Life before humanity’s Great Acceleration: My interview with Chelsea Follet

My guest this episode is Chelsea Follett. Chelsea is a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, where she works with HumanProgress.org. She is also the author of the Past Imperfect Substack and her new book, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past, which challenges our tendency to romanticize the past by revealing the harsh realities of life before industrialization.

Today, we’ll discuss the book, exploring a world that technological progress and economic growth have allowed us to escape.

In this episode:

* Romanticizing the pre-industrial past (0:54)

* Life before the great enrichment (5:05)

* But what about the royalty? (13:27)

* Nostalgia and the case against growth (21:52)

* Making the case for growth (26:52)

* How we treated people, animals, and nature (32:04)

* The beauty of the past without its horrors (36:39)

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)

But here are some edited highlights from the chat:

On misconceptions about the Industrial Revolution…

Even if you ignore the extremes and just look at the broad center of the political spectrum, if you ask the average person, what was the effect of the Industrial Revolution on the living standards of an average person? The picture they will paint for you is not a pretty one. They will probably tell you that the Industrial Revolution caused terrible living conditions, worker exploitation, pollution, and all manner of other hardships.

Not that long ago, on the Joe Rogan podcast, our vice president JD Vance made the comparison, like everyone else does, it’s cliche at this point, between the AI revolution and the Industrial Revolution. And he claimed that if we want to avoid what was worst, his word, of the Industrial Revolution from recurring during the AI revolution, we need strong labor unions, anti-monopoly measures, essentially more government intervention into the economy. And I don’t think he is expressing an unusual view when he thinks of the Industrial Revolution and his mind immediately goes to these terrible working and living conditions that no modern person would accept. But we have to remember those conditions were largely preexisting.

On the improvement of diets…

The diets of the past, which are so romanticized both by the MAHA movement and other people, this idea that in the past people ate these wholesome, chemical-free diets, all organic. Unfortunately, this romanticized view would shock our ancestors, whose food was so bland that they fought wars and would kill and die over spices that we now take for granted. And that’s when they had food at all.

Every three or four years, a famine could occur and the years of famine were terrible even in the relatively well off areas of the world, such as Western Europe. For example, in Burgundy, France, at one point, a famine occurred that was said to have taken the lives of 10,000 families, and those that survived were said to have turned to eating grass and wild plants in the fields, and even to eating human flesh of those who had already succumbed to malnourishment. In fact, we see again and again accounts of famine-induced cannibalism in different parts of the world.

On the hardships of royalty…

You alluded to the lives of the wealthy. Even if you were a member of the small elite, and remember again, 80 to 90 percent of the population would have been subsistence farmers. But even if you managed to win the lottery and be born among the nobility, you still would have wine freeze at your table. You still would lose half of your children because being a prince or princess would not spare you from the astronomical rates of childhood death in the past. You would still face a higher mortality rate at every age, indeed.

There is another myth that rates of mortality in the past were only so much higher because of high rates of child mortality. In reality, in the pre-industrial past, mortality rates were higher at every age group. Although it is true that children face the worst odds of anyone. And if you were a member of the nobility or even the royalty, we must recall again that even the palace of Versailles lacked restrooms. Human waste would accumulate in the corridors. There is a firsthand account of the Queen’s gentleman usher letting go of her hand to go urinate on a wall hanging.

On the case against growth…

Sadly, if you look at polling of the general population, you will see that a majority of people, for example, oppose data center construction in their community. And in the DC area where we both reside, regulation has been preventing the entry of self-driving cars that are operating just fine in other areas of the country and that hold the potential to save many of the nearly 40,000 lives that are lost every year to traffic accidents. Progress is being held back by these government barriers because, as you point out, many people do not see economic growth as a particularly important goal.

If the AI revolution is a new industrial revolution, that is incredible. What that would mean, if true, is that our descendants, our great-grandchildren, will look back at the 2020s with the same kind of horror and disgust and disbelief with which we look back on the pre-industrial age because their own standard o