This Earth Day comes on the heels of a remarkable turning point in conservation history: Scientists at Colossal Laboratories have claimed the first animal species de-extinction by recreating dire wolves through genetic editing.

Some have argued that modifying animals (in this case, grey wolves) to resemble extinct species is not true de-extinction. Still, it is certainly a significant departure from a past defined by widespread human-caused species loss.

De-extinction is among the extraordinary conservation efforts resulting from human wealth and technological innovation that have turned the tide from animals vanishing to whole species possibly returning to life. As humans make progress, they bring the whole animal kingdom along with them.

Species loss is sometimes considered a purely modern phenomenon, but humans have been exterminating wildlife since prehistory. A prominent theory explaining the extinction of megafauna (large animals such as mastodons, sabertooth cats, mammoths, American lions, and the now topical dire wolves) is geoscientist Paul Martin’s overkill hypothesis, suggesting that humans rapidly hunted many big game animals to extinction.

In the Americas and Australia, where humans first arrived later than in Eurasia or Africa, human beings proved particularly deadly, as local species were unused to coexisting with homo sapiens and had not developed ways of surviving human interaction. As science writer Sharon Levy’s book on megafauna notes, the last 50,000 years saw about 90 genera of large mammals go extinct, amounting to over 70 percent of America’s largest species and over 90 percent of Australia’s.

In fact, such exterminations continued throughout the preindustrial era. New Zealand provides a relatively recent example of an overkill extinction. People first settled in New Zealand in the late 13th century. In only 100 years, humans exterminated 10 species of moa, along with at least 15 other kinds of native birds, including ducks, geese, pelicans, coots, the Haast’s eagle, and an indigenous harrier.

Today, few people know that lions, hyenas, and leopards are all native to Europe but were eliminated from the continent by human activity in antiquity. As historian Richard Hoffmann notes in his book An Environmental History of Medieval Europe, lions, hyenas, and leopards had “vanished from Mediterranean Europe by the first century BCE, and bear populations in both the Balkans and the Apennines were much reduced.”

He notes that “elimination of all the now proverbially ‘African’ animals — lion, elephant, zebra, etc. — from areas north of the Sahara was complete by the fourth century CE … These purposely targeted ‘trophy’ organisms [were] pursued on cultural grounds beyond all reasonable expenditure of energy.”

Countless species have been exterminated from large parts of their native habitats or were driven to extinction in the preindustrial era. Hoffmann further notes, “Such prized game as bear, wolf, and wild pig were extirpated from the British Isles by the end of the Middle Ages. The last individual specimen of the great native European wild ox, the aurochs, was killed by a known noble hunter in Poland in 1637.”

In Iceland, by the 12th and 13th centuries, the walruses that once lived on the southwest coast were gone. The examples of premodern species depletion go on and on.

In the modern era, some claim that extinctions have accelerated, with alarmists such as Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich even going so far as to say we’re in the midst of a sixth “mass extinction.” That is, by any account, a gross exaggeration. The last true mass extinction occurred some 65.5 million years ago, when the dinosaurs died, long before humans existed.

In reality, for the past 50 years, species populations are no longer shrinking in wealthy countries, and in many cases, they are increasing. According to a 2023 investigation, poor countries’ populations have also stopped declining. “The extremely large number of species that are said to be continuously dying out comes from theoretical models of insects and even smaller organisms that are assumed to disappear,” the author notes.

Wild animals are coming back in rich areas of the world, with a resurgence of bison, boars, ibexes, seals, turtles, and more. European wolf conservation efforts have been such a success that many people now see the exploding wolf population as out of control, and Sweden is even seeking to cull 10 percent of its wolves through hunts. Last year, thanks to the growth in their numbers, the Iberian lynx wildcat, the red-cockaded woodpecker, and the Apache trout all ceased to be endangered.

Not only is it clear that humans were much more likely to drive large animals to extinction in the past than they are today, but for the first time, we are trying to bring past forms of wildlife back. What explains this dramatic shift?

As human beings have grown wealthier, they have also come to care about environmental stewardship and gained the resources to act upon their newfound compassion for wildlife. For most of history, animal welfare was not a concern. Hoffman relates that “late antique and early medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to … humankind.”

Today, in contrast, many people voluntarily exert enormous effort toward protecting species and even attempt to reengineer extinct creatures back into existence. It turns out that human progress isn’t only good for humanity. Growing prosperity and advancing technology have enormous potential to benefit many beloved and majestic animal species. Perhaps even extinct ones!

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 4/22/2025.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for far higher taxation in a recent blog entry, arguing that current wealth concentration is higher than that of the Gilded Age and is about to get worse globally. The chart-topping singer Billie Eilish implored billionaires to give away their money, while New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has gone further, opining, “I don’t think we should have billionaires” because we live in “a moment of such inequality.” If anything is having a moment, it is the conviction that inequality has grown urgent enough to justify a muscular policy response.

But the facts don’t support this. Not only has global income inequality fallen over the long run — contrary to the popular narrative — but inequality has also declined in education, health, and a host of other areas. The world is now more equal across a range of factors, from lifespan and childhood survival to internet access and schooling. The more broadly one examines inequality, the more encouraging the data appear. It turns out that even the shock of COVID-19 failed to erase decades of progress toward a wealthier and more equal world.

Indeed, the data show a pronounced decline in global inequality over the past few decades, driven largely by rising prosperity in poorer countries. During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, progress slowed sharply. Some indicators stalled and a few modestly worsened. But the gains accumulated before the crisis were not undone.

In short, the damage to human well-being was more limited than many feared.

Another recent analysis published in The Economist finds that global inequality in consumption spending is falling. In 2000, the richest 10% of humanity spent 40 times more than the poorest 50%. In 2025, they spent around 18 times more. Using data from World Data Lab, they find that the poorest 50% now out-consume the richest 1%, breaking from past trends.

Yet many think that only large-scale redistribution can stop runaway worldwide inequality. Figures as diverse as Amodei, Eilish, and Mamdani are far from alone in embracing this view. Over the past few years, calls for a worldwide wealth tax, a vast increase in foreign aid spending, and other unprecedented measures are gaining steam across academia, non-profits, the press, and international organizations like the United Nations.

That conclusion is premature. Getting the facts straight is essential, because misunderstanding global inequality can push policymakers toward harmful solutions.

The record on foreign aid is far less encouraging than its advocates suggest: decades of evidence show that aid frequently fails to deliver sustained development and bears no reliable relationship to long-term economic growth. Worse, the fixation on ever larger aid flows often crowds out the harder work of domestic reform. In some cases, foreign aid has been shown to weaken political institutions, entrench bad governance, and slow the process of democratization.

Wealth taxes have their own problems, from high administrative costs and enforcement challenges to low revenue production and invasion of financial privacy. These problems help explain why so many of the countries that have implemented wealth taxes in the past — such as France, Germany, and Sweden— later abolished the tax. Perhaps the worst of all, by discouraging risk-taking, wealth taxes suppress investment and growth, effects that would be felt in both rich and poor countries and would likely prove especially damaging to development in the world’s poorest economies.

Recent work on multidimensional inequality suggests that the world has not been drifting toward ever greater gaps, but that the rich and the poor have been converging in material comfort. Calls for global wealth taxes or massive new aid programs often rest on the assumption that international trade and economic freedom have failed to deliver broadly shared gains. Yet the long-term evidence suggests the opposite.

The pandemic offers two lessons here: First, it highlights just how sensitive progress is to disruptions in markets. It depends on conditions that allow growth to occur and persist, including functioning markets and stable institutions. Many of the proposed policy solutions risk undermining that progress.

The second lesson is that while the pandemic represented a hurdle in the path of progress, the long-term trend toward lower global inequality is holding strong.

Alarmist narratives shape public opinion and encourage policymakers to pursue sweeping interventions that may do more harm than good. A clearer view of the data counsels caution rather than panic.

This article was originally published in Washington Examiner on 3/23/2026.

Consider “gander pulling,” which entailed beheading a live goose, barehanded, while riding a horse—and, usually, while drunk—in front of a roaring crowd. Particularly popular around Easter in the American South, gander pulling was once a beloved pastime in the United States and many parts of Europe. The writer Carl Sandburg claims that even U.S. President Abraham Lincoln attended gander pulls in his youth.

It may be hard to believe that people chose to spend their time in this manner, but they did. The sport even earned an entry in Merriam-Webster.com, which defines it as “a pastime especially formerly in the South and Southwest in which a person on horseback rides rapidly past a goose hanging with its neck down and greased and tries to pull off its head.” The blood sport was most popular from the 17th to the 19th centuries and may date back to 12th-century Spain. Gander pulling may also be the source of the idiom “the goose hangs high,” meaning that “things are or will be pleasant, desirable, or merry.”

Writer Louis B. Wright describes gander pulling among other bygone forms of entertainment in his book Everyday Life in Colonial America: “[Pastimes included] running after a greased pig or ‘gander pulling,’ in which men rode by and tried to pull off the well-greased head of a goose suspended from a bar. When a rider lost his balance and tumbled to the ground, the crowd held their sides with laughter. Our ancestors were not overly refined and they did not worry about such things as pain to the goose or danger to the rider.”

In her book The New Nation: American Popular Culture Through History, Pennsylvania State University professor Anita Vickers notes that sometimes a hare was substituted for the goose, that the audience often doused failed contestants with buckets of water, and that gander pulling contests often lasted for hours—resulting in drenched competitors and a thoroughly tortured goose. Vickers also writes:

Gander pulling was one of the oldest of American sports, brought to New Amsterdam by the Dutch. As with other cruel and bloody sports, gander pulling spread to other parts of the colonies and remained popular in the United States and its territories until the mid-nineteenth century … The prize in a gander pulling contest was trivial. Sometimes the purse consisted of contributions by the audience, approximately 25 cents a head. . . . Other times the winner was treated to rounds of drinks at the local tavern. Frequently, the prize was the bird itself. The true draw was the betting that ensued, sometimes for money but more often than not for liquor.

The anthology We Are What We Celebrate: Understanding Holidays and Rituals, published by New York University Press, identifies gander pulling as a tradition on both Easter Monday and Shrove Tuesday. Another source similarly claims that, in Virginia, gander pulling tournaments often took place on the Monday following Easter. The Chicago Tribune states, in contrast, that in Illinois gander pulling was a yuletide tradition. And the Encyclopedia of North Carolina describes gander pulling as a popular “Easter time” tradition in that state, noting that most contestants fortified themselves for the undertaking with copious amounts of homemade corn liquor.

Women did not compete but found entertainment in the sport as well, according to the Encyclopedia of North Carolina: “The event offered a holiday outing for nearly everyone. Female spectators—who seem to have enjoyed gander pulling as much as men—cheered the crude ‘knights’ on their sturdy mounts and encouraged them to ‘seize the day’ (or gander). Each competitor hoped he would tear the prize from the body and nobly present a battered, bloody trophy to the lady of his choice.” Much has been written about the supposed death of romance, but at least men today do not present the objects of their affection with blood-soaked severed goose heads.

For a contemporary account of a gander pull, which goes into lengthy and grotesque detail, read the chapter “A Gander Pull in Arkansas,” from In the Louisiana Lowlands, a book published in 1900. The author mentions an occasion when it took “twenty-eight pulls on the picked and greased head of a gander before his obdurate head was induced to leave his body.” The author then muses, tongue-in-cheek, “Who could say that the gander might also not enjoy the tournament and imagine himself the highly honored object for which renowned knights were contending, and by skillfully dodging some and resigning his head to more favored ones he could choose the knight upon whose banner victory should perch.”

Our ancestors inhabited a more brutal world, where violent treatment of human beings was routine and mistreatment of animals hardly given a thought. Our forebears were also often bored out of their minds. It is easy to forget just how limited entertainment options were in the past. In an era before access to electricity, recorded music, movies, television, the internet, video games, or smartphones, tedious and mind-numbing manual labor might have kept people occupied, but it could not fulfill their longing for amusement and novelty. The pervasive and extreme boredom that often defined premodern life, combined with the ubiquity of frivolous cruelty at the time, may explain pastimes such as gander pulling.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 4/6/2023.

Discontent fueled the 2025 New York City mayoral election and Zohran Mamdani’s victory. A common theme echoed across the five boroughs: New York is a hard place to live. “We are overwhelmed by housing costs,” said Santiago, a 69-year-old retiree, outside a Mamdani rally. Those opposed to Mamdani had their own complaints. María Moreno, a first-time voter from the Bronx who supported Andrew Cuomo, lamented, “Now everything’s dirty, and our neighborhood does not feel safe.”

Today’s voters have legitimate grievances. The city’s housing costs, quality-of-life issues, and perceptions of disorder weigh heavily on residents’ minds. But it’s important to keep things in perspective. Different voters may romanticize different eras, but many seem to share a sense that if they could travel back far enough in time, they’d find a New York that was once clean, safe, and affordable. When Americans were polled in 2023, almost 20 percent said that it was easier to “have a thriving and fulfilling life” hundreds of years ago. Across the country, as one writer put it, people are engaged in an “endless debate around whether the preindustrial past was clearly better than what we have now.” In fact, Mamdani’s politics are grounded in an ideology that first arose from the frustrations of the early industrial era.

If Americans could go back in time to preindustrial New York City, however, they’d likely be horrified and possibly traumatized. Despite today’s real challenges, most New Yorkers would not trade places with their predecessors.

Long before the rise of factories and industry, New York City was a bustling port, founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in order to trade furs in the early seventeenth century. As early as 1650, local authorities enacted an ordinance against animals roaming the streets to protect local infrastructure—but to no avail. Then, in 1657, according to the Dutch scholar Jaap Harskamp:

New Amsterdam’s council attempted to ban the common practice of throwing rubbish, ashes, oyster-shells or dead animals in the street and leave the filth there to be consumed by droves of pigs on the loose. When the English took over the colony from the Dutch, pigs and goats stayed put. . . . Pollution persisted. The streets of Manhattan were a stinking mass. Inhabitants hurled carcasses and the contents of loaded chamber pots into the street and rivers. Runoff from tanneries where skins were turned into leather flowed into the waters that supplied the shallow wells. The (salty) natural springs and ponds in the region became contaminated with animal and human waste. For some considerable time, access to clean water remained an urgent problem for the city. . . . The penetrating smell of decomposing flesh was everywhere.

Into the early twentieth century, urban living in the United States felt surprisingly rural and agrarian, with an omnipresent reek to match. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, pigs roamed freely through New York City streets, acting as scavengers, and nearly every household maintained a vegetable garden, often fertilized with animal manure.

Indoor air quality was no better. A drawing from Mary L. Booth’s History of the City of New York depicts a seventeenth century New Amsterdam home with smoke from the fireplace swirling through the room. Indoor air pollution remains a serious problem today in the poorest parts of the world, as smoke from hearths can cause cancer and acute respiratory infections that often prove deadly in children. One preindustrial writer railed against the “pernicious smoke [from fireplaces] superinducing a sooty Crust or furr upon all that it lights, spoyling the moveables, tarnishing the Plate, Gildings and Furniture, and Corroding the very Iron-bars and hardest stone with those piercing and acrimonious Spirits which accompany its Sulphur.”

That said, before industrialization, though inescapable filth coated the interiors of homes, the average person owned few possessions for the corrosive hearth smoke and soot to ruin. By modern standards, New Yorkers—like most preindustrial people—were impoverished and lacked even the most basic amenities. According to historian Judith Flanders, in the mid-eighteenth century, “fewer than two households in ten in some counties of New York possessed a fork.” Many were desperately poor even by the standards of the day and could not afford housing. One 1788 account lamented how in New York City, “vagrants multiply on our Hands to an amazing Degree.” Charity records suggest that the “outdoor poor” far outnumbered those in almshouses.

Water quality was infamously awful. In seventeenth-century New Amsterdam, as Benjamin Bullivant observed, “[There are] many publique wells enclosed & Covered in ye Streetes . . . [which are] Nasty & unregarded.” A century later, New York’s water remained as foul as Bullivant had described. Visiting in 1748, the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm noted that the city’s well water was so filthy that horses from out of town refused to drink it. In 1798, the Commercial Advertiser condemned Manhattan’s main well as “a shocking hole, where all impure things center together and engender the worst of unwholesome productions; foul with excrement, frogspawn, and reptiles, that delicate pump system is supplied. The water has grown worse manifestly within a few years. It is time to look out [for] some other supply, and discontinue the use of a water growing less and less wholesome every day. . . . It is so bad . . . as to be very sickly and nauseating; and the larger the city grows the worse this evil will be.”

In 1831, a letter in the New York Evening Journal described the state of the water supply:

I have no doubt that one cause of the numerous stomach affections so common in this city is the impure, I may say poisonous nature of the pernicious Manhattan water which thousands of us daily and constantly use. It is true the unpalatableness of this abominable fluid prevents almost every person from using it as a beverage at the table, but you will know that all the cooking of a very large portion of the community is done through the agency of this common nuisance. Our tea and coffee are made of it, our bread is mixed with it, and our meat and vegetables are boiled in it. Our linen happily escapes the contamination of its touch, “for no two things hold more antipathy” than soap and this vile water.

In 1832, New York experienced a devastating outbreak of cholera, a bacterial disease that typically spread through contaminated water and killed with remarkable speed. A person could wake up feeling well and be dead by nightfall, struck down with agonizing cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea. The epidemic killed about 3,500 New Yorkers.

The initial actions taken to protect city water supplies were often private in nature. In fact, throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, private businesses generally supplied urban water infrastructure. Despite such efforts, drinking water remained generally unsafe, even after industrialization, until the chlorination of urban water supplies became widespread.

The pervasive grime took a visible toll on New Yorkers. Between drinking tainted water, eating contaminated food, inhaling smoke-filled air, and living with poor hygiene, the average resident sported visibly rotten teeth. One letter from 1781 described an acquaintance: “Her teeth are beginning to decay, which is the case with most New York girls, after eighteen.”

The dental practices of the time were often as horrifying as the effects of neglect. The medieval method of using arsenic to kill gum tissue, providing pain relief by destroying nerve endings, remained common until the introduction of Novocain in the twentieth century. As late as 1879, the New York Times ran a story with the headline “Fatal Poison in a Tooth; What Caused the Horrible Death of Mr. Gardiner. A Man’s Head Nearly Severed from His Body by Decay Caused by Arsenic Which Had Been Placed in One of His Teeth to Deaden an Aching Nerve—an Extraordinary Case.” The story detailed the gruesome demise of a man in Brooklyn, George Arthur Gardiner, who died “in great agony, after two weeks of indescribable suffering.”

Preindustrial New York City wasn’t uniquely miserable for its time. Life was harsh everywhere, and cities around the world contended with the same foul smells, filth, poor sanitation, and grinding poverty. Rural villages were no better. Peasant families often brought their livestock indoors at night and slept huddled together for warmth. In many cases, rural peasants were even poorer than their urban counterparts and owned fewer possessions. Farm laborers frequently suffered injuries and aged prematurely from backbreaking work, while fertilizing cesspits spread disease and filled the air with an inescapable stench.

Though they may have been slightly better off than their rural counterparts, the struggles of early New Yorkers are worth remembering. However daunting the problems of today may seem, a proper historical perspective can remind us of how far we’ve come.

This article was originally published in City Journal on 1/13/2026.

Many people assume that before the days of factory farming, livestock lived in peace and happiness—with pristine, spacious surroundings, fresh grass to consume and kind treatment from good-natured family farmers, at least until the moment of slaughter. Sadly, the reality of how farm animals lived in the preindustrial and early industrial age was often far removed from this image. Consider the plight of the unfortunate creatures that provided our ancestors with beef and milk.

First, beef. In England, it was once illegal to sell “unbaited” beef. Between 1661 and 1687, over 40 cases of selling unbaited beef were prosecuted, notes British historian Emily Cockayne. For example, in 1662, an unfortunate fellow named Thomas Stevenson “was fined for selling unbaited bull meat.” To the people of that era, the idea of selling unbaited beef was outrageous. After all, baiting was standard and expected.

What differentiated baited beef from unbaited beef? The former came from an animal that spent its last moments alive being tortured. An excited crowd would gather to witness the “baiting,” or the releasing of dogs to attack the bull and induce a state of panic. The dogs were trained to bite the bulls’ necks and faces, especially the mouth and nose. The bull was typically trapped in a small, enclosed space or chained to an iron stake to prevent escape. Special dogs, from which the modern bulldog and pit bull derive their names, were bred for the task: to keep their jaws clenched into the flesh of a bull even as the bull ripped out the attacking canine’s entrails.

After a dog latched onto a bull with its teeth, the dog breeders would sometimes hack off the dog’s feet to test the canine’s toughness. “During a bull-baiting contest, the feet of the bulldog were chopped off to show gameness. This was done for the benefit of the spectators, and to put a higher value on the price of the pups of this dog. A bulldog that would quit after its feet were chopped was disposed of and not used for breeding.” In other words, the dogs were bred to keep biting the bulls even while being mutilated themselves. One bullbaiting witness in the 19th century, when the practice was dying out, wrote, “It was a young bull and had little notion of tossing the dogs, which tore the ears and skin of his face in shreds and his mournful cries were awful.”

What was the point of tormenting bulls and dogs in this manner, let alone legally requiring that bulls spend their last moments of life this way before becoming sellable beef? While the blood sport provided entertainment, baiting was also thought to produce higher-quality meat. Dying in battle meant that the bulls’ muscles worked hard until the final moment. This was thought to tenderize the meat and, inexplicably, to improve the beef’s nutritional quality. Today, in contrast, people consider the highest-quality beef to be that of certain Japanese cattle that live in a stress-free environment with daily massages to work out muscle tension and even soothing classical music. And most farmers now go to great lengths to ensure cattle’s final moments are calm, using a carefully designed system.

Next, consider dairy cows. Before the development of railways, it was difficult to transport milk from the countryside into cities without it spoiling first. As a result, many dairy cows were kept inside cities, decreasing milk transport times but often resulting in appalling conditions for the animals. Cockayne wrote this of London’s urban cows: “With a small and diminishing number of grazing opportunities and little space to store fodder, beasts were left to wallow in their own excrement, tied in dark hovels, where they fed on brewers’ waste and rank hay. Their milk was known as ‘blue milk,’ and was only good for cooking.” The already poor quality of the unhappy creatures’ milk was further diminished when the substance was taken into the marketplace through the city’s squalid streets. Consider the following description of milk in London from a work published in 1771:

The produce of faded cabbage leaves and sour draff, lowered with hot water, frothed with bruised snails, carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, spittle, snot, and tobacco-quids from foot-passengers, overflowings from mud-carts, spatterings from coach-wheels, dirt and trash chucked into it by roguish boys for the joke’s sake, the spewing of infants who have slabbered in the tin measure, which is thrown back in that condition among the milk, for the benefit of the next customer; and, finally, the vermin that drops from the rags of the nasty drab that vends this precious mixture.

From baited beef to blue milk, the harsh realities of preindustrial farming are at odds with the popular romanticized notion of what farming was like in the past. Of course, none of this is to excuse any mistreatment of animals today, but it can hopefully put debates about current farming practices in a proper perspective.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 10/17/2024.

“Her heart rate is decelerating with each contraction,” explained the doctor to my husband and me, a grave expression on her face, “and we just saw a major deceleration.” We were rushed into the surgery room for an emergency cesarean section, and just minutes later, we met our first child.

She was alive, beautiful, and screaming her lungs out.

After the C-section, we learned the reason for the heartrate decelerations: her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, like a noose, four times. We were told the hospital’s record was five. The technical term for her condition was “quadruple nuchal cord.” Were it not for the emergency C-section, she almost certainly would have asphyxiated during delivery and been stillborn.

The specifics of my daughter’s situation may have been unusual, but her survival is an example of a broader trend. Thanks to medical advances, the global rate of stillbirth per 1,000 births has fallen from 23 in the year 2000 to 14 in 2023, with decreases seen in all regions of the world. In my daughter’s case, for example, those advances included external monitoring of the fetal heart rate during labor and a cesarean delivery.

Not only has there been progress in reducing stillbirths, but more and more children survive to see their first birthday. The global infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births fell from 64 in 1990 to 27 in 2023, according the World Bank.

Access to stillbirth-preventing technology, as well as improvements in nutrition and sanitation that decrease infant mortality, are made easier by the spread of economic development around the world. The greatest improvements in infant health have taken place in developing countries as poverty declines and standards of living rise.

To understand just how important prosperity is, consider the difference between falling stillbirth rates, which depend on the latest and thus very expensive technology, and falling infant death rates, which are connected to overall economic improvements in developing countries.

Poor countries suffer far more stillbirths than rich countries, both in absolute terms and adjusted for population, although the rate is decreasing in both. Using data spanning 1990 to 2010, researchers have estimated that more than 40 percent of global stillbirths occur in sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region. In fact, 98 percent of the world’s stillbirths occur in low-income and middle-income countries. Less than 2 percent occur in developed regions.

In contrast, when it comes to infant mortality rates, sub-Saharan Africa and other poor areas of the world have seen faster progress than rich countries. Like the stillbirth rate, the infant mortality rate remains far higher in poor countries than in rich ones. In 2023, it was more than 44 per 1,000 live births in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, compared with less than six in the wealthy United States.

However, as extreme poverty becomes more rare, living standards rise, and small changes in sanitation and nutrition exert a dramatic effect on infant health. Sub-Saharan Africa has more than halved its infant mortality rate since 1990. In East Asia, which saw a rapid decline in poverty following economic liberalization, infant mortality fell by a staggering 70 percent.

Overall, children’s odds of survival have improved, but much work remains to be done. Even in wealthy countries like the United States, there are still parents who lose their children to stillbirth or in the first year of life.

“After my daughter died from her knotted cord wrapped around her neck three times, I heard so many stories of other friends of friends where something similar had happened,” one woman told the New York Times. “I know my friends were trying to offer support, but hearing of so many other people who had suffered as I did was not a comfort. It was a further sorrow.”

If hearing of other stillbirths only compounded her pain, it might be of some small comfort to her to know that fewer and fewer people suffer the loss of a child each year. As better monitoring devices and other technologies spread to more medical facilities, and as surgical techniques improve, birth continues to become a safer endeavor for mothers and children. As prosperity spreads throughout the world, more children live to see their first birthday and beyond.

Today, my daughter is a healthy, happy, cuddly three-month-old infant. I am forever grateful for the skilled physicians who saved my daughter’s life using modern technology. No mother, anywhere in the world, should ever have to lose a child — and thanks to the global decline of poverty and spread of medical technology, fewer do.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 4 /4/2019.

Pessimism about potentially life-enhancing technologies is not new. The Twitter account Pessimist’s Archive (a favorite of the internet guru Marc Andreessen) chronicles the unending stream of pessimism with old newspaper excerpts.

Pessimistic reactions range from merely doubtful (such as this response to the idea of gas lighting in 1809, or this one to the concept of anesthesia in 1839) to outright alarmist (such as this 1999 warning that e-commerce “threatens to destroy more than it could ever create”).

In some cases, the pessimists insist that an older technology is superior to a new one. Some, for example, claimed that an abacus is superior to a computer and a pocket calculator, while others claimed that horses are longer-lasting than the dangerous “automobile terror.”

Others argue that new technology is damaging existing businesses and customs. One particularly emotional 1918 article described how automobiles are destroying the livery stable business and, together with “the movie show,” changing dating forever by ending the tradition of romantic carriage rides.

Another frequent complaint is that new technology exacerbates inequality, because the wealthy tend to adopt new technologies first. One article from 1914, for example, laments that “wireless telephones” will only ever “be a boon to privileged persons.” The article was referring to the early wireless radiotelephones being developed at that time, which were not lightweight handheld devices. Today, of course, wireless phones can fit in your pocket, have many more capabilities, and are ubiquitous. Eventually, the free market tends to drive down the cost of technologies, making them accessible to more people.

Perhaps what is most remarkable about pessimistic responses to new technology is how often the pessimists successfully use the power of the state to try to halt technological progress.

In the 1930s, pessimists feared that radios were a threat to democracy and worried that the devices were ruining childhood. By 1936, the pessimists had succeeded at banning radios in cars in a number of U.S. cities, arguing that they were distracting and might prevent drivers from hearing fire engine sirens.

Sadly, techno-pessimists have managed to enact bans or partial bans on a great variety of technologies. These include “horseless carriages” (cars), “automatic lifts” (elevators), and bicycles (which are “the most dangerous thing to life and property ever invented” according to an 1881 New York Times article). The list also includes, more recently, video games, headphones, and hover-boards.

As new breakthroughs continue to occur practically every day, looking back at how people decried and fought against progress in the past helps put current technological and scientific debates in perspective.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 2/5/2016.

My 1-year-old daughter recently got sick. She cried nonstop, she ran a fever, and her body broke out in a fiery red, spotty, measleslike rash. But it wasn’t measles. (Recent outbreaks notwithstanding, that disease is blessedly rare in the U.S., thanks to widespread vaccination.)

Alarmed by the spreading rash and worsening symptoms, I rushed my screaming toddler to an emergency room, where a doctor calmly diagnosed her with scarlet fever.

I thought I had misheard. Scarlet fever sounds like something from a different century.

Many people today are only vaguely familiar with the term from classic literature. Scarlet fever is prominently featured in the plots of many old books, such as Frankenstein, Little Women, The Velveteen Rabbit, and Little House on the Prairie. The disease is described in Anna Karenina as an inevitable part of life. Scarlet fever’s prominence in fiction makes sense, given that many writers once had real-life experience with the illness. Little Women author Louisa May Alcott’s sister died from it at age 22.

Yet scarlet fever, a scourge that has caused millions of deaths throughout history and that was once described as “agonizing” and “diabolical,” is now a mild illness. This formerly feared disease once sent countless children into isolation from their loved ones at so-called fever hospitals, where the young patients often contracted additional illnesses and died, separated from their families. Yet today a scarlet fever diagnosis is no cause for alarm. Modern medicine played an important part in that change, but there is more to the story.

Many lethal epidemics of scarlet fever occurred throughout Europe and North America during the 17th and 18th centuries, and such deaths were numerous in the 19th century. In fact, from 1840 through 1883, scarlet fever was among the most common causes of death for children in the United States, with case fatality rates ranging from 15 percent to 30 percent.

Making matters worse, scarlet fever sometimes occurred in combination with other potentially deadly ailments, further lowering the chances of survival. As the historian Judith Flanders put it, “Before the age of five, 35 out of every 45 Victorian children had experienced either smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, typhus or enteric fever—or some combination of those illnesses—and many of them did not survive.”

In 1865, there were around 700 scarlet fever deaths per 100,000 1-year-old children in England and Wales. Despite a decline in the scarlet fever death rate, at the beginning of the 20th century the disease still caused around 350 deaths per 100,000 people of all ages.

Scarlet fever is caused by a toxin produced by Streptococcus pyogenes, the same bacteria behind the far more common ailment strep throat. Even before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, scarlet fever cases and deaths were falling. That was likely thanks to improvements in the population’s overall health, partly due to cleaner water and better sanitation. Research suggests that better maternal nutrition also greatly increased children’s resilience against the disease. Once penicillin was discovered, doctors could employ it to fight off most bad bacteria.

Scarlet fever spread easily among the poor but killed without regard to wealth or status, even slaying royalty, including queens of Denmark and Norway and a young Romanian princess. The Romantic composer Johann Strauss I lost his battle with scarlet fever in 1849 at age 45. It could kill at any age but was particularly deadly to children. The philosopher René Descartes’ daughter Francine lost her life to scarlet fever in 1640 at age 5. Scarlet fever killed biologist Charles Darwin’s 10-year-old daughter in 1851 and his last child, an 18-month-old son, in 1858. Scarlet fever also claimed the life of the 3-year-old grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller Sr. in 1901.

Too often, those who survived untreated scarlet fever developed rheumatic fever a few weeks later. Triggered by an immune system overreaction to scarlet fever, rheumatic fever can permanently damage essential bodily organs such as the heart and brain. Potential long-term complications ranged from an irregular heartbeat to neurological issues to heart failure. Today, thanks to antibiotics, rheumatic fever is rare.

Due to antibiotics, already-declining deaths from scarlet fever became virtually unknown. Cases of scarlet fever also became few and far between by the year 1950. The Harvard Medical School website notes the reason why scarlet fever has become so rare “remains a mystery, especially because there has been no decrease in the number of cases of strep throat or strep skin infections.” Recall that the same bacteria causes all those ailments.

Sadly, cases of the disease are now rising again, although they remain far rarer than in the 19th century. Many areas of Asia began to see an increase in scarlet fever around 2009. Starting around 2014 and especially since 2022, there has been an uptick in cases in children in Europe and, more recently, in the United States. Scientists suspect that new mutations or variants in the bacteria may fuel the return of scarlet fever as a serious problem. Thankfully, the mortality rate for scarlet fever is now less than 1 percent, as almost all cases receive antibiotic treatment.

My household’s tiny scarlet fever patient has been drinking each dose of the strawberry-flavored antibiotic that she was prescribed and is on the road to recovery. I am grateful to live in an era of modern medicine and good general health, where diseases with scary, old-timey names are no longer so frightening. If only the children of the past were so fortunate.

This article was published in the July 2025 issue of Reason.

Many hoped the Bolshevik Revolution one hundred years ago would usher in a new era of gender and class equality. Following the revolution, Soviet Russia declared “International Women’s Day” an official holiday, and “Marxist feminists” romanticize communism to this day. Women of the Gulag, both a remarkable book and a documentary film, highlights the disparity between the Soviet Union’s alleged gender equality and the reality of life for women under communism.

There is a popular claim that Soviet women “enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time,” so it is worth noting some of the ways that communism tyrannized women in particular. Those who claim the Soviet Union liberated women would do well to learn the stories of the women of the Gulag.

The Gulag forced labor camp system, created under Lenin and massively expanded under Stalin, was only one of many horrors in the Soviet Union. At least five million prisoners toiled in the camps at any given time during the system’s peak from 1936 to 1953, mining radioactive material, hauling logs barefoot in winter, or performing other forms of slave labor. The camps were allegedly for “class enemies” (anyone insufficiently poor) and traitors.

“[S]ome 18 million people passed through this massive system,” with millions more compelled to migrate to special settlements with similar conditions, according to Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History. It is estimated that harsh conditions and summary executions killed off at least 10 percent of the Gulag’s total prisoner population each year. Although only between 10 and 15 percent of Gulag inmates were women, their imprisonment had some uniquely horrible features.

First, they were almost all arrested for the alleged crimes of their husbands or fathers. Communist officials saw women as just another means of punishing men, rather than as individuals with distinct identities. One of the few ways for a woman to avoid arrest alongside her husband was, perversely, to accuse him of treason before anyone else did. Signed by the head of the NKVD on August 14, 1937, Operational Order of the Secret Police No. 00486, “About the Repression of Wives of Traitors of the Motherland and the Placement of Their Children,” stated:

Women married to husbands at the time of their arrest are to be arrested with the exception of … wives who provide information that leads to their husband’s arrest… The wives of traitors are to be imprisoned… no less than five to eight years. Children… are to be placed in orphanages of the ministry of health in other locations.

That brings us to the second horror unique to women’s persecution. Upon a mother’s arrest, the Soviet system declared her children orphans and sent them as far away as possible. After regaining freedom a woman would often never learn of their fate. In the state-run orphanages, children of traitors and class enemies faced social stigma. They were taught to feel shame and loathing for their parents.

The book describes how the secret police kidnapped Maria Ignatkina’s children and “before their horrified eyes… beat her to the ground.” Her husband was tortured into giving a false confession and killed. Maria spent eight years in a Gulag for the crime of being married to him. She attempted suicide but failed. Fortunately, her children were rescued from the orphanage by an aunt. Maria was eventually able to reunite with them and meet her grandchildren—a rare happy ending.

Finally, in addition to all the other horrors of the Gulag – forced labor, hunger, beatings, harsh cold, and unsanitary conditions — women prisoners were also subject to the experience of institutionalized sexual violence. A woman named Elena gave an unsettling account of how on a ship transporting prisoners to the Gulag, women were raped by multiple men, beaten and doused with cold water in an organized process called a “Kolyma streetcar,” and the bodies of the women who did not survive were thrown overboard. Other similar accounts corroborate her story.

Of course, the Gulag system was not the only way the Soviet Union harmed women. Its disastrous economic policies led to far deeper and more widespread poverty and scarcity than under capitalism (which has helped bring global poverty to an all-time low), affecting women and other vulnerable members of society the most. Still, the Gulag system serves as a stark example of how, despite a proclaimed commitment to gender equality, the Soviet Union accomplished the exact opposite of “liberation” for women.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 12/15/2017.

The year was 1924, the 16-year-old son of the president of the United States lay dying, and a bacterial infection in a blister on the third toe of his right foot was to blame. It developed earlier in the week, while he was out playing tennis on the White House lawn with his brother. Many of the best doctors of the day were consulted, multiple diagnostic tests were run, and he was admitted to one of the top hospitals in the country. Despite all that, he died within a week of infection. Sadly, the case of Calvin Coolidge’s son was not unusual. Deaths from sepsis following the infection of a minor cut or blister were extremely common at the time and no amount of wealth or power could save a patient.

Just four years later, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin—the world’s first antibiotic. That and other medical breakthroughs have helped raise global average life expectancy to an all-time high. Today, antibiotics are readily available for a few dollars at your local drugstore and around the world, and death from sepsis is much rarer than it once was. Access to antibiotics is just one of many ways in which an average person today is better off than the rich and powerful were a century ago.

Happy Valentine’s Day! This romantic day’s namesake was a priest who was said to have performed secret marriages in defiance of a Roman emperor. Much ink has been spilled on the declining rate of marriage and which people are more or less likely to marry. Statistics showing a long-term decrease in marriage are concerning for many reasons: Fewer marriages may mean fewer people finding love, fewer children being born, and perhaps a lonelier and more fragmented society. Amid this decline in marriage it might be tempting to imagine that modern society is hopeless, while our ancestors had it made when it came to romance. Perhaps in the villages of yore, life was simpler, love and marriage came easily, and most of our ancestors lived happily ever after in contented, wedded bliss.

But the truth is that people in the preindustrial past faced few possibilities when it came to marriage. The number of potential partners in one’s tiny village was low, and the few available choices might all be one’s cousins, increasing the risk of birth defects in any resulting children. Peasants “married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects were often incomprehensible to men living only a few miles away,” according to the historian William Manchester. Travel was rarer, and communities were more secluded than a modern person could easily imagine. By the 18th century, little had changed: “Most villagers married people from within 10 miles of home,” as the historian Kirstin Olsen noted.

The tiny pool of possible marriage partners often produced matches that might raise eyebrows today, such as consanguineous pairings (including plenty of first cousins) and couples with huge age gaps. Even in the 18th century, in England, grooms could legally be as young as 14 and brides as young as 12, although that was rare in practice, thankfully.

Given the highly limited pool of marriage partner choices, perhaps it is unsurprising that many people seemingly settled for spouses ill-suited to them and that “much of the satirical literature of the 18th century,” in Olsen’s words, “lampooned marriage as a hell or prison sentence for one or both partners. The poem Wedlock by the Englishwoman Mehetabel “Hetty” Wright (1697–1750), herself pressured into a loveless marriage with a plumber, paints a typical picture: “Thou source of discord, pain and care, / Thou sure forerunner of despair, / Thou scorpion with a double face, / Thou lawful plague of human race, / Thou bane of freedom, ease and mirth, / Thou serpent which the angels fly, / Thou monster whom the beasts defy” . . . you get the idea.

Wives like Hetty weren’t the only miserable ones. Men were also often unhappy in marriage. An illustration from the mid-1600s depicts an alleged Dutch invention to help unhappy husbands: a windmill to transform ugly wives into beautiful ones. An accompanying description claims that the mill can transform “all sorts of women, as the old, decreped, [sic] wrinkled, blear-ey’d, long-nosed, blind, lame, scolds, jealous, angry, poor, drunkerds, [sic] whores, sluts; or all others whatsoever. They shall come out of [the] mill, young, active, pleasant, handsome, wise, loving, vertuous [sic] and rich.”

Widespread antipathy towards one’s spouse also found expression in distasteful jokes such as the following from The Spirit of English Wit: to “a gentleman in the country, whose wife had the misfortune to hang herself on an apple-tree, a neighbour came in, and begged he would give him a cyon [scion] of that tree, that he might graft it upon one in his own orchard; ‘for who knows,’ said he, ‘but it may bear the same fruit?’”

Many unhappy marriages turned abusive. Courts tolerated physical abuse in most cases, and men often had the legal authority to commit their wives to insane asylums. Domestic violence was celebrated in songs such as the upbeat wife-beater’s anthem The Cooper of Fife, which I have written about previously. An abused woman’s best hope was often not legal recourse but the possibility that a male relative, neighbor, or sympathetic passerby might notice her plight and act on her behalf. Olsen notes that sometimes “neighbors intervened when men beat their wives … as a saddler did in 1703, telling the abusive husband, ‘you shall not beat your wife.’”

Women, for their part, were also known to engage in criminal cruelty toward their husbands, such as by lethally poisoning them. Sometimes these murders were committed in retaliation for domestic abuse. Aqua Tofana was a poison discovered in 17th-century Sicily that was notoriously sold through much of Italy by women to other women seeking to discreetly end their husbands’ lives. Hundreds of victims (mainly men murdered by their wives) are estimated to have perished from the colorless, odorless poison, the precise ingredients of which are today unknown. The poison has been called the “bottled revenge of the 17th-century wife.”

With so many difficulties accompanying marriage in the premodern age, it may seem a wonder that anyone married. But remaining single in the preindustrial world brought its own challenges. At the time, marriage was often the only way that women could avoid the fate of becoming unpaid live-in housekeepers to a relative. “Even before she had reached her teens, a girl knew that unless she married before she was twenty-one, society would consider her useless, fit only for the nunnery, or, in England, the spinning wheel (a ‘spinster’),” as Manchester relates.

Marriages were not only frequently unhappy but often short, ending with the untimely death of the husband or wife. In the 17th century, A History of Old Age reminds us that “disease, war, and accident all played a role in ensuring that most marriages ended with the early death of a spouse. Remarriage and blended families were much more common then, despite popular ideas to the contrary today.”

Perhaps our ancestors didn’t have it so good after all. If preindustrial marriage was, to borrow Hetty’s phrase, a “sure forerunner of despair,” today, the data suggest marriage usually makes people happy. Modern-day romance has its challenges, to be sure, but the dating pool is at least bigger than a remote village where the only options are your cousin or someone 15 years older than you. While current dysfunctional dating dynamics are worth examining, keeping a historical perspective reminds us that it could be so much worse.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 2/14/2025.

Refreshingly pragmatic and nonpartisan, The Case for Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future (Polaris Books, 2023) by Robert Zubrin offers a sweeping history of energy technology advances. It also provides a taxonomy of the enemies of nuclear power, including Malthusians and “degrowth” advocates who would, ironically, limit the world’s only scalable clean energy technology in the name of protecting the environment. The book launches a compelling and detailed defense of one of humanity’s most promising yet misunderstood sources of energy. Policy makers across the political spectrum would be wise to heed Zubrin’s call to reform and liberalize what he calls the “regulatory whipsawing and strangulation of the nuclear industry.”

Zubrin pulls no punches, refusing to play games of political tribalism (i.e., opining that climate change “has become politicized to the point where opposing parties have chosen to either deny it or grossly exaggerate it”). While he presents nuclear energy’s potential to lower emissions as a huge positive, he also notes, “The existential threat facing humanity is not climate change. It is the ideologies of despair.”

Specifically, when people see the world as a zero-sum battle over scarce energy and limited resources, such desperation can curtail freedoms and even produce unthinkable atrocities. As Zubrin writes, “If the belief persists that there is only so much to go around, then the haves and the want-to-haves are going to have to duke it out, the only question being when.” He frames producing ample energy as not only an economic but also a moral imperative.

Although the book’s main point may be to promote nuclear power as a solution to some of society’s problems, Zubrin’s most gripping insight lies not in the specifics of its case for nuclear energy but in its broader dual thesis about the relationship between energy abundance (regardless of the energy’s source) and freedom. He writes that energy technology “is the foundation for freedom.” He posits both that free societies are better able to produce energy and that access to more energy liberates mankind.

Zubrin tells of how, as civilization has become increasingly energy-intensive, our employment of energy has liberated humanity—particularly women—from grinding labor. “Powered mills had the same significance for women of the Twelfth Century as washing machines did for those of the Twentieth,” Zubrin claims. He quotes the ancient Greek poet Antipater of Thessalonica, who praised the water wheel’s reduction of women’s work hours with these words:

Hold back your hand from the mills, you grinding girls. Even if the cockcrow heralds the dawn, sleep on. For Demeter [the goddess of harvest and agriculture] has imposed the labors of your hands on the [water] nymphs, who leaping down upon the topmost part of the wheel, rotate its axle; with encircling cogs, it turns the hollow weight of the Nisyrian millstones. If we learn to feast toil-free on the fruits of the earth, we taste again the golden age.

The water wheel saving women from waking at sunrise for the mind-numbing task of grinding grain to make bread is just one more example of how technological advances throughout history have arguably benefited women even more than men.

Harnessing energy and mechanizing labor has unshackled countless individuals from exhausting toil—a liberating process that is ongoing in many countries as more households gain access to electricity and labor-saving devices such as laundry machines. Given how many tasks now delegated to electric machines traditionally fell to women, perhaps it is unsurprising that many prominent advocates of an energy-abundant future fueled by nuclear power are women, or as Zubrin alliteratively puts it, a “fine friendly force of fierce feminine fission freedom fighters.”

Of course, as Zubrin would likely agree, energy access alone does not create freedom, even if it may help to counter the scarcity mindset that is so often freedom’s enemy. One need only look to the Gulf petrostates featuring both massive oil fields and authoritarian political systems to find proof that energy abundance is insufficient to spread liberalism or gender equality.

Oil-rich Saudi Arabia did not even issue driver’s licenses to its female citizens until five years ago. It is clear that freedom leads to energy abundance. It is more doubtful that energy abundance necessarily leads to freedom broadly understood—although it at least defuses scarcity-based rationales for limiting human liberty. (Sadly, authoritarians have invented many other justifications for restricting freedom.)

While energy abundance and freedom may be somewhat mutually reinforcing, if humanity were to pick only one, the choice seems clear: institutions and policies of freedom. History shows that free people in lands devoid of natural resources can innovate their way to high living standards. (As Zubrin points out, “It is human ingenuity that turns natural raw materials into resources.”)

Consider Hong Kong’s whirlwind free market transformation from a barren island into a gleaming metropolis in the 1950s and the 1960s. Freedom is the wellspring of prosperity and innovation, and the energy needed to power modernity. As Zubrin notes, when it comes to environmental challenges, once again, “Freedom is not the problem. Freedom is the solution. Prosperity is not the problem. Prosperity is the solution.”

Zubrin also writes that “human progress must and will inevitably entail continued exponential growth of human power generation.” Whether humanity generates that power with nuclear reactors or finds an even better solution, the relationship between many aspects of freedom and energy is worth pondering.

Zubrin’s book shows the urgency of unleashing energy abundance. He argues convincingly that a future of bountiful energy could help preserve the liberty that scarcity often imperils. Embracing freedom is the surest way to power the future.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 4/26/2023.

Christmas is often a time for nostalgia. We look back on our own childhood holidays. Songs and traditions from the past dominate the culture.

Nostalgia is not without its purposes. But it can also be misleading. Take those who view the material circumstances of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” as superior to our own.

Claims that an American today earning the minimum wage is worse off than the working poor of the 19th century have been popular since at least 2021. A recent post with thousands of likes reads:

Time for your annual reminder that, according to A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit makes 15 shillings a week. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $530.27/wk, $27,574/yr, or $13.50/ hr. Most Americans on minimum wage earn less than a Dickensian allegory for destitution.

This is humbug.

Consider how harsh living conditions were for a Victorian earning 15 shillings a week.

Dickens writes that Mr. Cratchit lives with his wife and six children in a four-room house. It is rare for modern residents of developed nations to crowd eight people into four rooms.

It was common in the Victorian era. According to Britain’s National Archives, a typical home had no more than four rooms. Worse yet, it lacked running water and a toilet. Entire streets (or more) would share a few toilets and a pump with water that was often polluted.

The Cratchit household has few possessions. Their glassware consists of merely “two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.” For Christmas dinner, Mr. Cratchit wears “threadbare clothes” while his wife is “dressed out but poorly in a twice-turned gown.”

People used to turn clothing inside-out and alter the stitching to extend its lifespan. The practice predated the Victorian era, but continued into it. Eventually, clothes would become “napless, threadbare and tattered,” as the historian Emily Cockayne noted.

The Cratchits didn’t out-earn a modern American earning the minimum wage. Mr. Cratchit’s weekly salary of 15 shillings in 1843, the year “A Christmas Carol” was published, is equivalent to almost £122 in 2025. Converted to U.S. dollars, that’s about $160 a week, for an annual salary of $8,320.

The U.S. federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour or $15,080 per year for a full-time worker. That’s about half of what the meme claims Mr. Cratchit earned. Only 1% of U.S. workers earned the federal minimum wage or less last year. Most states set a higher minimum wage. The average worker earns considerably more. Clerks like Mr. Cratchit now earn an average annual salary of $49,210.

Mr. Cratchit couldn’t have purchased much of the modern “basket of goods” used in inflation calculations. Many of the basket’s items weren’t available in 1843. The U.K.’s Office of National Statistics recently added virtual reality headsets to it.

Another way to compare the relative situation of Mr. Cratchit and a minimum-wage worker today is to see how long it would take each of them to earn enough to buy something comparable. A BBC article notes that, according to an 1844 theatrical adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” it would have taken Mr. Cratchit a week’s wages to purchase the trappings of a Christmas feast: “seven shillings for the goose, five for the pudding, and three for the onions, sage and oranges.” Mr. Cratchit opts for a goose for the family’s Christmas meal. A turkey—then a costlier option—was too expensive.

The American Farm Bureau Federation found that the ingredients for a turkey-centered holiday meal serving 10 people cost $55.18 in 2025. At the federal minimum wage, someone would need to work seven hours and 37 minutes to afford that feast.

A minimum-wage worker could earn more than enough in a single workday to purchase a meal far more lavish than the modest Christmas dinner that cost Mr. Cratchit an entire week’s pay. And the amount of time a person needs to work to afford a holiday meal has fallen dramatically for the average blue-collar worker in recent years despite inflation. Wages have grown faster than food prices.

There has been substantial progress in living conditions since the 1840s. We’re much better off than the Cratchits were. In fact, most people today enjoy far greater material comfort than did even Dickens’s rich miser Ebenezer Scrooge.

This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on 12/23/2025.

After decades of the disastrous policy of limiting family growth by force, China, according to news reports, is now pestering its women through text messages and social media to have more babies. This meddling by the state, like past coercion, is counterproductive. China should stop telling couples how many children to have. Keep central planning out of family planning, and families will flourish.

Not content to regulate life outside the household, authoritarians have a long history of intervening in family affairs. The Chinese Communist Party’s recent family-policy flip-flop is unsurprising. Throughout history, communist countries have alternated between coercive measures aiming to produce larger families and ones intended to shrink the average family size. China’s one-child policy, for instance, was in force for 36 years (1979–2015).

Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union financially penalized those without children, enacting a so-called “childless tax” that the country enforced from 1941 to 1990 in various degrees. The tax punished childless men between the ages of 20 and 50 and childless women between the ages of 20 and 45. A decree in 1944 expanded the childless tax to also penalize parents who had merely one or two children.

Communist Romania and Poland (post–World War II) implemented similar taxes modeled on the Soviet law. Those taxes, like their inspiration, lasted until the collapse of the USSR bloc in 1991. Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania went furthest of all, enacting strict prohibitions on birth control that resulted in a large number of abandoned children whose parents often could not afford to raise them.

The conditions in the communist nation’s overcrowded orphanages — nicknamed “child gulags” — were nightmarish. Yet signs at the inhumane institutions mockingly boasted, “The state can take better care of your child than you can.”

If communists are consistent on one point, it is that the state knows best. Always. Even when it comes to how many children each couple should bring into the world. Where communists have been inconsistent, though, is on whether that number ought to be higher or lower.

Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, it became fashionable among intellectuals around the world to worry about “overpopulation,” a concept that overwhelming evidence has since called into question. The resulting panic had its darkest manifestation in China’s one‐​child policy, which saw more than 300 million Chinese women fitted with intrauterine devices modified to be irremovable without surgery, over 100 million sterilizations, and over 300 million abortions, an unknown share of which were coerced.

China’s official Xinhua News Agency has boasted that the one-child policy prevented 400 million births. “Excess birth” fines could reach up to ten times a family’s annual disposable income.

Revenue-hungry local officials continued to fine families and enforce childbearing limits even after the country loosened its one-child policy to a two-child policy (2016–2021) and then loosened it further into a three-child policy. As China’s officials grew increasingly concerned about the population’s aging and shrinking, the three-child policy was, at last, rendered merely symbolic in 2023.

Yet China’s vast population-planning bureaucracy remains in place and could easily be reoriented toward attempts to coercively engineer the size of the country’s population upward. In a CCP-run paper, some Chinese academics have called for a tax on childlessness.

And China is not alone. Some Russian politicians also would like to reinstate a childless tax (Russia’s leaders have been toying with the idea for more than a decade).

Today, while unfounded overpopulation fears retain popularity in some circles, plummeting global birth rates have led the pendulum of policy-maker opinion to swing toward the idea that the world might benefit from more, rather than fewer, children. The number of countries with “raising fertility” as an explicit policy objective keeps rising.

Thankfully, in most cases such initiatives do not involve coercion. From South Korea to Estonia, various countries have tried offering government subsidies, expensive new state programs, cash bonuses, or similar incentives to encourage their citizens to have larger families. But an overview of past efforts to alter birth rates, whether upward or downward, shows that such efforts have had lackluster results at best and resulted in tragic human-rights abuses at worst.

Rather than pursuing new initiatives that are costly and questionably effective, and risk wading into the territory of social engineering or worse, policy-makers concerned about birth rates should take a “first do no harm” approach to fertility.

As my colleague Vanessa Calder and I outlined in a policy paper, removing government rules and regulations that disproportionately affect families would enhance families’ freedom of choice and may reduce the cost of child-rearing enough to boost fertility. In other words, policy-makers can make it easier for parents to form the families they desire by simply stepping back and removing government barriers to fertility and family life.

The state’s thumb shouldn’t be on the scale of intimate family decisions, one way or the other. Reforming policies that artificially make family life harder offers a better way forward. Hopefully, policy-makers in China and elsewhere will come to recognize that.

A version of this article was originally published in National Review (Online) on 1/18/2024.

The debut of the robot butler NEO has drawn widespread ridicule. Unable to perform many chores without a remote human operator, the machine has become a target of social media backlash. Videos circulating online show the robot struggling with basic tasks, such as closing a dishwasher.

But don’t underestimate the potential of robotic housekeepers just yet.

The technology is dawning at an opportune time. Consider the growing concerns about plummeting birth rates. Last year saw the lowest fertility rate ever recorded in the United States, below 1.6 children per woman.

Could robots help to reverse the trend by relieving the household drudgery associated with child-rearing?

The question has broad implications because the United States’ low fertility is no anomaly. Global fertility decline is speeding up, doubling between the 2000s and 2010s and again this decade. This means the world’s population will almost certainly peak earlier than experts projected, and at a much lower level. Many countries are contemplating expensive taxpayer-funded efforts to spark a new baby boom, despite the poor track record of such policies.

There is much disagreement on what caused the 1950s baby boom, but one theory is that the rise of time-saving technologies played a key role. Between the 1920s and 1950s, domestic responsibilities were transformed as the number of households equipped with electric appliances, including refrigerators, stoves, vacuums and washing machines, rose dramatically. The new machines lessened the burden of household labor, freeing up time and making parenthood easier.

In the present era, technology is once again freeing up more time for many people, and not just by reducing commute times through remote or hybrid work. While reading about the latest breakthroughs, one might get the impression that machines are only learning to perform enjoyable and creative tasks, such as writing or drawing, rather than tending to the menial household chores that many would prefer to automate. One internet user expressed the sentiment this way: “I don’t want AI to do my art so I can do my laundry and dishes. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so I can do my art.” Many would gladly welcome Rosey the robot maid into their homes.

The potential of technology to free humanity from the burden of household labor deserves more attention. Perhaps no group would benefit more than parents. The more children one has, the more laundry piles up and dishes fill the sink.

Various companies are racing to offer the public affordable robots to do housework. Robotic housekeepers might be here sooner than you think — even if NEO is seemingly not yet able to live up to its creator’s vision of a robot butler able to effortlessly empty the dishwasher, water house plants and do other chores. Tesla’s Optimus robot can fold laundry and take out the garbage, among other tasks. There are even robots that can wash dishes as fast as a human can.

If such technologies become widely available, everyday life will be far easier, and so will parenthood.

There are already robotic lawn mowers. In fact, a 2025 survey found that 13% of U.S. homes own a robotic lawn mower. And robot vacuums have become so common as to be unremarkable. In the United States, 15% of households now own a robotic vacuum, according to a YouGov poll. In the United Kingdom, one in 10 households owns one, while one in seven households reportedly plans to buy one within the next 12 months.

I remember when my family purchased a robot vacuum. We watched, mesmerized, as it zigzagged across the nursery carpet. Our toddler oohed and followed it around. Our awe reminded me of a touching account of a grandmother who had painstakingly scrubbed clothes by hand her whole life and then watched with wonder as her new laundry machine completed the task for her. One of the reasons I have more children than most is that I’m a techno-optimist, and I believe that my children will inherit a world with less toil and more joy. (My husband and I are expecting our fourth child.)

Of course, outsourcing all household chores to robots wouldn’t guarantee higher fertility. One lesson from the history of demographic forecasting is the need for humility.

After all, birth rates have dropped faster than demographers anticipated. But one thing is clear: Technological advancements have the potential to raise the standard of living, free up time and allow people to pursue their dreams. For many, this means having children.

A version of this article was originally published at Deseret News on 11/29/2025.

Those of us fortunate enough to enjoy steady access to electricity and heat seldom contemplate just how vital to our existence these basic services are.

Being forced to survive a winter without electricity in the modern age is a humanitarian emergency, a horrific step back toward a past best left behind. Because, lest we forget just how gruesome the premodern age was, all humans once faced wintertime without electricity—even royalty. Accounts from the French court of Versailles in the 17th century tell of a palace “so bitterly cold that the wine as well as water freezes in the glasses at the King’s table.”

When Homo erectus first learned to control fire a million years ago, humanity may have gained the ability to create warmth during winter and light after sunset, but the heat didn’t extend far, and the light was dim and absurdly costly.

From fire to electricity and LEDs, heat and lighting technology have come a long way—further than our ancestors could have imagined. And as free enterprise and exchange have lifted billions of people out of poverty over the last few decades, the long-run trend is that an ever-greater share of humanity can take the modern wonders of abundant heat and light for granted.

In India, for example, only half of the population had access to electricity in 1993, the earliest year for which the World Bank has data. That rose to 99 percent of the population by 2021. Here you can watch a video of the powerful moment that a remote Indian village called Rakuru in the Himalayas turned on its first electric lights eight years ago. “The people were hugging each other and dancing,” was how Shivani Saklani, an Indian GE employee who helped bring about the village’s electrification, described the scene. “The experience was so powerful it made me cry.”

Progress is ongoing: in Sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region, electricity access is rising, but is still only enjoyed by around half of the population. Numerous energy entrepreneurs are hard at work trying to fulfill the need for electricity and spread it to more of the world’s people—people like Dozie Igweilo, whose startup uses solar lamps to help Nigerians through power outages.

Sometimes, policy restrictions get in the way. For example, in the four years following the Fukushima disaster, there were 1,280 cold-related deaths due to the Japanese government’s ill-considered decision to end nuclear power production. The invasion of Ukraine revealed the folly of many European governments’ meddling with energy markets to ban hydraulic fracturing. Rather than helping the earth, these bans have enabled Russian energy blackmail.

Despite all the progress that humanity has made, around 677 million people still lived without electricity as of 2023, the most recent year of data. Think of the famous satellite images of North Korea at night: a field of eerie darkness contrasted with the light of prosperous towns and cities to the south. The disparity between the authoritarian hermit kingdom and its free southern neighbor speaks to a harsh but important truth: progress is not automatic or irreversible. The conveniences of modern life are fragile, dependent on peace for their continued existence, and dependent on freedom to come into being in the first place.

So if you live in a community with abundant electricity, take a moment to appreciate your situation. Remember just how life-changing electricity is, as you witness it warming homes and powering the numerous holiday lights (another modern marvel worth contemplating) warding off the winter gloom.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 12/09/2022.

Below is a brief excerpt from my opinion piece this morning in “Free Expression,” a new feature of the Wall Street Journal.

Claims that an American today earning the minimum wage is worse off than the working poor of the 19th century have been popular since at least 2021. A recent post with thousands of likes reads:

Time for your annual reminder that, according to A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit makes 15 shillings a week. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $530.27/wk, $27,574/yr, or $13.50/ hr. Most Americans on minimum wage earn less than a Dickensian allegory for destitution.

This is humbug. Consider…

Read the rest at WSJ.com

It’s the holiday season, and Christmas carols are everywhere, including the ubiquitous “Jingle Bells,” first published in 1857. Many take the refrain, “Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh!” at face value. But an underappreciated aspect of the lyrics is that they are actually rather cynical about sleigh rides. Part of the song goes:

The horse was lean and lank

Misfortune seemed his lot

He got into a drifted bank

And then we got upsot.

In the next verse, which is often skipped, the narrator relates being thrown out of the sleigh onto his back and getting laughed at by a romantic rival. His misfortune was relatively minor, but being thrown from a sleigh or carriage was not always a laughing matter.

During the time of horse-drawn vehicles, accidents frequently caused not only delays and inconveniences but also injuries and deaths. The British historian Paul Hair called the horse “one of man’s most dangerous tools,” arguing that “it is likely that per unit of travel the horse was more dangerous than the motor vehicle.”

He quotes Britain’s registrar general as noting in 1865 that “street accidents by horse carriages kill more people in a year than railways” and estimates a horse-related mortality rate of around 55 deaths annually per million people in 1874. In 2020, there were 1,516 road deaths in the United Kingdom. Divided by the current U.K. population of 67.2 million, that translates into a mortality rate from motor vehicle accidents of about 23 deaths annually per million people, making modern car rides more than twice as safe as Victorian horse carriage rides. And car deaths are becoming more rare almost everywhere.

One problem with relying on unruly, skittish horses for transportation was that the animals sometimes bolted or reared unexpectedly. A slightly faulty harness could also spell disaster. Even dismounting a horse or carriage was dangerous; horse kicks have an average force of 2,000 pounds per square inch and an average speed of 200 miles per hour. One famous study found that, in the 19 years between 1875 and 1894, at least 280 highly trained Prussian cavalrymen died from horse kicks.

No amount of wealth or power could shield someone from the inherent danger of a horseback or carriage ride. Servants and nobility alike succumbed to carriage accident injuries.

The crown prince of France’s July Monarchy, Ferdinand Philippe d’Orléans, died of a skull fracture from a horse carriage accident at the young age of 31 in 1842. In the United States, the French-born governor of Louisiana, Pierre Derbigny, died in office in 1829 when he was thrown from a moving horse-drawn carriage. A grandson of Thomas Jefferson died in a horse carriage accident in 1875. Future first lady Frances Cleveland’s father died in a horse carriage accident that same year.

A monument in New York City commemorates a debutante named Charlotte Canda, who was killed in a horse carriage accident in 1845. On her way back from her 17th birthday party, the horse bolted, and Charlotte was thrown out of the moving carriage.

In Australia, the English novelist Charles Dickens’ daughter-in-law died in a similar accident in 1878. The ponies became spooked and ran wild, flinging her out of the carriage and causing a fatal head injury. She was just 29 years old and left behind two children who survived the accident, but were no doubt traumatized by witnessing their mother’s death. In Germany, in 1900, Prince Albert of Saxony died at age 25 when an open carriage collided with his own, overturning it into a ditch.

Old newspapers reveal many episodes of startled horses running amok, wrecking the vehicles they were pulling and injuring riders. The horses themselves were often casualties. In fact, Victorian streetcar horses had an average life expectancy of barely two years.

If we look beyond horse-drawn carriage accidents to other equine-related injuries, the list of victims includes several kings. William of Orange, for example, died from illness exacerbated by a broken collarbone sustained when his horse tripped on a molehill in 1702. After having the bone set, he took a bumpy 12-mile carriage ride that jolted the bone out of place and necessitated re-setting it. That carriage ride must have been horrifically painful.

So rather than romanticizing horse-drawn transportation, the next time you hear the line, “Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh!” remember that the lyric is somewhat sarcastic—and with good reason. And as you travel to see loved ones for the holidays, take a moment to appreciate the technological advances in transportation safety.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 12/24/2021.

A Christmas Carol, the classic 1843 holiday tale written by the English writer Charles Dickens, is surprisingly relevant to today’s concern over overpopulation.

The well-known story deals with the transformation of wealthy London businessman Ebenezer Scrooge from a misanthropic grump into a merry fellow filled with goodwill toward his fellow man. His change of heart results from visits by four mysterious spirits: the ghost of his former colleague, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Future. Early in the story, Scrooge suggests that poor people ought to die and thereby “decrease the surplus population.”

The idea of a “surplus population” predates Dickens’s novel, harking back to antiquity and, in its early modern iteration, Thomas Malthus’s 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus’s idea—that too many people would deplete resources and lead to scarcity—was popular among British intellectuals when Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. Indeed, in 1840s England, the concept of overpopulation seemed more relevant than ever as the population of London swelled.

During the 19th century, London became the world’s most populous city. London’s population grew from 1 million in 1800 to over 2 million by the time A Christmas Carol was published, and to 6.5 million by the end of the 19th century. London’s population grew partly due to urbanization, as people fled the countryside to work in factories. While the factory conditions were often harsh, millions of Britons found them preferable to the backbreaking agricultural labor and monotony of rural life.

London’s population also grew because the United Kingdom as a whole was expanding. A Christmas Carol suggests that Scrooge is in his 60s or 70s, argues Stanford University English professor Claire Jarvis. That means that during his lifetime the character would have seen his country’s population increase by about a third. There were fewer than 20 million people in the country when Scrooge’s character was “born.” By 1843, however, the country’s population stood at over 27.5 million.

That was, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton argues, due to the spread of new knowledge and medical advances, including the spread of variolation and inoculation against smallpox, first among the nobility and, later, among commoners. To get a sense of how deadly Victorian England was, note that a child in sub-Saharan Africa today enjoys better odds of living to the age of five than a Victorian child did. As fewer people died, the population grew.

Writer and economist Jerry Bowyer has argued in Forbes that with A Christmas Carol, Dickens was weighing in on a central economic debate of his time. That is, the debate between Malthusians and the disciples of the Scottish economist Adam Smith, like the French economist Jean Baptiste Say, who argued that peaceful market exchange could create prosperity and meet the needs of a growing populace. Say was right. As the chart above shows, British population growth coincided with massive enrichment.

The debate over “overpopulation,” has continued to rage on, more recently between neo-Malthusians like the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and rational optimists like the late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon. The latter’s insight was that human beings themselves are the “ultimate resource” making all other resources more plentiful. (Recent research lends support to Simon’s ideas).

The Ghost of Christmas Present represents the opposite of Malthusian scarcity. He first appears to Scrooge on a “throne” made of overflowing food: “turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch.” The spirit carries a torch shaped like “Plenty’s horn,” meaning a cornucopia, the emblem of abundance, and an empty, swordless scabbard, symbolizing peace.

The Ghost claims he has “more than eighteen hundred” brothers, representing previous Christmases (again, the book came out in the year 1843). Upon hearing that, Scrooge’s mind, in true Malthusian fashion, immediately turns to scarcity. “A tremendous family to provide for!” mutters Scrooge. The Ghost then whisks Scrooge to a marketplace to show him this scene of Smithian abundance:

“There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts … There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions … There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks … there were piles of filberts … there were Norfolk Biffins [a kind of apple] setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons … The[re were] gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl.”

In the marketplace, Scrooge observes the literal fruits of international commerce. Trade allowed Victorian Englishmen and Englishwomen to enjoy oranges, lemons and grapes in midwinter. The Ghost of Christmas Present then shows Scrooge the family of one of his employees having Christmas dinner. Even that impoverished family is shown enjoying oranges.

When Scrooge inquires about whether the family’s ill child, Tiny Tim, will survive, the Ghost of Christmas Present taunts Scrooge by repeating Scrooge’s words back at him: “What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” Scrooge then begins to feel shame at having questioned the worth of “surplus” human beings.

Today, globalization has taken Smith’s ideal of peaceful exchange to a new level, increasing worldwide prosperity. Even as the world’s population has climbed to an all-time high, hunger has reached an all-time low. Yet Malthusianism continues to haunt public discourse and enjoys surprising popularity. Dickens would agree that it’s time, as the saying goes, to lay that ghost to rest.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 12/23/2019.

Spectacular twinkling displays are a staple of the holiday season, from elaborately lit homes to drive-through light shows. But electric lights are more than a charming way to ward off the winter gloom; they have also made this time of year considerably safer than in the past.

The first Christmas lights were candles. The practice of placing lit candles on Christmas trees dates to at least 1660 in Germany. Placing candles in windows may have originated with early American colonists. Whatever their origin, candles placed in windows and on trees became a widespread tradition. By 1856, U.S. President Franklin Pierce brought candlelit Christmas trees to the White House.

Tragically, candles often proved as deadly as they were pretty. Christmastime conflagrations occurred so regularly that, by 1908, many insurance companies refused to cover fires started by Christmas trees.

In 1911, the National Fire Protection Association, New York Board of Fire Underwriters, and Newark Fire Department issued a joint warning reading, in part, “Do not permit children to light, or re-light, the candles while parents are not present. They frequently set fire to their clothing instead. The tree itself will burn when the needles have become dry.”

Christmas candles caused fire, deaths

Old newspapers reveal horrific Christmas candle fires, including a blaze that killed 36 people in Oklahoma in 1925 and a fire that struck a Chicago hospital in 1885. In one 1905 incident, a Kansas City man dressed as Santa Claus caught fire, along with his sack of toys. (In what might be considered a Christmas miracle, he survived).

A series of innovators sought to make holiday candles safer. In 1867, a fellow named Charles Kirchhof patented a weighted candleholder meant to improve the stability of candles on trees. In 1878, Frederick Artz invented a still superior candleholder that clipped onto tree branches. But the biggest safety improvement came from switching from candles to electricity.

Three days before Christmas, in 1882, electric holiday lights were born. Just two years after Thomas Edison patented the lightbulb, one of his employees, Edward Hibberd Johnson, realized the invention’s festive potential. He wrapped some small bulbs on a wire around a Christmas tree. The Detroit Post reported on the innovation:

“There … was a large Christmas tree presenting a most picturesque and uncanny aspect. It was brilliantly lighted with many colored globes about as large as an English walnut … The result was a continuous twinkling of dancing colors, red, white, blue, white, red, blue all evening. I need not tell you that the scintillating evergreen was a pretty sight — one can hardly imagine anything prettier. The ceiling was crossed obliquely with two wires on which hung 28 more of the tiny lights; and all the lights and the fantastic tree itself with its starry fruit were kept going by the slight electric current brought from the main office on a filmy wire.”

“Electric trees will prove to be far less dangerous than the wax candle parlor trees,” Johnson noted at the time.

Electric lights were ‘extravagant’

At first, only the rich could afford such electric lights; one 1884 New York Times editorial dubbed them “extravagant.” Less than 10 percent of America had electricity when Christmas lights debuted. But the cost of electricity rapidly plummeted, and 60 percent of the country had access to electricity by the time weatherproof lights came on the market in 1927.

Fully lighting a Christmas tree with electric bulbs could cost as much as $300 in the early 1900s, the equivalent of around $8,500 today. The first “pre-wired” strings of electric Christmas lights, called “festoons,” launched in 1903 and cost $12 each (almost $400 today). Many people could only afford to rent rather than buy electric holiday lights.

By 1914, a string of lights cost just $1.75 (about $50 today). Business competition led to even cheaper and safer electric holiday lights sweeping the market in the 1920s and 1930s.

Electricity can also, of course, cause fires. In 1943, the singer and actor Bing Crosby, famous for holiday hits like White Christmas, lost his home to a fire owed to faulty Christmas light wiring. But thanks to continued safety improvements, house fires have been declining in frequency for decades in the United States.

So, the next time you gaze at some holiday lights, take a moment to appreciate how electricity has transformed the season and saved countless lives.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 12/29/2021.