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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is humbug.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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