Chelsea Follett, Managing Editor of Human Progress at the Cato Institute and author of Centers of Progress, joins Jim O'Shaughnessy to discuss her forthcoming book The Grim Old Days. Follett challenges the widespread nostalgia for pre-industrial times by documenting the harsh realities of historical life.

The conversation explores why people consistently romanticize the past despite overwhelming evidence that life has dramatically improved. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau's contradictory teachings in Emile to modern doomsday predictions, they examine humanity's psychological bias toward imagining better times in earlier eras.

Drawing from historical examples and data, they discuss how distributed value networks and intellectual freedom have driven progress, while centralized authority has often stifled innovation. The discussion touches on everything from medieval drinking habits to modern AI anxieties, illustrating recurring patterns in human responses to change.

The Psychological Roots of Historical Nostalgia

Humans have consistently pined for earlier eras throughout history, with examples found even in the Old Testament: 'say not thou, why were the former days better than these?'

Jean-Jacques Rousseau exemplified this contradiction - while writing Emile about natural child-rearing, he abandoned all five of his children to orphanages with extremely high death rates

Most people don't realize how bad the past was because they've never been told that story of history, instead comparing today's problems to an imagined utopia

The Brutal Reality of Pre-Industrial Childhood and Death

Emergency C-sections illustrate modern medical progress - Follett's daughter survived a quadruple nuchal cord that would have been fatal in pre-industrial times

Half or more of children were statistically not expected to survive to adulthood, making child loss extremely normal for most ancestors

People at every age had worse survival chances than today - even a 60-year-old's likelihood of reaching 70 was significantly lower in the past

Bill Bryson's At Home illustrates how a president's son died from sepsis after getting a sliver playing tennis, highlighting the absence of antibiotics

Violence, Crime, and Daily Brutality in Historical Life

Early modern London had violent crime rates worse than current US rates, with very low clearance rates for catching criminals

A 1595 London law stated: 'no man shall after the hour of nine at the night...make any affray or beating his wife or servants' - treating spousal abuse as a noise ordinance

People could be executed for minor crimes like trespassing or small theft, yet crime rates remained extremely high despite harsh punishments

Family violence was normalized - beating spouses, children, servants, and employees was completely acceptable throughout most of history

The Underappreciated Revolutions in Daily Comfort

Air conditioning is the most underrated advancement - deaths from extreme heat have dropped despite rising average temperatures

Medieval beds were often just hay stuffed into cloth sacks, and furniture was so rare that 'movable' was the common term for what we call furniture

Even wealthy people would brag about owning couches in letters, with recipients not knowing what was being described

Most ancestors were constantly inebriated - the German Order of Temperance in 1600 limited members to only 14 glasses of wine daily

Failed Doomsday Predictions and Scientific Orthodoxy

Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb predicted billions would starve within a decade of his 1974 Congressional testimony, yet global poverty has collapsed from 2+ billion to under 800 million

Julian Simon's bet with Ehrlich in The Ultimate Resource proved commodity prices would fall, not rise - Ehrlich lost but continued promoting the same theories

William Miller predicted the world would end in 1843 with 100,000 followers, then revised to 1844 when wrong - this became Seventh-day Adventism with 19 million current followers

Greta Thunberg quietly deleted a doomsday tweet when her predicted date passed, illustrating how failed predictions don't update beliefs

Distributed Networks vs Centralized Authority in Innovation

Germany's fragmented political structure allowed Gutenberg's printing revolution while China's centralized Song dynasty suppressed the same technology

Centers of Progress examines how cities like Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age fostered innovation through openness to diverse viewpoints, hosting thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to John Locke

Coffee houses revolutionized society by replacing constant inebriation with caffeine-fueled intellectual exchange, leading to innovations like Lloyd's of London insurance pricing

The Republic of Letters enabled Enlightenment progress through distributed intellectual networks before being captured by centralized institutions like the Royal Society

Modern Progress Threats and the Path Forward

AI fears follow historical patterns - photography threatened portrait artists, radio was said to poison the air with dead birds shown around towers

Incumbent businesses consistently block innovation - rideshare companies now oppose self-driving cars just as taxi companies once opposed ridesharing

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch supports rational optimism - there will always be problems, but better solutions can be developed

Progress requires both economic freedom for innovation and social freedom for intellectual exchange - 'Progress is the exception, not the rule' throughout history - Chelsea