Back in 2020, I noted, “The dramatic rise in telework amid the pandemic is a radical experiment, but its effects will be long-lasting.” I was right. Rates of full-time, in-office work plummeted during the pandemic, and while many employers have since shifted from fully remote work to hybrid work schedules, hybrid work levels have remained stable since 2022. In 2025, 78% of full-time remote-capable U.S. employees are either hybrid or fully remote, with hybrid as the most common arrangement.

What is sustaining this transformation of the workplace? The inconvenient answer for those who see government action as the source of progress is that this transformation is thanks to freely chosen, mutually beneficial decisions by employers and employees rather than any top-down mandate.

The proof is in how durable these patterns have been. Millions of workers and employers continue to choose them because they work. Roughly half of the U.S. workforce consists of employees who are capable of working remote or hybrid jobs. The most common arrangement sees workers commute two days a week and work remotely the other three. Most workers appreciate the flexibility, with a mere 6% of remote-capable workers saying they prefer to work on-site full-time.

An analysis from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that across industries, the rise in remote work and total factor productivity growth may be positively correlated, and many employees report higher productivity at home. Some research also suggests that hybrid and fully remote work may have positive effects on individual employee productivity, satisfaction, and physical health, as well as employee retention.

Historically, most improvements for workers have followed a similar pattern—wherein the market dictates employer-employee relationships, not government—despite a popular narrative to the contrary. The economist Benjamin Powell observed that legal labor standards, working-hour limits, and the introduction of a minimum wage in the United States and other wealthy countries after industrialization largely mirrored policies that employers had already implemented of their own accord. Legislation merely codified preexisting norms instead of prompting a change in industry practices.

Economist Price Fishback similarly noted, for example, “State laws limiting the number of working hours for women … passed after many employers had substantially reduced hours for women. Recent studies have found that the laws had relatively little effect.”

A century ago, the Ford Motor Company pioneered limiting the workweek to five days. Ford’s example soon inspired manufacturers across the country and around the world to adopt the Monday-to-Friday workweek. That occurred because employers discovered that productivity increased, while employees valued the extra leisure time. As the economist Ludwig von Mises put it, “The nineteenth century’s labor legislation by and large achieved nothing more than to provide ratification for changes which the interplay of market factors had brought about previously.”

Today, remote and hybrid work often benefits both employers and employees, and this work flexibility rise occurred in spite of many outdated government rules that hinder such arrangements. These rules are in desperate need of reform. For example, various federal tax rules discriminate against remote work arrangements, while differing state rules can subject remote workers to double taxation, and occupational licensing rules limit workers’ options to move between states. If anything, the government has stood in the way of the great workplace transformation toward remote and hybrid work.

Calls to legally mandate remote or hybrid work are a misguided attempt to give the government credit for a shift that has already happened independently of government action. Premier Jacinta Allan of Victoria, Australia, announced that her state government will enshrine a legal right for employees, in both the private and public sectors, who can perform their job from home to do so at least two days a week. The law comes into effect in September.

The legal change will benefit few employees, as 65% of Victorians are already hybrid or remote, but it will create more bureaucratic headaches by adding unnecessary red tape for employers and employees alike. “WFH [work from home] is already happening, and there is no reason to legislate a one-size-fits-all approach,” cautioned Andrew McKellar, the chief executive of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

This represents perhaps the first example of a legal entitlement to work from home, coming long after the market has already made such arrangements widespread. “If you can do your job from home, we’ll make it your right—because we’re on your side,” said Allan. In reality, it is employers and employees exercising their freedom in the market, not political mandates, that have made the flexibility of remote and hybrid work widely available today.

This article was originally published at RealClearMarkets on 6/23/2026.

Does capitalism help or hurt women? A fascinating book from Cambridge University Press, Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist Debate, seeks to answer that question.

Philosophy professors Ann Cudd of Boston University and Nancy Holmstrom of Rutgers University both want more freedom and higher material living standards for women. But they disagree on how to achieve that goal.

One thinks capitalism is the answer; the other socialism. Their differences boil down to two points: how capitalism has affected women to date, and the viability of alternative systems to improve a woman’s lot.

The professors may disagree—yet the data sides overwhelmingly with capitalism.

When it comes to material living standards, Cudd presents page after page of evidence to demonstrate “that capitalism has brought about a massive improvement in life for human beings” by reducing poverty and spurring technological innovations in, for example, healthcare. Death in infancy or childbirth is much rarer than it once was. Family sizes are smaller, since children generally survive into adulthood. And women’s options have multiplied as a result.

Holmstrom, however, claims that capitalism has lessened women’s material well-being; it has, she says, exacerbated inequality, which she conflates with poverty. Cudd counters that those who care about women’s welfare should focus on poverty, which is at a historic low.

But giving women the freedom to flee rural penury in order to work in factories, counters Holmstrum, has made them worse off. “The lives of subsistence peasants may be limited, but materially adequate and stable,” she writes. She thinks factory jobs “seldom provide a way out of poverty”.

Cudd answers that the world’s poorest people are overwhelmingly rural, performing informal subsistence agricultural labor: “Global capitalism has not changed their lives very much; they live much as their ancestors did.”

As the data shows, factory work has, indeed, helped women escape both poverty and the stricter gender roles of rural areas. And while Holmstrom implies that the world’s poor prefer agricultural drudgery to urban work, the ongoing global migration from rural areas to cities provides evidence to the contrary.

Capitalism, says Cudd, has not just liberated women from the fields but helped society to see them as individuals. It promotes not only material progress, but also social innovation, which has helped break down those old prejudices such as sexism. “Capitalism derives its primary justification from the maximization of individual liberty,” she says, “and capitalist societies promulgate the ideology of individualism, which helps to break down … sexist norms and practices.”

Indeed, the capitalist worldview subverts sexism and other forms of collective prejudice—just look at how it eroded India’s caste system.

“Capitalism reduces the oppression of traditional societies that impose hierarchies of gender and caste,” writes Cudd, because embedded within market exchange itself is the idea that each individual should be free to pursue her self-interest. Market participation also increases women’s bargaining power within society, empowering them to lobby for legal equality and greater freedom.

Holmstrom, on the other hand, defines freedom as negative liberty (freedom from interference) and what some philosophers call positive liberty (the means to act). To be free, Holmstrom contends, a woman needs adequate material resources and an environment of social tolerance.

But capitalism has actually increased freedom as Holmstrom conceives it—by reducing poverty and encouraging social tolerance. As the philosopher Jason Brennan noted, “as a matter of historical fact, protecting negative liberties is the most important and effective way of promoting positive liberty”.

Holmstrom is resistant to this view, observing that some capitalist states deny their citizens freedom outside the economic realm. But then, aren’t dictatorships that at least allow their citizens economic freedom (Chile under Pinochet) better than anti-capitalist dictatorships (modern Venezuela)? After all, capitalism fosters the conditions for people to escape poverty and ultimately demand more personal and political freedoms.

The debate is complicated by the fact that the professors disagree over how to define a capitalist state. For example, Cudd and Holmstrom both denote Sweden and similar states with high social spending as capitalist, but Cudd does not count oligarchic states such as Saudi Arabia as such. And Holmstrom insists that the exclusion of such states makes for a biased “persuasive definition” of capitalism. Yet Holmstrom does not want to count any past socialist system as truly socialist—which in turn shows her bias.

Cudd notes that capitalism compares favorably on practically every indicator of human wellbeing to the socialism practiced by the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Cuba today. Holmstrom, bizarrely, alleges that the Soviet and Maoist systems helped women, and praises the Soviet Union for offering “free” childcare and laundry services.

One might respond that if a woman resorts to cannibalizing her own children to survive a manmade famine (as thousands did while millions of others died starving), endures rape in a gulag (“rape was so common as to be considered routine”), or faces execution for political dissent, then laundry services do not meaningfully improve her situation.

While Holmstrom thinks those states helped women, she believes no society has ever truly given “the people” (rather than a bureaucracy) control over the means of production. She does admit she is comparing capitalism to an imagined ideal of socialism. And anticipating charges of Utopianism, she points out that many major social changes such as women’s suffrage once seemed unreachable.

Yet ultimately, she offers little in the way of evidence that her vision wouldn’t fail like all of the other socialist experiments throughout history. There is, after all, ample data on where that road leads—and it is hardly a paradise for workers, women, or anyone else.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 5/15/2017.

The world’s population has never been bigger, yet rates of poverty and hunger are at historic lows. How is that possible? It turns out that population growth can fuel resource abundance and economic prosperity through innovation. Contrary to popular belief, resources have become more plentiful as the global population has increased. Analyzing historical data, the authors of “Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet” discovered that in recent decades resource abundance outpaced population growth, a phenomenon they call “superabundance.” This counterintuitive relationship arises from the fact that more people generate more ideas and inventions, leading to economic growth and improved living standards.

In other words, on average, free people produce more than they consume. Perhaps that is not so surprising, because human ingenuity is what transforms raw natural materials into valuable resources in the first place. A remarkable example is Hong Kong, which underwent a rapid free market metamorphosis from a barren island to a prosperous metropolis in the 1950s and ’60s.

However, it’s crucial to note that simply having a large population is insufficient to create abundance. The poverty experienced in China and India before their liberalizing economic reforms serves as a stark reminder of that. Merely having a large population is not enough; it is freedom that unleashes human potential and transforms living standards. Free societies foster innovation by granting individuals the liberty to explore new ideas, debate, trade and profit. And the more people do those things, the more opportunities arise for specialization, collaboration and technological breakthroughs. Under conditions of economic freedom, more people mean more entrepreneurs, more innovators and more creators.

Demographic Dilemmas

If it is true that free individuals engaged in idea generation and market exchange are “the ultimate resource,” as the late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon called them, then the more, the merrier. In a free society, fears about so‐​called overpopulation and resource depletion are baseless. Moreover, population growth rates are decreasing globally, with many countries now experiencing shrinking populations as fertility rates fall. Fertility is lowest in the high‐​income countries, in many cases at record lows and in most instances “below replacement” (i.e., lower than needed to keep the population from shrinking).

Many middle‐​income countries, including Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Russia, also have fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. It must be noted, though, that smaller family sizes often relate to positive developments such as increased education for women and declining rates of child mortality. (More children surviving to adulthood decreases the incentive to have additional children as an insurance policy against a high likelihood of childhood death.) Moreover, many commentators celebrate the possibility of population decline for a variety of reasons, often believing that a smaller population will benefit the environment.

Others, however, fear that a smaller population size could come with various challenges. If a larger population has the potential to increase the rate of technological advancement and economic growth, then a smaller population could conversely slow the rate of progress. Such risks may be manageable through automation or immigration (although if birth rates continue to decline globally, then migration alone cannot counteract depopulation in the very long run). Thus, many thinkers across the ideological spectrum, such as Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat, have expressed concerns about subreplacement fertility and possible attendant tradeoffs.

Irrespective of whether or to what extent their worries are substantiated, such fears have motivated a variety of policies intended to help families and boost birth rates in countries from South Korea to Estonia. Unfortunately, such “pro‐​natal” policies often take the form of expensive new government programs and subsidies that increase the burden on taxpayers while having little or no effect on fertility. In a recent Cato policy analysis I co‐​authored with Vanessa Calder, we found that in almost all cases, countries with pro‐​natal policies tied to explicit fertility targets failed to meet their stated goals. That conclusion fits with a larger body of research showing that the effect size of fertility initiatives is often small and comes at an enormous fiscal cost.

Ultimately, it is not the government’s place to encourage or discourage any particular family size, and past government attempts to alter fertility rates have sometimes even resulted in tragic human rights abuses. So, rather than embarking on new initiatives that are costly, are questionably effective and risk wading into the territory of social engineering or worse, policymakers should take a “first do no harm” approach to fertility. Instead of replicating costly efforts that have proven ineffective abroad, U.S. policymakers keen on supporting families and concerned about fertility decline should consider repealing the various government policies that can act as artificial barriers to fertility and raise costs for parents. In other words, policymakers should make sure that government policies do not interfere with individuals’ freedom to form the families they want to create.

Family‐​Friendly Policies

First, consider policies affecting family budgets and work. By some estimates, housing is the greatest expense associated with raising children, and regulations that limit the housing supply, including land use and zoning regulations, make housing less affordable. Meanwhile, tariffs raise the cost of construction materials and push the cost of housing even higher. The cost of food, the second‐​greatest expense associated with children, is inflated by subsidies that backfire, regulations and restrictive trade policies. Studies suggest that reforming such policies could reduce the retail price of milk, a staple among families with young children, by 15% to 20%.

Then there’s education: Increasing school choice would increase incentives for schools to meet the needs of students and their families. Next, consider child care. Various regressive regulations limit the supply of child care and push up prices. For example, Washington, D.C., adopted a licensing law requiring many child care workers to have a college degree. When it comes to child‐​to‐​staff ratios, requiring even one less staffer per infant reduces child care costs by up to 20%. In fact, many countries such as Denmark, Spain and Sweden have no government‐​mandated maximum ratio at all. Removing laws that discourage telework and flexible work can also make life easier for parents. For example, pandemic‐​era reforms removing barriers to telemedicine not only increased patient convenience but made balancing parenthood and career easier for some workers in medical fields by allowing for remote work.

Further, some healthcare policies excessively limit parents’ options regarding the way their children are conceived and born. Several government policies—including certificate‐​of‐​need laws restricting the creation of new birth centers and various state laws restricting vaginal birth after cesarean attempts to hospital settings and banning them at smaller clinics or birth centers—make it needlessly difficult for mothers who want to avoid cesarean sections to do so. Such restrictions not only disrespect mothers’ autonomy but can make having multiple children medically risky and, research suggests, may depress fertility, all without improving health outcomes.

Policymakers worried about families and fertility should similarly avoid overregulating the field of reproductive technology, which can help many couples struggling with infertility challenges. Policymakers should also avoid imitating Hungary, which nationalized its fertility clinics and subsidizes fertility treatments, resulting in fewer treatment options and lengthy wait times that have prompted many Hungarians to seek treatment in neighboring countries. Such policies not only diminish individual liberty but make bringing new children into the world unnecessarily difficult.

Finally, there are some well‐​intentioned but excessive child safety policies that make raising children more expensive and time‐​consuming. For example, one study found that extended‐​age car seat requirements were associated with only 57 car crash fatalities in 2017 but with a reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year. Speaking of safety, Utah (2018), Oklahoma (2021), Texas (2021), Colorado (2022) and Virginia (2023) have passed “reasonable childhood independence” legislation that pushes back against overly burdensome and intensive parenting norms. More states should pass these laws so that children benefit from increased independence and parents benefit from reduced stress levels.

Those are just a few of the reforms to labor, trade, healthcare, education, housing and safety policies that would reduce the regulatory cost of raising children and help families. Although I am skeptical of the idea of expensive new government policies aimed at increasing fertility, believing them to be misguided and possibly beyond the proper scope of government, at the very least, any expansion of spending on families should be paired with deregulation of the goods that parents demand most and reform of policies that artificially and needlessly make family life harder.

If free people are the ultimate source of societal abundance—if people themselves are “the ultimate resource”—then we should reconsider overly burdensome regulations that potentially frustrate fertility aspirations. The work that parents do raising the next generation of human beings is important—and arduous enough without the government making it harder. To increase abundance, families must be free.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 8/24/2023.

A strange twist on the idea that the planet would benefit from having fewer people (to consume fewer resources) is that the planet would also benefit from having shorter people (again, to consume fewer resources). The proposal to shrink the population, whether in terms of its total size or its average height, seems to be in vogue. An op-ed in the New York Times argues:

Short people don’t just save resources; as resources become scarcer owing to overpopulation and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival. . . . When you mate with shorter people, you’re potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet.

This opinion piece by journalist Mara Altman assumes that resource scarcity is an urgent threat in our modern, globalized economy and that less resource consumption is the solution. To that end, she suggests that human beings attempt to lower their species’ average height and thus their consumption needs and that they accomplish this through romantic discrimination against the tall (specifically, tall men).

The strange argument reminded me of an old but excellent quote by economic historian Deirdre McCloskey (emphasis added):

The rich became richer, true. But the poor have gas heating, cars, smallpox vaccinations, indoor plumbing, cheap travel, rights for women, low child mortality, adequate nutrition, taller bodies, doubled life expectancy, schooling for their kids, newspapers, a vote, a shot at university and respect.

One of the results of improved nutrition and health that accompanied the Great Enrichment—the dramatic, unprecedented, and ongoing transformation in global living standards—has been that people have become taller than in the past. For example, research suggests the average height of Dutch people has shot up in the last 160 years by at least 20 centimeters (around 8 inches), making them the tallest on the planet. “The Dutch have become so much taller in such a short period that scientists chalk most of it up to their changing environment. As the Netherlands developed, it became one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of cheese and milk,” which are highly nutritious, notes science journalist Martin Enserink. Many people consider the Netherlands the site of the beginning of the Great Enrichment.

In advanced economies, many more people may be reaching their height potential thanks to improved diets and health. “The most reasonable explanation is that the overall increase in average height is a reflection of the overall improvement in health,” according to Christopher S. Baird, a physics professor at West Texas A&M University. “As western civilizations entered the modern age, improved technology made it possible for more and more people to have consistent access to a nutritious diet and a healthy environment. While a person’s genetic code may specify the potential height that he can reach once mature, he will fall short of that height if his body does not have adequate health and nutrition.”

It may be that precisely because being tall is associated with better health, taller men tend to be viewed as more attractive by the opposite sex. “We know that in children proper nutrition makes a big difference for height, health, and intellectual development. The evidence is clear in poor countries where some children come close to starving,” according to John Malouff, a professor of psychology at the University of New England in Australia, who studies romantic attraction. Women’s widely known preference for tall men has been confirmed by various studies, and Altman’s proposal that women ignore what they find attractive for the greater good of conserving the Earth’s resources is unlikely to have much of an effect.

But why call for the shortening of the population at all? Altman is, of course, right that shorter people usually require less food to eat, less cloth to clothe them, and so on. But human ingenuity offers many other ways to increase resource abundance—new ideas, tested in the marketplace, can result in the discovery of greater stores of natural resources, resource alternatives, and creative ways to reduce resource use without sacrificing living standards. As long as they maintain the freedom to experiment and exchange, people are net creators rather than consumers of resources—and that holds for both the short and the tall alike. So there is no reason to sacrifice the greater average height that humanity has achieved largely through advances against poverty.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 1/4/2023.

Ehrlich, who warned of a link between overpopulation and a series of environmental catastrophes for over five decades, previously stated that Earth can only sustain 500 million people. There are currently over 7.7 billion people on the planet. Surely there are better ways to deal with environmental problems than reducing the human race by 94 percent. Alas, in spite of Ehrlich’s long record of failed predictions, more and more people are embracing his anti-humanist agenda.

Whether it’s Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s questioning the morality of childbearing, a birth-strike movement that encourages people to forego parenthood despite the “grief that [they say they] feel as a result,” or political commentator Bill Maher claiming, “I can’t think of a better gift to our planet than pumping out fewer humans to destroy it,” a misanthropic philosophy known as “anti-natalism” is going increasingly mainstream.

The logical conclusion of this anti-humanist ideology is, depressingly, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (Vhemt). According to its founder, activist Les Knight, Vhemt (pronounced “vehement”) is gaining steam. “In the last year,” Knight told the Daily Mail in 2019, “I’ve seen more and more articles about people choosing to remain child-free or to not add more to their existing family than ever. I’ve been collecting these stories and last year was just a groundswell of articles, and, in addition, there have been articles about human extinction.”

The number of people fulfilling the movement’s goals (regardless of any affiliation with the movement itself) is growing. The U.S. birth rate is at an all-time low. According to the latest figures from the Center for Disease Control, the total U.S. fertility rate for 2024 was around 1.6 births per woman (i.e., below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman needed to maintain the current population).

Some anti-natalists are not content with promoting the voluntary reduction of birth rates, and would prefer to hurry the process along with government intervention. Various prominent environmentalists, from Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Travis Rieder to science popularizer and entertainer Bill Nye, support the introduction of special taxes or other state-imposed penalties for having “too many” children. In 2015, Bowdoin College’s Sarah Conly published a book advocating a “one-child” policy, like the one China abandoned following disastrous consequences including female infanticide and a destabilizing gender ratio of 120 boys per 100 girls, which left around 17 percent of China’s young men unable to find a Chinese wife. Even after that policy’s collapse, she maintained that it was “a good thing.”

Modern-day anti-humanism emerged in the 1970s, midwifed by a doomy strain of environmental pessimism led by Ehrlich (but with intellectual antecedents dating back to Thomas Malthus in the 18^th century). Ehrlich’s widely read The Population Bomb originally opened with the lines, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Thanks to human ingenuity in the form of the Green Revolution, that didn’t happen. The challenge of feeding a growing population led instead to technological innovation and that produced a solution: higher agricultural productivity and falling food prices. Far from leading to starvation, more humans exchanging ideas and innovating have ensured that the supply of food rose to meet growing demand.

Ehrlich quietly removed his failed prognostication from subsequent editions of his book, but his ideas caught on among some strands of the environmentalist movement, and soon spread through parts of the political Left. Robert Zubrin’s book Merchants of Despair gives an overview of the partial reversal of the Left’s traditional commitment to advancing the human condition, in favor of a project that viewed humanity as a plague upon the Earth:

Instead of The Grapes of Wrath, they carried copies of The Population Bomb … Instead of “Stop the War,” their buttons read “Stop at two” [children]; instead of “Power to the people,” their slogan was “People pollute.”

Anti-natalists believe that a world without humans, or with significantly fewer of them, would eventually revert to a pollution-free paradise with abundant natural resources. These extinction advocates, however, have misunderstood the evidence about population growth’s true impact on the planet. The late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon rejected the idea of overpopulation as a problem in his 1981 book The Ultimate Resource. He believed that, on the contrary, more people in the world means more people to solve problems. “There is no physical or economic reason,” he wrote, “why human resourcefulness and enterprise cannot forever continue to respond to impending shortages and existing problems with new expedients that, after an adjustment period, leave us better off than before the problem arose.”

In 1980, Simon made a bet with Ehrlich. Ehrlich would choose a “basket” of raw materials that he expected to become scarcer in the coming years. At the end of a specified time period, if the inflation-adjusted price of the basket was higher than at the beginning of the period, that would indicate the materials had indeed become scarcer and Ehrlich would win the wager; if the price was lower, that would mean the resources had instead become more abundant, and Simon would win. The stakes would be the ultimate price difference of the basket at the beginning and end of the time period. Simon ultimately won, and Ehrlich duly sent him a check for the price difference.

New research, inspired by the Ehrlich-Simon wager, has further confirmed that, contrary to the anti-humanists’ claims, population growth goes hand-in-hand with more abundant resources. Consider the amount of time it takes an average worker to earn enough to buy a basket of common commodities—the “time-price” of those items. After analyzing the time prices of 50 basic commodities, The Simon Abundance Index finds that between 1980 and 2025, “every 1-percentage-point increase in global population corresponded to roughly 6.3 percentage points of growth in population-level resource abundance.”

There are some notable environmentalists who recognize the fact that humans are capable of creating abundance instead of scarcity. Environmentalists who take the rational and techno-optimistic view, sometimes called “enlightenment environmentalists” or “ecomodernists,” still believe in humanity’s ability to tackle environmental problems with innovation and ingenuity. Examples include Harvard University’s Steven Pinker and the Breakthrough Institute’s Michael Shellenberger, who both hold that technologies such as nuclear power can reduce emissions. And the research of Rockefeller University environmental science professor Jesse H. Ausubel, who was integral to setting up the world’s first climate change conference in Geneva in 1979, has shown how technological progress can allow nature to rebound, even while food and other resources have become more plentiful.

Unfortunately, ecomodernists appear to be a minority within the environmental movement. Too many people still agree with Ehrlich that humans are analogous to cancer cells and long for the reduction or even extinction of our species. One third of Americans in the millennial generation say they are deeply concerned about the environmental impact of having children. Not that long ago, well within the living memory of a millennial such as myself, a 2002 episode of Aaron Sorkin’s popular political drama The West Wing could still quip that “Death is bad” remained a praiseworthy left-wing position. The scriptwriter took it for granted that everyone ought to be in favor of human flourishing. If only that were still the case.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 5/8/2019.

Few are familiar with the tragic origins of Father’s Day. Father’s Day was inspired by both a lethal workplace catastrophe and by a single father who raised six children after his wife’s untimely death.

In 1907, an explosion in a West Virginia coal mine resulted in the deaths of 361 men, 250 of whom were fathers. It was the deadliest mining disaster in U.S. history, and 1,000 children lost their fathers in the accident. To honor the lost miners, a local woman named Grace Golden Clayton arranged a “Father’s Day” tribute the following year on July 5th.

Workplace death was sadly common in that era: scholars estimate that in the United States around 61 workers per 100,000 employees died annually in work-related accidents during the early 20th century. In 2020, the most recent year for which there is data, that figure was 3.4 fatalities — a 94 percent reduction. Progress in workplace safety is particularly good news for men. Holders of the 20 jobs with the highest occupational fatality rates, such as logging and steelworking, are over 90 percent male, and men account for more than 90 percent of workplace fatalities. While even one workplace death is too many, we can be thankful that, as workplace deaths have become rarer, far fewer children lose their fathers to disasters like the one that inspired the first Father’s Day.

A tragic, but rewarding life

While West Virginia may be the birthplace of Father’s Day, the event did not catch on until later; the annual Father’s Day tradition on the third Sunday in June that we know today was inspired by a devoted single father named William Jackson Smart.

William was born in 1842 in Arkansas. He had the unusual experience of fighting on both sides of the Civil War. Arkansas joined the Confederacy, but in 1863 William switched sides to fight for the Union. He was fortunate to survive: one in five Civil War soldiers met an untimely end. In 1865, the year the war ended, he married Elizabeth. She died at age 30 in 1878. Some sources report that the couple had five children, and that at least one died in infancy. What we do know is that William was left to care for three surviving children: an infant daughter, a five-year-old daughter, and a six-year-old son.

In those days, losing a spouse to premature death was a common affair. Data suggests that among white men in William’s birth cohort, nearly 5 percent were widowers during their 40s. Reflecting the higher male mortality during the Civil War, over 10 percent of women in that same demographic were widows in their 40s. Such statistics are not surprising, given how short the typical lifespan was during that era. As late as 1880, the average U.S. life expectancy was only 39 years; today that figure is more than 76 years.

After two years of single fatherhood, William remarried in 1880. His second wife was Ellen, a 29-year-old widow with three children of her own. William and Ellen added seven more children to their household (one of whom died in infancy), and moved their sprawling family from Arkansas to a farm in the Pacific Northwest.

Daughter honored twice widowed dad

William’s children from his first marriage and his stepchildren were grown when he became a widower for the second time. When Ellen died in 1898, William was left to raise their 16-year-old daughter Sonora and five sons: a 15-year-old, 12-year-old twins, a 10-year-old, and a 7-year-old. Sonora may have helped him take care of her younger brothers initially, but when she married the following year, William was left to raise the five boys on his own.

William rose to the challenge. Sonora said admiringly of her father: “This role he performed with courage and selflessness until we were all in homes of our own.”

Starting in 1909, as Mother’s Day — a holiday with its own tragic backstory — grew in popularity, Sonora worked to popularize a complementary Father’s Day to be celebrated around the date of her father’s birthday. She partnered with businesses, ranging from menswear manufacturers to greeting card trade groups, and spent decades lobbying for the holiday’s official recognition — which finally arrived in 1972.

The holiday’s heartrending beginnings highlight how much more difficult fatherhood often was in the past, when high rates of premature death killed many fathers and made others into widowers left to raise children on their own. This Father’s Day, appreciate the progress that has given fathers more years with their families, alive and well.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 6/23/2022.

Has anything changed the world more than the internet? South Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang thinks so. He would argue that one invention—an engine of liberation—has had a far more powerful effect on daily lives. He means the washing machine, of course, which the late Hans Rosling called the greatest invention of the industrial revolution. It freed women from the chore of laundry—or at least from spending one full day a week every week doing it.

As a result, Americans now lose less than two hours a week to the task, and today a greater proportion of poor US households own washing machines than average American households did back in the 1970s. While washing machines are far from being the only reason that women’s options have multiplied in the West, they have certainly helped. “Without the washing machine,” claims Chang, “the scale of change in the role of women in society and in family dynamics would not have been nearly as dramatic.”

The change is ongoing. Thanks to economic growth and rapidly declining global poverty, more women own or have access to washing machines than ever before. The International Energy Agency estimates that, in 2021, over 50 percent of households worldwide owned one. That means the market for washing machines has significant room to grow—and that there is a vast amount of latent human potential still out there, yet to be unleashed.

Take China, home to the greatest escape from poverty of all time, when economic liberalization freed hundreds of millions from penury. In 1981, less than 10 per cent of urban Chinese households had a washing machine (as approximated by the number of sets per hundred households). But by 2011, 97.05 per cent did. In 1985, less than 5 per cent of rural Chinese households had a washing machine, partly because of the expense, but also because they lacked access to electricity. By 2011, 62.57 per cent owned a machine. Thus possession of a washing machine is a useful indicator, not only of China’s tremendous progress, but of the narrowing gap between rural and urban areas.

It’s a slightly different story in India, where liberalizing economic reforms didn’t begin until 1992, rather later than in China. In 2024, around 20 per cent of Indian households owned a washing machine. As with China, urban households are better off, with 40 percent owning a washing machine versus 11 percent in rural areas. That means many women still do the laundry by hand, pounding and scrubbing for hours, in some cases with no running water. Nonetheless, movement is in the right direction. As India’s economy grows and poverty declines, more women will be able to ditch the dirty washing.

We have come a long way since Bendix Home Appliances patented the first automatic washing machine for domestic use in 1937. As a Bendix ad in Life magazine put it in 1950, “washday slavery became obsolete in just 13 years” for American women. In 2007, Panasonic launched laundry machines with a sterilization mechanism designed specifically to address Chinese consumers’ priorities and successfully increased its market share in the country.

It is important to note what is at the root of this progress. Not only has competition and the profit motive incentivized the washing machine’s invention, it is the capitalist drive that is ensuring ongoing marketing to new customers in developing countries. Innovation stagnates under socialist systems, but capitalism has created more life-transforming innovations than any other economic system and sown the greatest rise in living standards in history.

Africa remains the continent with the worst record on economic freedom, as well as being the poorest continent with the least access to time-saving technologies. But even in Africa, the vicious cycle is breaking and capitalism is slowly helping to alleviate poverty. Washing machine ownership might be low, but most Africans are optimistic about their economic future and possibilities.

Thus today, washing machines are still doing the work they were doing 80 years ago – which isn’t just cleaning clothes. These juddering boxes are life-transforming technologies that allow women to put their time and labor to more constructive use. And as ownership sweeps across the world, we can also track the progress of economic freedom.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 4/28/2017.

In his book Enlightenment Now, Harvard University professor Steven Pinker recounts how technology helped get boys off the farm and into the classroom. He quotes a tractor advertisement from 1921:

By investing in a Case Tractor and Ground Detour Plow and Harrow outfit now, your boy can get his schooling without interruption, and the Spring work will not suffer by his absence. Keep the boy in school—and let a Case Kerosene Tractor take his place in the field. You’ll never regret either investment.

As more farms adopted efficiency-enhancing agricultural devices like kerosene tractors, more boys attended school instead of working the fields. For girls, the huge time savings brought on by labor-saving household devices played a similar role. As running water, electricity, washing machines, and other modern conveniences spread, time spent on housework plummeted. Pinker’s book also contains a telling chart documenting the change.

Most of the work replaced by those technologies had traditionally fallen to mothers—and to their daughters. The time freed up by innovation enabled more girls to attend school.

Washing machines and tractors have accomplished more than just cleaning clothes and plowing fields. They also freed America’s children to receive an education.

Today, there are still children kept from school by household labor requirements. The burden disproportionately falls on girls. According to the United Nations, data from 42 countries show that rural girls are more likely to be out of school than rural boys. In rural Sub-Saharan Africa, the U.N. data also shows that girls often spend more time gathering wood and water than boys—time that could be spent in a classroom instead.

Fortunately, access to running water and electricity is rapidly spreading across the globe. As more households gain access to modern technologies, more children will leave behind backbreaking physical labor for school books and studying.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 7/2/2018.

Has humanity made progress? With so many serious problems, it is easy to get the impression that our species is hopeless. Many people view history as one long tale of decay and degeneration since some lost, idealized golden age.

But there has been much remarkable, measurable improvement—from rising life expectancy and literacy rates to declining global poverty. (Explore the evidence for yourself). Today, material abundance is more widespread than our ancestors could have dreamed. And there has been moral progress too. Slavery and torture, once widely accepted, are today almost universally reviled.

Where did all this progress come from? Certain places, at certain times in history, have contributed disproportionately to progress and innovation. Change is a constant, but progress is not. Studying the past may hold the secret to fostering innovation in the present. To that end, I wrote a book titled Centers of Progress: 40 Cities that Changed the World, exploring the places that shaped modern life.

The origin points of the ideas, discoveries, and inventions that built the modern world were far from evenly or randomly dispersed throughout the globe. Instead, they tended to emerge from cities, even in time periods when most of the human population lived in rural areas. In fact, even before anything that could be called a city by modern standards existed, progress originated from the closest equivalents that did exist at the time. Why is that?

“Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace,” urban economist Edward Glaeser opined in his book The Triumph of the City. Of course, he was hardly the first to observe that positive change often emanates from cities. As Adam Smith noted in 1776, “the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country.”

One of the reasons that progress tends to emerge from cities is, simply, people. Wherever more people gather together to “truck, barter, and exchange,” in Smith’s words, that increases their potential to engage in productive exchange, discussion, debate, collaboration, and competition with each other. Cities’ higher populations allow for a finer division of labor, more specialization, and greater efficiencies in production. Not to mention, more minds working together to solve problems. As the writer Matt Ridley notes in the foreword he kindly wrote for Centers of Progress, “Progress is a team sport, not an individual pursuit. It is a collaborative, collective thing, done between brains more than inside them.”

A higher population is sufficient to explain why progress often emerges from cities, but, of course, not all cities become major innovation centers. Progress may be a team sport, but why do certain cities seem to provide ideal playing conditions, and not others?

That brings us to the next thing that most centers of progress share, besides being relatively populous: peace. That makes sense, because if a place is plagued by violence and discord then it is hard for the people there to focus on anything other than survival, and there is little incentive to be productive since any wealth is likely to be looted or destroyed. Smith recognized this truth, and noted that cities, historically, sometimes offered more security from violence than the countryside:

Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were in this manner established in cities, at a time when the occupiers of land in the country, were exposed to every sort of violence. But men in this defenceless state naturally content themselves with their necessary subsistence; because, to acquire more, might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition, and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the conveniencies and elegancies of life. That industry, therefore, which aims at something more than necessary subsistence, was established in cities long before it was commonly practised by the occupiers of land in the country. […] Whatever stock, therefore, accumulated in the hands of the industrious part of the inhabitants of the country, naturally took refuge in cities, as the only sanctuaries in which it could be secure to the person that acquired it.

Of course, not all cities were or are peaceful. Consider Smith’s own city: Edinburgh. At times, the city was far from stable. But the relatively unkempt and inhospitable locale emerged from a century of instability to take the world by storm. Scotland in the 18th century had just undergone decades of political and economic turmoil. Disruption was caused by the House of Orange’s ousting of the House of Stuart, the Jacobite Rebellions, the failed and costly colonial Darien Scheme, famine, and the 1707 Union of Scotland and England. It was only after things settled down and the city came to enjoy a period of relative peace and stability that Edinburgh rose to reach its potential. Edinburgh was an improbable center of progress. But Edinburgh proves what people can accomplish, given the right conditions.

During the Scottish Enlightenment centered in Edinburgh, Adam Smith was far from the only innovative thinker in the city. Edinburgh’s ability to cultivate innovators in every arena of human achievement, from the arts to the sciences, seemed almost magical.

Edinburgh gave the world so many groundbreaking artists that the French writer Voltaire opined in 1762 that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.” Edinburgh gave humanity artistic pioneers from the novelist Sir Walter Scott, often called the father of the historical novel, to the architect Robert Adam who, together with his brother James, developed the “Adam style,” which evolved into the so‐​called “Federal style” in the United States after Independence.

And then there were the scientists. Thomas Jefferson, in 1789, wrote, “So far as science is concerned, no place in the world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh.” The Edinburger geologist James Hutton developed many of the fundamental principles of his discipline. The chemist and physicist Joseph Black, who studied at the University of Edinburgh, discovered carbon dioxide, magnesium, and the important thermodynamic concepts of latent heat and specific heat. The anatomist Alexander Monro Secondus became the first person to detail the human lymphatic system. Sir James Young Simpson, admitted to the University of Edinburgh at the young age of fourteen, went on to develop chloroform anesthesia.

Two of the greatest gifts that Edinburgh gave humanity were empiricism and economics. The influential philosopher David Hume was among the early advocates of empiricism and is sometimes called the father of philosophical skepticism. And by creating the field of economics, Smith helped humanity to think about policies that enhance prosperity. Those policies, including free trade and economic freedom that Smith advocated, have since helped to raise living standards to heights that would be unimaginable to Smith and his contemporaries.

That brings us to the last but by no means least secret ingredient of progress. Freedom. Centers of progress during their creative peak tend to be relatively free and open for their era. That makes sense because simply having a large population is not going to lead to progress if that population lacks the freedom to experiment, to debate new propositions, and to work together for their mutual benefit. Perhaps the biggest reason why cities produce so much progress is that city dwellers have often enjoyed more freedom than their rural counterparts. Medieval serfs fleeing feudal lands to gain freedom in cities inspired the German saying “stadtluft macht frei” (city air makes you free).

That adage referred to laws granting serfs liberty after a year and a day of urban residency. But the phrase arguably has a wider application. Cities have often served as havens of freedom for innovators and anyone stifled by the stricter norms and more limited choices common in smaller communities. Edinburgh was notable for its atmosphere of intellectual freedom, allowing thinkers to debate a wide diversity of controversial ideas in its many reading societies and pubs.

Of course, cities are not always free. Authoritarian states sometimes see laxer enforcement of their draconian laws in remote areas, and Smith himself viewed rural life as in some ways less encumbered by constraining rules and regulations than city life. But as philosophy professor Kyle Swan previously noted for Adam Smith Works:

Without denying the charms and attractions Smith highlights in country living, let’s not forget what’s on offer in our cities: a significantly broader range of choices! Diverse restaurants and untold many other services and recreations, groups of people who like the same peculiar things that you like, and those with similar backgrounds and interests and activities to pursue with them — cities are (positive) freedom enhancing.

The same secret ingredients of progress—people, peace, and freedom—that helped Edinburgh to flourish during Smith’s day can be observed again and again throughout history in the places that became key centers of innovation. Consider Paris.

As the capital of France, Paris attracted a large population and became an important economic and cultural hub. But it was an unusual spirit of freedom that allowed the city to make its greatest contributions to human progress. Much like the reading societies and pubs of Smith’s Edinburgh, the salons and coffeehouses of 18th‐​century Paris provided a place for intellectual discourse where the philosophes birthed the so‐​called Age of Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was a movement that promoted the values of reason, evidence‐​based knowledge, free inquiry, individual liberty, humanism, limited government, and the separation of church and state. In Parisian salons, nobles and other wealthy financiers intermingled with artists, writers, and philosophers seeking financial patronage and opportunities to discuss and disseminate their work. The gatherings gave controversial philosophers, who would have been denied the intellectual freedom to explore their ideas elsewhere, the liberty to develop their thoughts.

Influential Parisian and Paris‐ based thinkers of the period included the Baron de Montesquieu, who advocated the then‐​groundbreaking idea of the separation of government powers and the writer Denis Diderot, the creator of the first general‐​purpose encyclopedia, as well the Genevan expat Jean‐​Jacques Rousseau. While sometimes considered a counter‐​Enlightenment figure because of his skepticism of modern commercial society and romanticized view of primitive existence, Rousseau also helped to spread skepticism toward monarchy and the idea that kings had a “divine right” to rule over others.

The salons were famous for sophisticated conversations and intense debates; however, it was letter‐​writing that gave the philosophes’ ideas a wide reach. A community of intellectuals that spanned much of the Western world—known as the Republic of Letters—increasingly engaged in the exchanges of ideas that began in Parisian salons. Thus, the Enlightenment movement based in Paris helped spur similar radical experiments in thought elsewhere, including the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. Smith’s many exchanges of ideas with the people of Paris, including during his 1766 visit to the city when he dined with Diderot and other luminaries, proved pivotal to his own intellectual development.

And then there was Voltaire, sometimes called the single most influential figure of the Enlightenment. Although Parisian by birth, Voltaire spent relatively little time in Paris because of frequent exiles occasioned by the ire of French authorities. Voltaire’s time hiding out in London, for example, enabled him to translate the works of the political philosopher and “father of liberalism” John Locke, as well as the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton. While Voltaire’s critiques of existing institutions and norms pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse beyond even what would be tolerated in Paris, his Parisian upbringing and education likely helped to cultivate the devotion to freethinking that would come to define his life.

By allowing for an unusual degree of intellectual liberty and providing a home base for the Enlightenment and the far‐​ranging Republic of Letters, Paris helped spread new ideas that would ultimately give rise to new forms of government—including modern liberal democracy.

Surveying the cities, such as Edinburgh and Paris, that built the modern world reveals that when people live in peace and freedom, their potential to bring about positive change increases. Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity. I hope that you will consider joining me on a journey through the book’s pages to some of history’s greatest centers of progress, and that doing so sparks many intelligent discussions, debates, and inquiries in the Smithian tradition about the causes of progress and wealth.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 3/14/2024.

Affordability fears, talk of a “K-shaped” economy, and claims of a new Gilded Age have pushed inequality to the center of today’s policy debates. Calls for a worldwide wealth tax and other unprecedented measures are not treated as radical but as inevitable—across academia, non-profits, the press, and international organizations, including the United Nations.

The COVID-19 pandemic seemed to clinch the case. As economies contracted and progress in poorer countries stalled, it was easy to assume that decades of convergence between developed and developing countries had come to an end. The authors of one Oxfam paper, for example, proclaimed during the pandemic that “unparalleled action [is] needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID-19.”

New research suggests a more nuanced reality. The updated Inequality of Human Progress Index assesses how the pandemic affected progress toward a more prosperous and equal world.

The pandemic clearly slowed improvement in global living standards and interrupted the pace at which countries were becoming more equal. It did not, however, cancel out the long-term, positive trends. Even under the strain of COVID-19, its attendant lockdowns, and other forceful policy responses, global inequality across key measures of well-being remained lower than it was a generation ago.

The index looks beyond income alone. It measures inequality across eight dimensions that shape everyday life, including lifespan, child survival, nutrition, education, internet access, environmental safety, income, and political freedom. The index, which I co-authored with George Mason University economist Vincent Geloso, seeks to offer a fuller view of gaps in global development, taking into account more aspects of human well-being than any prior index of inequality.

The data show a substantial decline in global inequality over the past three decades as rising prosperity allowed poor countries to narrow gaps with rich ones. That pattern held through 2019. During the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, progress slowed sharply and, in some areas, stalled or modestly reversed. Yet the earlier gains were not erased.

This distinction is important. COVID-19 was a severe shock. Life expectancy fell worldwide. School closures disrupted education. Economic activity and international trade declined, with especially devastating effects on low-income countries. The index reflects these setbacks. Inequality stopped falling at its earlier pace and, in some measures, edged upward slightly after years of progress. Still, the overall level of global inequality remained far below where it stood in the 1990s.

In a few areas, improvement continued even during the crisis. Internet access expanded rapidly, especially in poorer countries, reducing inequality in access to information to its lowest level on record. Faster regulatory approvals amid the pandemic helped bring more people online. In Kenya, for example, Alphabet’s high-altitude internet balloons were finally cleared in 2020, allowing rural areas to gain internet access for the first time. The project had been stalled in regulatory review for nearly two years before the crisis prompted action.

Not all the data were encouraging. Inequality in political liberty ticked up during the pandemic as many countries took a turn toward greater authoritarianism. Even with the long-term shift toward electoral democracy intact, the setback shows the importance of protecting political liberty during emergencies.

For all the turmoil, the damage across different measures of well-being was thankfully limited.

These findings complicate popular claims that the world is experiencing a runaway increase in inequality. Calls for a global wealth tax, massive new aid commitments, or other significant expansions of state redistribution often rest on the premise that trade and free enterprise have failed to deliver shared gains. The data suggest otherwise.

If anything, the pandemic highlighted how sensitive progress can be to disruptions in markets. Countries with greater economic freedom generally proved more resilient. In contrast, prolonged lockdowns and restrictions often imposed heavy costs on poorer populations, particularly in countries where remote work and online schooling were not viable options for most people.

The broader lesson is that global convergence is neither automatic nor guaranteed, but instead depends on certain conditions such as undisturbed markets, even as long-term progress has proven more robust than critics often assume.

Mistaken narratives about global inequality have real consequences. They shape public opinion and influence policymakers to embrace sweeping interventions. A more accurate assessment of recent history suggests a need for caution.

COVID-19 tested the global economy in ways few events in modern history have. It slowed human progress and exposed vulnerabilities. At the same time, it demonstrated the durability of the long-term trend toward lower global inequality. Preserving and strengthening the policies and institutions that made that progress possible, including economic and political freedoms, remains a better bet than assuming they have already failed. The gains of recent decades have left the world both better off and more equal.

This article was published in the Orange County Register on 2/1/2026.

A 1962 episode of the sitcom the Dick Van Dyke Show centers around a couple struggling to decide what to name their first child. Much of the comedy remains accessible to a modern audience. But one part of the episode that is confusing to a modern viewer occurs toward the beginning, when actress Mary Tyler Moore’s character conveys to Dick Van Dyke’s character, her husband, that she is pregnant. A shortened version of the scene’s script follows.

Her: “I just came from the doctor.”

Him: “Doctor? What happened?”

Her: “Well, I drove down this morning . . .”

Him: “What, in the car? Alone? On the highway? You smashed into somebody. You’ve had an accident. [. . .] Anyway, you’re alright? Nobody was hurt?”

Her: “Well, the rabbit died.”

Him: “Are—you—oh my gosh.”

The husband immediately recognized the meaning of the cryptic (to modern ears) words “the rabbit died” and knew that his wife was pregnant. A person today might assume that this must be some kind of secret code that the couple decided on in advance. But just about everyone in the United States in the 1960s would have understood those three words—“the rabbit died”—to indicate pregnancy. It was a common saying at the time. And the phrase’s origins are rather gruesome.

Once, taking a pregnancy test literally involved sacrificing the lives of rabbits. These days, at-home over-the-counter pregnancy tests available at any drugstore require the sacrifice of nothing more than a small disposable object made of plastic that detects the presence of the pregnancy hormone, hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin). But before the invention of these devices, the typical way to test for hCG entailed injecting a live female rabbit with a woman’s urine, waiting a few days, killing the rabbit, dissecting the rabbit, and examining the rabbit’s ovaries. If the slain rabbit’s ovaries were enlarged, indicating exposure to the pregnancy hormone, then the test result was positive. If the deceased rabbit’s ovaries were a normal size, then the test result was negative.

While grisly, the rabbit test, which was also sometimes enacted on mice instead of rabbits, was effective—perhaps even 98 percent accurate. It was the first highly accurate method of detecting pregnancy put into widespread use. As his New York Times obituary notes, the inventor of the so-called rabbit test, Dr. Maurice Friedman, even quipped, “The only more reliable test is to wait nine months.” Today’s at-home pregnancy tests are about 99 percent accurate, require no visit to a doctor’s office, and produce results within minutes rather than days. And pregnancy tests today of course no longer require the killing of any fuzzy, long-eared, hopping creatures. Such simple at-home tests were first marketed in the 1960s and widely adopted in the 1970s, as the greater convenience they offered helped them to rapidly replace the rabbit test.

The rabbit test came into use in the 1930s and continued to be used regularly in the early 1960s and occasionally even later. The test was still familiar to the public when, in 1978, an episode of the TV series M*A*S*H depicted the surgeon character Hawkeye performing an ovary surgery on a pet rabbit (without killing it) to learn whether the character Margaret was pregnant.

When Mary Tyler Moore’s character said in 1962 that “the rabbit died,” the audience would have understood her words to be literal: her doctor had likely informed her that she was pregnant based on the results of a test that involved killing and taking apart a rabbit. Because, of course, women did not typically kill and dissect the rabbits themselves. They left a urine sample with a doctor, who would send the sample to a laboratory where the ill-fated rabbits awaited injection, death, and dissection. Then the doctor would inform the patient of the pregnancy test results.

Public confusion regarding how exactly the so-called rabbit test worked led to the widespread misapprehension that the rabbits involved only died if the test result was positive and otherwise survived (like the fortunate fictional rabbit on M*A*S*H). In reality, each test entailed a rabbit’s death, regardless of whether the test result proved positive or negative. But the phrase “the rabbit died” soon became a common euphemism for announcing pregnancy. Even doctors would often notify patients of a positive result by saying “the rabbit died,” although doctors presumably had a better understanding of how the test functioned than did the general public and knew that the rabbit died either way.

According to Washington Post history writer Gillian Brockell, the rabbit test resulted in the killing of at least “tens of thousands of rabbits.” Going down the rabbit hole of history reveals many routine cruelties now thankfully left behind—often rendered obsolete by scientific advances offering more humane alternatives, as in the case of the rabbit test.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 9/29/2023.

Few know the story of the woman who inspired Mother’s Day. Her name was Ann Jarvis, and the many tragedies in her life demonstrate how much more difficult motherhood was in the past and the progress that has been made since.

Ann was born in 1832 in Virginia, and married at age 18. After marrying, Ann had 13 children over the course of 17 years. In that era, prenatal care was almost nonexistent. During the 19th century, about 500 to 1,000 mothers died for every 100,000 births. Giving birth 13 times, as Ann did, meant that she faced between a 6 and 13 percent chance of death. Fortunately, she survived. Today, the maternal mortality rate, while still higher in poor countries than in rich ones, is falling—decreasing from 328 deaths per 100,000 live births in the year 2000 to 197 per 100,000 in 2023, the World Bank’s most recent year of data.

Children also faced fearful survival odds and were often killed by childhood ailments that are now preventable or treatable. Ann’s family was no exception: only four of her children lived to adulthood. Her children died of illnesses such as measles, typhoid, and diphtheria, which are now far less common thanks to vaccines and better sanitation.

The grief of losing nine children is beyond the imagination of most people today. Ann faced better odds than her foremothers in this regard, although she fared worse than the statistical average. The average number of a mother’s children lost to premature death had fallen from three in 1800 to just two in 1850, the year that Ann wed. That figure fell to one child in 1900. Today, thankfully, childhood death is extraordinarily rare in developed countries, where most mothers can expect to see all of their children survive. That progress is ongoing, and has come about thanks to medical advances, improved sanitation, and rising prosperity to fund them—as well as the efforts of people like Ann.

In 1858, while she was pregnant with her sixth child, Ann began organizing women’s clubs with the goal of reducing childhood death. The clubs raised funds to buy medicine for local children, hired assistants for mothers suffering from tuberculosis, brought supplies to sick quarantining households to prevent the spread of disease, and more. “The clubs inspected food and milk for contamination—long before governments took on such tasks—and they visited homes to teach mothers how to improve sanitation. Ann became a popular speaker, addressing subjects [such as] ‘Great Value of Hygiene for Women and Children.’”

Ann helped popularize the practice of boiling drinking water in her community, preventing cases of the often‐​deadly waterborne illnesses (such as tuberculosis and typhoid fever) that ravaged humanity before widespread chlorination.

Despite the demands of childrearing and her volunteer work on behalf of mothers and children, Ann also found time to organize efforts during the Civil War to treat wounded soldiers from both sides. A devout Methodist, Ann was also active in her religious community and taught Sunday School lessons.

Anna, one of Ann’s four children to make it to adulthood, created Mother’s Day in Ann’s honor. She was inspired by something Ann had said during Sunday School: “I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial ‘mother’s day’ commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life. She is entitled to it.”

Given her tireless work to improve maternal and childhood health, Ann certainly deserves credit. This Mother’s Day, despite the problems that remain, take a moment to appreciate progress in the fight against premature death for mothers and their children.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 5/8/2022.

Donald Cardwell, a British historian of science and technology, famously observed that “no nation has been very creative for more than an historically short period.” Known as Cardwell’s Law, this dictum haunts many people concerned about the future of innovation. Can the United States, or any other country, break free of the cage of Cardwell’s Law and create an environment that fosters innovation indefinitely?

To better understand this challenge, it helps to zoom in from the level of nations to that of cities, which often function as engines of innovation. While intended to describe whole societies, Cardwell’s Law scales down well to the level of individual urban centers. After all, city-states were the first states and served as the sites of institutional experimentation. And for a long time, it was cities, not larger nations, that commanded loyalty.

A grim message from my otherwise uplifting book, Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World is that a city’s creative peak tends to be—as Cardwell noted—brief. As the British science writer Matt Ridley observed in the foreword to the book, “Global progress depends on a sudden series of bush fires of innovation, bursting into life in unpredictable places, burning fiercely, and then dying rapidly.”

Are there any exceptions to that rule? Have any cities managed to maintain longer-than-expected golden ages of innovation, and what can we learn from them?

The cities from earlier eras that I profiled in my book tend to be featured for their achievements over longer periods of time. That is, unfortunately, because in the distant past, progress was often painfully slow—not because someone had cracked the code to break Cardwell’s Law.

Writing, for example, developed over multiple generations, as simple pictographs that accountants invented for record-keeping purposes evolved into a symbolic script and eventually into highly abstract, cuneiform characters. The birthplace of writing was Uruk, an ancient Sumerian city. The most noteworthy part of Uruk’s history lasted for many centuries, but only because the city’s great achievement took generations to accomplish. We should hardly want to emulate a society that advanced at such a pace.

In contrast, when we turn to modern history, the pace of progress accelerates—but the creative window narrows. Manchester, the so-called workshop of the world, led the way during the Industrial Revolution, but only for a few decades. Houston’s heyday helping drive forward space exploration also only lasted a few decades. Today, the youngest living person to have walked on the moon is 89. Tokyo went from being a world capital of technology in the 1980s to decades of economic stagnation. The San Francisco Bay Area that birthed Silicon Valley and the digital revolution has lost its crown, with many technological breakthroughs now occurring elsewhere. In the modern era, the golden age of innovation in any locale tends to last only a few decades, or even less.

To understand why this pattern repeats so consistently, consider the underlying conditions that support—or sabotage—sustained innovation. The economic historian Joel Mokyr, in an illuminating 1993 essay, describes the narrowness of the path that societies must walk to promote creativity, a veritable tightrope where one wrong move can lead to everything crashing down. “In retrospect, the most surprising thing is perhaps that we have come this far,” he concludes.

What causes the downfall of centers of progress, making Cardwell’s Law so seemingly prophetic? While world-changing innovations have come from an extraordinarily diverse set of places, from Song–era Hangzhou to post–World War II New York, sites of creativity almost always share certain key features. It is the loss of those factors that spells their doom. These feature are: conditions of relative peace, openness to new ideas, and economic freedom.

Free enterprise and healthy competition encourage innovation, and the freedom to trade across borders plays an important role by increasing that competition. At the same time, free exchange across borders must not be confused with the total dissolution of borders: vast empires under centralized control tend to stagnate technologically, and complete integration of countries under a global government would in all likelihood be a disaster. A certain type of international competition can be beneficial—just not the kind of rivalry that leads to war.

War redirects creative energies toward making deadlier weapons and away from technologies aimed at improving living standards. And, of course, losing a war can lead to a society’s complete destruction.

Moreover, war prevents innovators from collaborating across borders, and even thinkers within the same country often cannot put their heads together due to the secrecy inherent in war. While some credit WWII with speeding up the creation of the computer, a case can be made that the conflict actually delayed the computer’s invention by preventing collaboration between many innovators, from Konrad Zuse in Berlin to Alan Turing in Great Britain. Even in peacetime, innovation can be stifled when freedom and openness are curtailed.

In short, progress is threatened when peace is lost to war, openness is stifled by the suppression of speech, and freedom is undermined by restrictive or authoritarian laws.

Hong Kong provides a recent and illustrative example of how quickly the conditions for progress can disappear. During its whirlwind economic transformation in the 1960s, Hong Kong rose from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the wealthiest. It accomplished this feat through policies of “noninterventionism”: simply allowing Hong Kongers to freely compete and collaborate to enrich themselves and their society. But the city’s proud tradition of limited government, the rule of law, and freedom has been abruptly extinguished by a harsh and unrelenting crackdown from the Chinese Communist Party.

Despite sobering examples such as that of Hong Kong, there is reason for hope. Centers of progress are often short-lived, but the fact that throughout history most societies remained creative for only a short time should not discourage us. To defy Cardwell’s Law, all that is needed is a clear-eyed willingness to learn from the mistakes of the past and to fiercely protect the conditions needed for further progress.

A version of this article was published by Human Progress on 6/17/2025.

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.