to modern economic growth has taught me anything, it is that economic growth is not just a line on a chart. It is a revolutionary transformation in the living standards of the average person. And if you were to show someone from the preindustrial past how we live today, as Emma put it, their minds would be blown by simply visiting a grocery store. So if I had a time machine and I could visit the future, I think it might be completely unrecognizable if they are as wealthy compared to us as we are compared to our preindustrial ancestors. It might be beyond our imaginations. But maybe our guests have more of a prophetic insight into what might happen 250 years from now.

Dominic Pino: I don’t think so. One of the things I think people get wrong about how they think about progress is that you inherently can’t predict what it’s going to look like. We’re in an auditorium right now named for Friedrich Hayek, so I have to bring him up a little bit here and just say that economic progress can’t really be planned in advance in a way that we’re going to know what it will look like in the future, because people come up with ideas that we would have never thought of before, because we’re not in their situation. Hayek’s insight is about how decentralized information is, and how people in different situations are going to come up with different things based on information that we don’t have. I think that’s true at one point in time across the world, but it’s also true between different points in time. So I just don’t think there’s any possible way that we can know.

Emma Camp: I will offer one prediction, which is that I think in the future they will have water bottles that tiny ladies such as myself can open. Dominic, will you please help me? So with that, I will actually answer the question. I think one prediction I’ll make is that we will get much better in the next couple of decades at curing certain illnesses. I think about something like cystic fibrosis, which used to be essentially a death sentence, this really horrible genetic condition where I think your body overproduces mucus. When I was a teenager, I was a fan of a YouTuber named Claire Wineland, who I think was two or three years older than me, and she had cystic fibrosis, and she died when she was 20 or 21 years old from complications of her disease. And now children born with this condition have essentially a totally average lifespan. So my hope is that we will continue to have a lot of medical advancements, and that especially genetic conditions that would have been death sentences, right now, in the future will be totally curable.

Dominic Pino: You have inspired me to be a bit bolder myself. I think one prediction might be fewer car deaths. If we get out of our own way and adopt self-driving cars, which, you know, Waymo is still not allowed to operate here in the District of Columbia despite operating safely in many other places, I think that those hold the potential to save many of the nearly 40,000 lives lost annually in car accidents.

Chelsea Follett: Now, let’s take a question from the audience. There in the back.

Marian Tupy, Editor, Human​Progress​.org: Thanks so much. Marian Tupy, the editor of HumanProgress. Dominic, Emma, you are both young people. How did you end up with your views? Just short biographical stories. How did you end up appreciating capitalism, being grateful for modernity? And what makes you different from such a huge share of your respective generations who believe the opposite?

Dominic Pino: They read good books.

Emma Camp: Yes. So, it might be a little too simple to put it this way, but the hockey stick graph. I don’t really know what else you can think when you look at this graph of human life expectancy, poverty, you name it, and it just is down here for years and years and years and years, and then around 150 or 200 years ago it shoots up, and it’s like, okay, well, what happened then? The Industrial Revolution. Okay. That’s all I really needed.

Dominic Pino: Yeah, I got interested in economics in high school, just from a sense of wanting to understand how things work. Why is it that we have these huge financial systems where money flows around, and then all of a sudden shows up in physical products that I use in my day-to-day life? How does this all get organized, and what happens? That got me interested in studying economics and then reading about both history and being grateful for how far we’ve come, but then also understanding more about free markets and what happens when you actually leave people alone and give them peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice, as Adam Smith would say. And it turns out that people are capable of some pretty cool stuff, and they do it without anybody having to order them to do it. I just think that’s really fascinating.

Chelsea Follett: And for those who are not brilliant enough to be convinced by simply viewing the hockey stick chart, who do not have the acumen to study economics, one of the goals of this book is to, through narrative history, really bring to life what that hockey stick chart meant and how much free markets have improved the world. And we are trying to reach young people with it. That is one of the goals of this book. It is very accessible, readable, amusing, if I may say so. And we have three lesson plans available online for high school teachers through Cato’s Sphere initiative to accompany the chapters. So we will be getting this into classrooms.

Another question that we have is: what about problems like the loneliness epidemic and its relationship to social media and emerging AI? I’m really glad we got this question, because obviously when you see progress in any area, new technologies, more economic growth, it brings new challenges and trade-offs as well. There are many so-called problems of prosperity. One thing that I think would also blow our ancestors’ minds is the fact that many people who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum today are obese. That would be very confusing to people who lived in a time of near-constant food scarcity, where food shortages regularly triggered riots, as they did up until the Industrial Revolution. But today, for the first time, obesity rates are actually coming down since we started measuring them. How did we do that? Was it through a ban on junk food? No, it was through a new innovation, a new class of drugs that have allowed us to deal with this mismatch between our psychology, which formed in a time period when food was scarce and gorging yourself on cheap, delicious calories was good for your survival, and a time when we actually have too much abundance of cheap, delicious food, more in a grocery store than one person could ever eat. I think AI does bring new challenges, but we are better situated than ever before to try to rise to meet them. But I don’t have a lot of specific thoughts about social media and the loneliness epidemic. Do either of you?

Dominic Pino: Yes, I have. I have a book coming out myself in June, sort of about this question. So, yes, I think when you look at these markers of social well-being, things are getting worse in the past couple of decades. But I certainly do not accept that human relationships are worse now than they were, say, 100 years ago. And I think the main driver of this is that people are able to move around more, so it’s easier to find people that you might want to be friends with or want to marry. People are highly educated, which I think also increases your kind of social capital. And then also we have massive increases in civil liberties. I think your marriage is likely to be happier if your wife has equal rights to you. You know, as a man to say that.

Emma Camp: So I would agree. I think we’re facing new challenges, but I certainly do not accept this, I think this is more common on the right, this sort of right-wing nostalgia for the past was so wholesome. Marriages lasted forever. There was this harmony between the sexes, and families worked closer. And I’m like, yeah, but there was also a lot of domestic abuse that went totally unprocessed, and women being unable to escape unhappy marriages, and also having to choose among your potential spouses just a couple of people that live in your town. So I would much rather deal with the challenges of today than the challenges of yesterday.

Chelsea Follett: If I may add on to that before Dominic shares one of the more shocking illustrations of how much worse we treated one another in the past, and allegedly we were so much more socially connected: in 1595, a law was passed in London that went like this: no man shall, after the hour of nine at night, make any rule whereby any such sudden outcry be made in the still of the night, as making any affray or beating his wife or his servants. And what that meant was no beating your wife after 9 p.m. That was a noise regulation. It was on a list of laws that also included a rule against using a hammer after 9 p.m., because beating your wife until she screamed was considered as ordinary as using a hammer. So we have not just made material progress. I think that we’ve made quite a bit of progress in how we treat one another as well.

Dominic Pino: Yeah, one of the things that I learned from the book is how we treated old people in the past was actually pretty terrible, if you were lucky enough to actually be old in the first place. You were often treated very badly, even by members of your own family, because it’s very hard to take care of people. We have lots of problems now where people have to take care of aging parents, and it’s very difficult, and that’s certainly a real issue. But the idea that this used to work so well in the past, well, no, it was really bad in the past. And as far as intact families go, there were lots more problems in the past because people would die. Yeah, sure, there was less divorce, maybe, but there were a lot more second marriages because your first spouse died. And it’s obviously a very difficult situation either way, but I don’t really think anybody would say that that’s a happier place to be, especially from the children’s perspective, going through parents getting divorced, or going through one of your parents dying, or both of your parents dying. Any of those would be very, very hard on children. So I also think that this romanticized view of the past can be a really big problem, and it clouds our judgment on what we need to do in the present to make things better for people.

Emma Camp: People forget that we have the evil stepmother trope for a reason.

Dominic Pino: Yeah, it was because the first mother died. That’s why I say it was so common for there to be remarriage and to have an abusive stepparent.

Chelsea Follett: People would often describe marriage in the preindustrial era, if you look at how they were conceptualizing it in their writing, as a hell or prison sentence for one or both partners. And unfortunately, there was a lot of spousal abuse, including by the women as well. To be fair, there was a poison, we still don’t know what went into it exactly, called Aqua Tofana. That was said to be the bottled revenge of the preindustrial housewife, because it was so deadly, and it was shared by women discreetly to end the lives of their husbands.

Let’s try to take another question from the live audience before we move to another one of our online questions. Actually, this gentleman up front.

Jacob, student, Liberty University: Hi, I’m Jacob. I’m with Liberty University. I’m a student. This question is somewhat related to the question that was recently asked about challenges, but it’s maybe a little bit different as a guiding principle. As new technologies come about, technology has the ability to magnify human capabilities. Right? But unfortunately, that not only means that it magnifies human capabilities to do good, but also to do evil. So at scale, we can maybe do really good things, but that also means that at scale, we can do really bad things. For example, on the traveling and the 15 miles, I think Dominic mentioned the richest people thought 15 miles was so far. Right? I recently spent the summer in the Middle East, and it took me just 26 hours to fly into Abu Dhabi. But we also recently observed a remembrance of 9/11, which shows us a challenge, the downside of what you can do with planes, that you can actually turn that into a guided missile. And this applies to globalization, all these things. So I’m wondering, how do you think that principle, that it magnifies our ability to do good and evil, how should that influence our optimism? Because I am very optimistic, but also can’t rid myself of these concerns, if that makes sense.

Chelsea Follett: So, great question. I agree with you that these new technologies are tools that can be used for good or evil. Humanity, though, over time has not only made material progress, but also, I believe the data bears out, incredible progress toward less violent norms, and this is not fully appreciated. In the past, public executions were considered a wholesome entertainment fit for the whole family. People would bring a picnic lunch, they’d bring the children, and the most enthusiastic viewers could be identified by their clothing actually being singed or covered with ashes, because they’d leaned in so close to the flames to try to watch every detail of the facial expression of the condemned as they choked to death on the smoke and died. And just recently, when the idea was floated by political leadership of bringing back public executions, there was a lot of public pushback against it, and that ended up being canceled, which I think is very heartening, actually.

Homicide rates in early modern Europe, before the Industrial Revolution (the early modern period is between the end of the Middle Ages and the start of industrialization), were actually higher not only than homicide rates in Europe today, which are quite low, but they were even higher than current homicide rates in the United States, which are considerably higher than Europe’s because of guns. We have become much less violent, and our circle of empathy has expanded so much to groups that previously did not receive empathy: women, employees, children, even animals. We now have debates about animal welfare. In early modern Europe, at one point there was actually a law in England against the sale of unbaited beef. Now, does anyone know the difference between baited and unbaited beef? Probably not. Baited beef came from an animal that spent its last moments alive being tortured, especially by bred and trained dogs, from which the modern pit bull and bulldog derived their names, kept their teeth clenched into an immobilized bull, even as the bull would gouge apart the canine and kill it in turn. This was considered a popular form of entertainment, and also, inexplicably, to make the meat higher quality. So you were actually ripping off your customers if you sold them beef that came from an animal that did not spend its last moments in torment. The fact that we are even having debates today about animal welfare shows that we live in a different world than one where it was legally required that you torture the creature before it dies. So could new technology be used to do evil? Certainly. But I think we’ve made a great deal of moral progress as well.

Dominic Pino: Yeah, one of the things I’m reading right now is David Hume’s History of England, and one of the things that he remarks on in there is that all these medieval battles were all routs. All of them were incredibly one-sided. The one side would win and they would just kill absolutely everyone. They would then go through the villages in the area and kill everybody there. And basically all battles in medieval times played out that way. And there’s two reasons for that. One, people didn’t really have the same concepts we do now about the distinctions between military and civilian targets and the correctness of targeting one or the other. But it was also just because we knew less about the other side. So you would constantly be ambushed, you would constantly have these incredible mistakes where you would think you went in with a roughly equal fighting force and actually you’re way outnumbered and you get completely destroyed. And so I think this is a good example from today: deaths in combat are much lower in frequency than they used to be in these times. And I don’t think it’s because people have gotten any better. We still have evil people in the world who want to do bad things. I think human nature is a constant, but it’s the technological improvements that have actually made this less likely, because now we know more about the enemy, we know more about the other side, and we can actually make better decisions even if we’re the same flawed people. So I think that’s an area actually where technology has improved things, so that you don’t have as many battles anymore, in really any conflict in the world, that look like the normal battle in a medieval society.

Emma Camp: Chelsea, I’m so glad you brought up the anecdote from your book about baited beef, because I’m an animal rights nut. I’m the kind of person who is very upset about animal agriculture right now, and industrial animal agriculture, and all of the cruelty that happens to animals that we eat right now. And because of that, it’s very easy for me to assume, well, before we had these industrial animal-torturing, killing machines, the animals must have lived much better lives. And I think your book was a good example of, actually, no, in many ways some of them were living much, much worse lives. Like the fact that you could not eat beef that had not been tortured to death, literally for fun. At least now even people who enthusiastically eat meat, which is most people, are somewhat uncomfortable with the situations that farmed animals are living in right now. People enjoyed watching animals be tortured to death, literally torn to shreds. That is horrible, and I think that the change is a sign of tremendous moral progress.

Chelsea Follett: We have received a question that goes like this: My sense is that we need to do a better job of quantifying advances in the standard of living. That is, take examples of the progress made in computing power, telephony, et cetera, even in recent decades, which some take for granted. The question becomes how and whether Cato could crunch these numbers. Do I have a website for you! HumanProgress is Cato’s databank website that shows all of the different ways that free markets and individual liberty and peace have helped to make the world a better place, with data, with charts. If you are someone like Emma who loves charts and that is enough to shift your worldview, please check out HumanProgress. Check out also the reporting of these two.

Another question we have is: as the population continues to age, how do you see continued advances improving the quality of those extended lives, keeping in mind that some seniors are quite challenged by new technologies? That’s a good one. It gets into what Dominic was saying. I think about how we do sometimes romanticize the lives of those who did manage to survive to old age in the past, which was far fewer people, first of all, than those today, because there is this myth that the reason life expectancy was in the 30s is solely due to the fact that half of children didn’t make it to adulthood. Yes, children faced the worst odds of anyone, but if you could just make it to adulthood, your chance of living to old age was the same as someone today. This is a myth. Mortality rates were higher for every age group. People in the past often did not retire. They would continue to work until they were no longer capable of doing so. And owing to those higher rates of mortality at every age group, people in the preindustrial past were actually less likely to have adult living children than are those in old age today. So the idea that they lived happy family lives and were less lonely, I think, is wrong.

But how can we make new technologies help the elderly? Today, I think that what Emma was saying about the potential for new drug discovery and medical advances, if we do not overregulate AI and get in our own way, is incredible. And that could help people who do not personally adopt new AI technologies to do their grocery shopping or help them with other aspects of life. That way we just have more medical advances, so that we can not only live longer, but stay healthier longer.

Emma Camp: Yeah, I do think there are a lot of older people who can do technology quite well. My grandmother is 89 and she texts with emojis. So I mean, it’s possible.

Dominic Pino: I think that’s true of people at every age, actually. Some people are early adopters of new technology and some people aren’t, and I think that’s just really a personality-driven thing, actually, more than an age-driven thing. But one of the cool things about modern economic growth is that even if a technology is not something that you’re using personally, it can still benefit you in general. I heard Daniel Hannan give this example one time, and I think it’s really helpful. He talked about how the job of a bartender today is basically the same job in a lot of ways as a bartender in Shakespeare’s time. You’re pouring drinks, you’re mixing drinks, you’re serving them to people, you’re taking money in exchange for this. It’s basically the same job. But of course, a bartender today is paid a lot more and has a much better quality of life than a bartender in the 1500s. And the reason for that is not that technology has changed things about their job. Instead, it’s changing things about everyone else’s job, and the rest of society is so much richer that those benefits still come to you. And I think that’s true for lots of different jobs and things. And I think it’s true even for people who aren’t working anymore. What we see in the United States is not only that people are living longer, they’re also retiring earlier over time. The official age of retirement that we always talk about is 65, but if you look at the average age when people actually retire, it’s somewhere 62 to 64. So people are actually doing quite well in that area, and it’s because we’re so rich as a society. Even if you’re not directly participating in a lot of these things, you still get the benefits.

Emma Camp: Yeah. I think the medical advances are a huge part of improvements to elder care. My 89-year-old grandmother fell and broke her leg last year, and she made a complete recovery, which is something that would have been shocking even a couple decades ago. She has a lot of gumption. She’s the strongest lady I know. But also she was able to get medical care very quickly. It was very high quality, with new techniques for repairing her bone that did not exist a couple of decades ago.

I think, to jump off of something Dominic said, because I am a cocktail enthusiast and a pedant, I will note that the job of a bartender is quite different, because the modern cocktail wasn’t invented until about a hundred years ago, and it could not exist without ice, and people did not have ready access to ice. Domestic freezers weren’t really introduced until the 1930s. A lot of people got their ice from slabs cut from lakes. You cannot have a good cocktail without ice, and you cannot have a lot of the cocktails that people make today without imported goods: vermouth from Italy, Campari, Japanese whiskey. So I think we have a lot to be enthusiastic about, specifically in the alcohol department.

Chelsea Follett: We also have a question that goes like this: The old days were horrible, and this book has become one of my favorites, simply out of morbid curiosity. But how good really were the 1950s, that American conservatives love to point to as the good old days? Obviously, that’s a phrase as old as time, but how different is it? I’m so glad that this question was asked, because it is something that I’ve received as pushback for this book. Okay, we have made progress since the Industrial Revolution, but that’s not the good old days people want to return to. What they really want is to return to the good old days of the 1950s, or sometimes they’ll say the 1960s or the 1970s. I’ve even heard the 1980s and the 1990s referred to as the good old days.

I think that some of the nostalgia people have for the 50s comes from the fact that even though we were objectively a much poorer country with a lower standard of living, smaller houses, many people without air conditioning and so on, we were making rapid economic progress. Even today, if you look at polling among people in countries that are still rapidly developing, and some still are, as Dominic pointed out, the Industrial Revolution has not reached all corners of the earth. Eight percent of the world’s population still doesn’t have electricity. If you look at polling among people in poorer countries, you will see a lot more optimism and a lot more recognition of the fact that poverty is falling globally. If you poll people in the United States and other rich countries, many do not realize that poverty is coming down globally, and they have a much more pessimistic view on things like AI and emerging technologies. Right now, the United States is actually, I believe, one of the most pessimistic countries regarding whether or not AI will improve their lives. In the 1950s we were poorer, but because progress was more rapid, we were, in a sense, a developing country, and people could see those positive changes over the course of their lives. I think there was more optimism. People had anchored their expectations differently. Whereas today, because we take our very high standard of living for granted as the default, and we compare the present to an imagined utopia instead of to where we’ve actually been and where many people still are, we’ve got a much greater sense of pessimism. So that’s why I think people have this nostalgia for the 50s, because there was more of a sense of optimism, perhaps, at the time.

Dominic Pino: Yeah, I think it’s easier to have it for the 50s than for decades that people can remember. Most people don’t remember those times. My favorite is when people point to the 70s as the good old days. Like, what are we talking about? The 70s were horrible. Unemployment was super high, inflation was super high. It was really not a great time. But the 50s, you do have a better case, because unemployment was low, you had a fast-growing economy. But that’s where it gets iffy. Because if the problem is that we’re too obsessed with economic growth and we’re too obsessed with GDP, and we need to go back to the good old days when GDP was growing twice as fast, I don’t know, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I think there was a ton of disruption in the 50s. The idea that this was some sort of stable time when nothing ever changed, like, no. If you’re in an economy that’s growing 5 or 6 percent a year, as we had in some of the years of the 50s, that’s disruptive. It’s a big deal.

And then we also have to remember that the 50s was a difficult time, depending on who you were. We still had racial segregation in the 50s, which is not good for a big chunk of the population. And then, of course, many fewer women in the workforce, lots of different things like that. And we’re coming after World War II, where all of the other industrial countries of the world had been bombed and destroyed, and the US was one of the only ones left standing. So you had a very uncompetitive global market where the US could really dominate in a way that you really can’t repeat and shouldn’t want to repeat. So I think there are some unique circumstances there. But if the idea is that we’re too obsessed with GDP now, which, by the way, we are not, there are lots of things the US does that are not good for GDP growth, but we were growing much faster at the time that people seem to want to go back to, which I think should tell us something, maybe, that maybe there was something to that.

Emma Camp: Yeah. I think a lot of the nostalgia for the 1950s is aesthetic. I think that people look at Tang ads, and photos of rich people doing things, and go, oh, but the dresses were so pretty and all the men were in suits. That sounds pretty nice. This happens especially with flying. This really gets stuck in my craw whenever I see this, where people will share a photo or an ad of, oh, in the 1950s, when you flew, they brought roast beef right to your seat and they cut it for you, and it was amazing. And I’m like, so you can basically get that experience today. It’s called first class on Emirates Airlines. You can buy that, because those plane experiences from the 1950s would have cost many thousands of dollars more, probably, in fact, than a first class ticket on an airline today. And it’s like, no, if you were in the 1950s, you wouldn’t have been able to afford to fly. You wouldn’t have been flying in style.

And I think also, as other people brought up, people often forget how bad the civil liberties situation was in the past. I don’t say, oh, rich white men had it so easy, because they also were dying of cancers that are easily cured today. They also faced a lot of these kinds of medical and poverty problems as well. But it wasn’t so nice to be a woman or a racial minority or gay in the 1950s. And I think that is why, perhaps, social conservatives bring up that decade in a nostalgic way.

Chelsea Follett: We also have a question asking how on earth could you get K through 12 schools, much less colleges, to teach about this? Again, Cato’s Sphere initiative is doing so much work to reach teachers across the country, in high schools, in middle schools. We are reaching students with free lesson plans and other materials, including to go along with the chapters of this book. Someone also points out that recessions were far more frequent in the 1950s. Also, an interesting point.

Someone asks: The Industrial Revolution improved living standards through innovation. How can the next revolution ensure that technology, services, and opportunities reach every territory, including remote communities? Should progress be measured not only by what society produces but by how many people benefit? That’s an interesting way to phrase it, because the world population is at an all-time high. We’ve had huge population growth. The number of people benefiting is objectively at an all-time high. What’s incredible about extreme poverty is not only has the share of people in extreme poverty gone down, but despite rapid population growth, the absolute number in extreme poverty has also declined. That’s started to come down.

How can we ensure that people in rural areas also benefit? I think that the rise of remote work is a lasting change that we’ve seen that has the potential to give people more options as to where they live and potentially revitalize rural communities as well. Up until this point in history, we’ve seen a trend of people being more and more likely to opt to move into cities, urbanization. And I’m not under the impression that that has to continue indefinitely for further progress. It’s about what people choose. If more people want to live in rural areas, obviously I’d like to have them have more freedom to do so, enabled by technology. On the other hand, that’s also not a goal of mine. If people do prefer urban living, they should be free to live in cities.

Dominic Pino: Yeah, I think a good example of technological diffusion, which is really what that question is getting at, just in the last 20 to 30 years, is the smartphone. It went from a thing that didn’t exist, that nobody wanted because no one knew what it was, to a thing that existed, and then people wanted them, to now being nearly universal, not just in rich countries, by the way, but also in poor countries. There are people in India right now who don’t have running water inside, but they do have a smartphone. It’s truly remarkable. India is in large part a cashless society now, because most people pay for things with their smartphones, including at rural markets in the middle of nowhere where you’re buying agricultural products. They’re paying with smartphones. It’s a pretty remarkable thing. Now, the Indian government was involved a little bit; they developed the payment interface that people use, but they didn’t give people phones. The spread of smartphones, and making this technology from something that’s extraordinarily expensive, a state-of-the-art thing, to something that you can make such cheap versions of that even the poorest people in the world can afford them, that was all markets. That was all markets that did all of that. There were really not government programs that tried to spread smartphones to people. It was just something that people wanted, and global markets were able to meet the need of people so that they could do that.

So I would say we don’t need to have some kind of government plan to try to figure out how to get technology to people. And in fact, if you look at the record of that in the United States, you’ve had all sorts of different programs about internet access and things like that that have been just comically inept. The most famous recent example being the $40 billion appropriated for broadband internet in the Build Back Better package back in 2021. That has done nothing, absolutely nothing. So I think getting government out of the way on these things will unlock possibilities that, if government was trying to plan for it, they wouldn’t have even thought of as a possibility when they started out.

Emma Camp: There’s a story I read this week that I can’t get out of my head, and it’s about maternal mortality in some of the poorest regions of Nigeria. I believe it is in the New York Times. It’s about how this unremarkable-looking sheet of plastic is preventing deaths from postpartum hemorrhage. This is one of the most common ways that women die in childbirth. It’s a sheet of plastic with a little bag at the bottom, and it’s placed under a woman while she gives birth. And if the bag at the bottom fills with too much blood, if it passes a line, because it’s actually quite hard to detect postpartum hemorrhage in these sort of less technologically advanced settings, there’s blood everywhere and you have no idea how much the woman has actually bled. So once it gets to a certain point, that’s when you know a hemorrhage is happening, and the hospital staff is able to immediately get the woman all the interventions that she needs. And it’s saving lives. And it’s incredible. An interesting part about it is that, thinking about how do we manufacture this, the plastic was too expensive, but the Gates Foundation gave a grant to a local manufacturing plant in Nigeria that’s making these pieces of plastic. So I’m talking about the future being better. People are much more charitable now. But then also, this is both saving lives and it’s creating economic activity in a poor part of the world, and everybody’s benefiting. When you feel like the future is bleak, you look at something like this and it makes me feel really hopeful.

Chelsea Follett: On that note about free enterprise and private charity helping to make the world a better place, we are now a few minutes over time, so please join us for a reception in the lobby.