A History of Optimism

For almost all of history, families buried half their children and few could read, until people changed that in the last two centuries.

Anne, the last Stuart to rule Britain, was pregnant at least seventeen times.11 Anne, Queen of Great Britain, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne,_Queen_of_Great_Britain Only one of her children, William, Duke of Gloucester, lived past the age of two. He fell ill at his eleventh birthday party in July 1700 and died six days later. His physicians bled and blistered him but could not agree on what was wrong. They put his death down to “a malignant fever”.22 Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_William,_Duke_of_Gloucester

A child born in 1800 could expect to live fewer than 30 years.33 Life expectancy globally, Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy-globally For most of history, parents buried about half their children before the age of fifteen.44 Mortality in the past: every second child died, Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past Most families farmed, and most farmers grew barely enough to eat. The economic historian Michail Moatsos estimates that three in four people alive in 1820 could not afford a small room, a little heat and enough food to stave off malnutrition.55 Extreme poverty in brief, Our World in Data (Michail Moatsos’s cost-of-basic-needs estimates). https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief

Few of them could read.66 Literacy, Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/literacy After dark, families lit their homes with tallow candles, rushlights or the fire. Candles and lamp oil cost so much that they used as little light as they could. The energy economist Roger Fouquet found that people in England in the 1300s paid about 16,000 times as much for each unit of light as people in Britain paid in 2023, after allowing for inflation.77 Light at Night, Our World in Data (after Roger Fouquet and Peter Pearson). https://ourworldindata.org/light-at-night

As late as 1800, people in every region of the world died, on average, before they turned 40.

Then people broke the pattern. The United Nations estimates that a child born in 2024 can expect to live 73.3 years.88 World Population Prospects 2024, press release, United Nations, 2024. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2024/07/press-release-wpp2024/ About 96 children in every hundred now live to fifteen. One person in ten lives below the World Bank’s extreme-poverty line of three dollars a day, and more than four in five can read.

Nobody handed these gains down from above, and nobody won them all at once. Greek doctors began to write down what they saw at the sickbed. Roman engineers piped clean water into a city of a million people. Monks copied books by hand until printers in Mainz and Venice made them cheap. Navigators charted the oceans, and natural philosophers in London and Paris tested their ideas against measurements. Mill owners in Lancashire, plant breeders in Mexico, chemists in Germany and programmers in California took what the generation before them knew and added to it.

The builders paid heavy costs, and often made others pay them. Athenians mined silver with slaves, Roman landowners worked their estates with captives, and British mill owners worked children for twelve hours a day and more. Physicists built the bomb as well as the power station. Historians can count those costs, and they can show that every generation, on balance, left more to the next than it found.

Every age had its prophets of decline. Hesiod put the golden age behind him. Malthus said population must always outrun food. Some of them were clever, and some were right about their own decade, but over the long run they were wrong. Since the Greeks began to argue in public, people have lived longer, eaten better, learned more, travelled further and governed themselves more freely, because each generation solved the problems in front of it and passed on what worked.

“Thereafter, would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night”

Demographers estimate that 110 million people lived on Earth three centuries before Hesiod and 230 million seven centuries after him. By 2023, 8.1 billion people lived on it.

Hesiod farmed at Ascra in Boeotia, in what he took to be the race of iron. A century or so after him, a few men in Miletus and the other Greek trading cities on the coast of what is now Turkey began to ask what the world was made of. They gave reasons for their answers and argued about them in public.