Halloween draws near, and it’s the season for scary stories. I have a true one for you. The gruesome reality of ordinary life throughout much of history, which is the subject of my new book, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past.
Economic history is encapsulated by the famous “hockey-stick chart”: centuries of barely perceptible progress bordering on stagnation, followed by a sudden, dramatic surge in economic growth and real incomes. Yet people often belittle this extraordinary increase in global wealth over the past two and a half centuries.
On social media, memes mocking the idea that rising GDP signifies progress attract thousands of likes, reducing the argument to the deliberately mangled slogan “line go up, means things gooder.” Left-wing French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon made a similar point during a campaign rally that went viral: “I dig a hole, GDP goes up. I fill it in, GDP goes up.” Nor is the critique limited to the left: Vice President JD Vance has questioned whether economic indicators reveal anything about well-being, writing, “Maybe economics is just fake.”
This critique isn’t new. In the 1960s, Robert F. Kennedy famously claimed that GNP “measures everything . . . except that which makes life worthwhile,” since it “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play,” nor “the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages.” It’s an eloquent speech, but it’s misleading.
Many people imagine that those centuries of near stagnation before the hockey-stick chart’s upswing were probably a pretty nice time to be alive. Some lament how much the modern world has supposedly cost us, insisting that before the Industrial Revolution people enjoyed a simpler life rooted in agriculture: a stable, peaceful age of happy villagers in cozy cottages, eating wholesome food straight from the farm, dancing around maypoles as their rosy-cheeked children skipped alongside them. Picture the Shire from The Lord of the Rings, but with taller residents.
Tragically, reality bore no resemblance to this fantasy.
Around half of all children died before adulthood, hunger was common, average life expectancy was in the 30s, and barely 1 in 10 people were literate. Peasants doing subsistence farm work made up most of the population. Most people’s lives were defined by exhausting labor from sunup to sundown, poor hygiene, aching teeth, flea-bitten skin, threadbare clothes, and the stench of improperly disposed human waste, with toxic air blackened by hearth smoke. Most preindustrial people survived on thin gruels and coarse bread, often stale or contaminated, and food scarcity regularly triggered riots.
Contrary to the romantic idea that pre-industrial societies lived in harmony with nature, environmental harm is not a recent phenomenon. Deforestation had depleted much of Europe’s forests by the early modern period, prompting Great Britain to import timber from America. Cities routinely dumped waste into the same rivers that supplied their drinking water, which is one reason alcohol was a daily staple for people of all ages, including children and pregnant women.
Medicine often harmed instead of helped: surgery was primitive and performed with no anesthesia beyond alcohol, doctors didn’t wash their hands between patients, and bloodletting remained standard treatment for nearly any ailment. Even lighting was once a luxury that most ordinary households went without after nightfall.
Where schooling existed at all, it could be brutal, with children often walking miles to one-room schoolhouses where teachers used physical punishment, sometimes followed by a second beating at home. The beating of wives and servants was widely accepted, and children were set to work in the fields as soon as they could walk.
Only with industrialization did people begin to seriously question many of these long-accepted cruelties and see them fade away.
Those who lived and died on one side of the hockey-stick chart’s upswing inhabited a completely different world than those on the other side. The Grim Old Days shows just how life-changing that growth has been.
As I came close to finishing this book, my toddler contracted scarlet fever, once a serious illness that often proved lethal to children. I am beyond grateful that my own children were born into a world with antibiotics and countless other marvels beyond our ancestors’ wildest dreams.
A line going up on a chart can represent children living to celebrate more birthdays, including mine. More time with loved ones. More years with your grandchildren. Practically everything that people value, from children’s health and environmental stewardship to self-reported happiness, correlates positively with GDP. And the world is not only richer, but freer: trends that are likely related.
Prosperity helped create a world where people marry for love rather than economic necessity, spend their childhoods playing and learning instead of toiling in the fields, and pursue work and hobbies of their own choosing. As the existential psychologist Clay Routledge notes, most people tend to find meaning “by turning outward and striving to make positive contributions to the world through our relationships, work, and other activities.” Individuals in affluent postindustrial societies enjoy unprecedented freedom to do just that.
That doesn’t mean the world is perfect today. Far from it. But industrialization didn’t bring hardship into the world; hardship was already there. Increasingly, economic growth has given us the means to alleviate it.
Halloween will be over in a few days, but the frightening true tales in The Grim Old Days don’t end with the season; they’re simply the story of ordinary life until very recently. Modern prosperity and freedom are a remarkably recent, fragile achievement. The real fright this Halloween is how easily we forget the harsh reality of the grim old days.
The book
The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past is out now. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joel Mokyr calls it “mandatory reading” for growth skeptics, Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist George Will calls it “a powerful demolition of capitalism’s critics,” and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker says “every student and intellectually curious person should read it.” Order it from the Cato Store, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Bookshop.org. And if you’re in Washington, DC, join me on November 5 for a Cato Institute Book Forum discussion of the book.
Love your work. I’m a 78 year old optimist. My grandparents and parents lived the hard life you speak of. Wonderful people. Buying the book as soon as I send this. People in the US, 4% of world population, are the happiest. The vast majority are fine.
The complainers get the press. John
Actually, humans were happiest and most successful in the 99% of our history when we were hunter-gatherers. Much as our close relations chimps and gorillas are so successfully now. The random and uncontrollable effects of technological developments has produced amazing capabilities and lots of fun.
But they also mean we live in numbers and concentrations that are immensely emotionally, socially and politically destructive. The WMD, narcotics, pandemics etc we have also produced mean we will not survive this century