‘Economic growth isn’t just an abstraction. It’s not just a line going up on a chart. Economic growth is a revolutionary transformation in the living standards of everyday people.’
Why do so many people – on the Right as well as the Left – look back fondly on a pre-industrial world they would never actually want to live in?
This week on The Capitalist, I spoke to Chelsea Follett of the Cato Institute about her new book, ‘The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past’, which will be published next month. It sets out what life was really like before modern economic growth: famine every few years, streets that doubled as open sewers and a world in which parents put their surviving children to work instead of playing with them.
We discussed why the fantasy of cosy village life is so persistent and how it feeds today’s scepticism about growth and AI. We also covered why the pre-industrial world was no environmental idyll, and what passed for entertainment when an execution was a family day out. Plus, the Dutch mob who killed and ate their prime minister in 1672.
Below, you’ll find some short excerpts from our conversation.
Marc Sidwell
Editor, CapX
Why growth isn’t just a line on a chart:
‘AI is often said to hold the potential of being the next industrial revolution. And how people view that is going to depend on what they think the effects were of the first Industrial Revolution on the living standards of everyday people. If they have a very negative view of the Industrial Revolution, and believe that it may have helped a few industrialists become wealthy but was basically a wash in terms of living standards for typical people – or even worsened the living conditions for the average worker – then they’re going to have a lot of scepticism toward AI, toward new technologies… I think that comes at least in part out of people not recognising that economic growth isn’t just an abstraction. It’s not just a line going up on a chart. Economic growth is a revolutionary transformation in the living standards of everyday people.’
Nostalgia on the Right and the Left:
‘All those who fantasise – whether it’s on the far Right about a return to feudalism, or on the far Left, those who advocate for degrowth and shrinking the economy and returning to this simpler, more sustainable way of life that they imagine characterised the world of our ancestors – these fantasies bear no resemblance to the reality.’
Hobbits in the Shire?:
‘There is this idea in the popular imagination that prior to industrialisation, people were essentially like hobbits in the Shire. They were in these happy, peaceful villages, breathing clean air, eating wholesome food in these warm, close-knit communities… And then the dark smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution, the satanic mills, as the poets said, came and disrupted this wonderful Eden-esque paradise… This, of course, cannot be farther from the truth. There were many terrible things about living conditions during industrialisation, but they were pre-existing. They were not new horrors that first arose with the construction of factories.’
The pre-industrial world wasn’t green:
‘Humanity has been altering our natural environment from the very beginning… If you look at the Domesday survey in 1086, at that point in time, 15% of England was covered by forest. But by 1340, that had fallen to 6%… Things like hunting were regulated, but it was entirely motivated by human relations. In the case of hunting, keeping the peasants in their place and not allowing them to hunt game that was reserved for the nobility was the primary motivation. Protecting wildlife did not even enter their minds.’
Poor but happy?:
‘People who say, well, they were poor, yes, they were materially worse off, but they had these warm, loving families, fail to recognise the actual reality of violence, mistreatment, death… In the past, life was much more isolated. And within your tiny village, there might not be very many partner choices. The people who were available to wed might all either be your first cousins… or they might have very large age gaps, or they might just be completely incompatible personality-wise with you… Many marriages were motivated primarily by economic necessity. So these were not necessarily these warm, wonderful families that we like to imagine today.’
No beating your wife after 9pm:
‘In 1595, there was a law in England that I’m going to read. It said: “No man shall after the hour of nine at the night keep any rule whereby any such sudden outcry be made in the still of the night, as making any affray, or beating his wife or servants.” In other words, no beating your wife or servant after 9pm. That was a noise regulation. It appeared in a list of laws that also included a rule against using a hammer after 9pm. Because beating your wife until she screamed was considered as ordinary as using a hammer. But if you were civilised, you wouldn’t do that after 9pm. You’d stop at 8.59 so that your neighbours could get some sleep.’
We’ve forgotten how bad it was:
‘I think that we have not only eliminated many of the problems of the past, but we have also eliminated the memory of those problems. People mostly do not recognise just how poor, how sickly, how violent, how devastating in so many different domains the past truly was… This book, I hope, will help people to recognise just how unusual our current moment in time is, and how fragile, perhaps, our anomalous high standard of living truly is, so that they never take their lot for granted.’
