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Join the Libertarian Christian Institute as each week they explore, debate, and analyze the issues that are directly relevant to the intersection of Christianity and liberty. Always thoughtful, frequently controversial, and never boring (trust us), it is our hope and prayer that The Libertarian Christian Podcast serve as a valuable resource to the Church for years to come.
If you'd like to reach out to us and ask a question or submit some feedback, you can reach us at podcast@libertarianchristians.com, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, and of course, our website, libertarianchristians.com.
Matt Bellis:
[0:03] Welcome to the show that gets Christians thinking about faith and politics. Get ready to challenge the status quo, expand your imagination, and tackle controversy head-on. Let's stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It's time for the Libertarian Christian Podcast.
Doug:
[0:22] Welcome to another episode of the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute and part of the Christians for Liberty Network. I'm your host, Doug Stewart, and I have a returning guest with me, Chelsea Follett, who is the author of a book we talked about called Centers of Progress way back in 2024. You can listen to episode 360 of that. She is a research fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. She works with humanprogress.org to educate the public on global improvements and well-being. And she's the author of a new book, which sounds like it's antithetical to what I just said. I'm going to hold it up here called The Grimmauld Days. Here, Chelsea's holding it up as well. The Grimmauld Days, an introduction to the pre-industrial past. Chelsea, I really... It's hard to say I enjoyed your book because it sounds a little strange for people who have read it, but I enjoyed having read your book. Let's go with that. Thank you so much for writing it.
Chelsea:
[1:16] Thank you so much for getting through it. I know that there are parts that are a little hard to read. It really does live up to the word grim in the title.
Doug:
[1:26] Yeah, it does. You start off a little bit talking about how if people asked you if you could take a time machine to go to the pass, where would you go? And you'd be like, I think I'd stay with present day. And so I agree. My answer always is I'd go to the future, not to the past. But I think you've given us the next best thing to going in a time machine to get to the past. And so I appreciate that. Tell us a little bit about what you're trying to accomplish by writing this book.
Chelsea:
[1:53] Well, I'm not confident if I had that time machine offer that I would make the same decision as you and go to the future because I do not think continued progress is at all guaranteed. And that is part of what motivated this book. I do not think that most people recognize how far we have come. People take the circumstances into which they were born as the default, and they take them for granted. They don't realize that this moment in time in which we live is very different from most of human history. It's very anomalous, I would argue. And the conditions under which we live may also be quite fragile. If we do not correctly identify the policies and institutions that have enabled, our relative extreme prosperity, actually, in the modern world, then, I worry we could lose what we have.
Doug:
[2:52] Yeah, you know, it's funny you use the word extreme prosperity, and that sounds like you're being like over the top. But really, when you do when you look at the math itself and what, you know, the poverty level was and is in the past versus today, I think that's a really good I think that's a really good word to use, extreme prosperity. I realize that that doesn't mean everybody is extremely prosperous, but it is a good it is a good word to use.
Chelsea:
[3:16] Absolutely. There are obviously still problems today, and there is still poverty. There probably always will be. However, when you actually look at the way the vast majority of our ancestors lived, their lives were defined by such extreme material deprivation, modern people can barely imagine it. We have not only eliminated many of the problems that our ancestors faced, but we have eliminated the memory of those problems. And so what I'm trying to do in this book is give some insight into just how difficult, everyday life for ordinary people really was in the past prior to that huge upswing in economic growth that occurred around the time of the Industrial Revolution. I think many people have seen this famous so-called hockey stick start of history where for most of history, income was actually relatively flat. Growth was barely perceptible. And then suddenly you get this huge upswing of exponential growth, GDP rising almost straight up in a line. And around the same time, you get...
Chelsea:
[4:33] A similar trajectory for life expectancy. It had been flat throughout most of history or growth was barely perceptible in average life expectancy. And suddenly you get a huge upswing around the time that we get that economic growth. Now, many people today dismiss economic growth. It's very fashionable now, both on the right, actually, and the left to say GDP is just this abstraction. It doesn't really matter. This is just a line going up on a chart. What does that have to do with real people's everyday lives? And what I'm trying to do with this book is to show you the reality of what life was like prior to economic growth. And the picture is not pretty.
Doug:
[5:18] That probably has to make you mad when people say that because you're just like, ah, this is, this is, you can't do that. At least people like Jonah Goldberg make a good case for this is,
Doug:
[5:28] this is something that can be fragile and we need to protect it and so forth. I have an idea of why you talk. I think it was on page one that your goal here is to de-romanticize the past. And you just mentioned it a little bit ago as well. I kind of have a theory as to why people romanticize the past. It was that old phrase of like the good old days is a combination of a bad memory and a good imagination. But I think I think part of it is like, what does what is it that shapes our imagination? You know, when my when my girls were younger, we were talking about parenting before we got started here. And my girls used to love watching Little House on the Prairie. And you know you can watch those those shows and be like wow they they really had a hard life but they were together and so it like feels happier than the conditions obviously they're not gonna make a show based on, they're probably not gonna make a show on your book chelsea i'm sorry to say.
Doug:
[6:17] Maybe a documentary that'd be really great to see because that would be really important but, There's this sort of like we read the literature of like, I guess in my head, I think of like Jane Austen or, you know, something along those lines. And it's like, it's not like I've read Jane Austen, but I understand what that's being communicated. And we just think of it as like, oh, well, they just had lives like us. They just didn't have as many things. Your book definitely tells a different a different tale. But I want to ask you, like, why do you think why do you think we're prone to romanticizing the past?
Chelsea:
[6:49] I think that it's a part of human nature that has been with humanity from the beginning. There is that line in the book of Ecclesiastes, say not thou, what is the cause that the former days were better than these? So there's been advice against romanticizing the good old days even over 2,000 years ago. So there is something in human nature that romanticizes the past and fails to fully appreciate the present. I think in our current day with the rapid technological change of AI and with so much talk of a potential AI revolution being the next industrial revolution, we're.
Chelsea:
[7:41] The way people think about the first industrial revolution is going to shape how they react to this new technological change, right? And because the first industrial revolution has such a terrible public image, I think that's motivating a lot of the pushback that we're now seeing to technological change. And as you point out, sometimes people will admit that there has been material improvements and that our ancestors were materially poorer, but they will say that nonetheless.
Chelsea:
[8:20] They were happier. They had more meaning in their lives because they had these close-knit loving communities and families.
Chelsea:
[8:30] Unfortunately when you look at the reality of the past that is also not the case so our ancestors, mostly i know you've read the book but just to sketch it out for those who are not familiar with this our ancestors did not travel the way we do most people stayed their entire lives in one very insular community and in your tiny village the only partners who might be available for you to marry might be all your first cousins. They might have huge age gaps. They might have personalities that are simply not compatible with yours. But economic necessity was the driving force behind many marriages. Marrying for love did not emerge as an ideal until rather later. Actually, around the time that prosperity started to spread thanks to early industrialization, that's when that ideal really emerged. But many people ended up with partners that were not very well-suited to them, and many marriages were not very happy. Beating one's wife and children were both extremely normalized to an extent that.
Chelsea:
[9:37] To horrify most people today. In 1595, there was a law in England that went as follows, no man, shall after the hour of nine at night keep any rule whereby any such sudden outcry be made in the still of the night as making any afraid or beating his wife or servants. And what that meant was no beating your wife or your servants after 9 p.m.
Doug:
[10:01] And that to me doesn't sound like it was really about the wife or servants, but about like curfew laws more so, right? Like noise abatement laws.
Chelsea:
[10:10] It was a noise regulation and it was in the same series of laws in a list of laws that also included a rule against using a hammer after 9 p.m. So that gives you some insight into how they were thinking about beating your spouse until she screamed. This was as ordinary as using a hammer.
Chelsea:
[10:28] But if you were civilized, you would, of course, stop at 8.59 so that your neighbors could get some rest at night.
Chelsea:
[10:34] That is, I think, a good window into the sort of fact that you can find in this book, the grim old days and introduction to the pre-industrial past. I pull out all of these different laws and firsthand accounts and other details that are shocking to a modern person. Because again, we have not only eliminated many problems of the past, we've eliminated even the memory of them. And of course, another thing that made family life much less warm and fuzzy than many people imagine with a romanticized vision of the past with the omnipresence of death in the past. Almost everyone had firsthand experience of child loss. I know, Doug, that you're also a parent, you have children, and that you also, must find that idea as horrifying as I do. But in the past, because of their higher fertility rates combined with the fact that statistically half or more of children did not make it to adulthood, practically every parent had lost a child. It was extremely common. Almost everyone had lost a child, had lost a sibling, had lost a parent. It was very common for parents to pre-decease their children during the child's childhood, especially with astronomical rates of death and childbirth. It was very common to lose your mother early in life.
Chelsea:
[12:00] This is hard to wrap the mind around. But the idea that people had less psychological suffering in the past and that they were happier prior to industrialization with these sky high rates of mortality, higher rates of mortality actually at every age, not just for children. Every age group had higher rates of mortality in the past. But of course, children had the worst odds of all. This was not a happy world. This was a world with grief and mourning on a scale that boggles the mind.
Doug:
[12:33] When I think of, so your subtitle is an introduction to the pre-industrial past. And I think the word industrial revolution or industrial, it has a lot of really bad connotations to a lot of people. And I think that's partly why they think things were okay before then. But then the Industrial Revolution came along and that gave us things like smokestacks, foul air, sweatshops, child labor, as if child labor wasn't already happening. It sounds like based on what you're just describing here, that the emotional impact of what people think about the Industrial Revolution should actually be more applied to what happened before then. Not that the Industrial Revolution was, you know, all, you know, rainbows and candy corn. But like, I guess it's candy canes. I don't know what the phrase is, the idiom. But anyway, like it sounds like that sort of mentality about what the Industrial, Revolution has in the popular mind, all the negativity, really applies to pre-industrial times more so.
Chelsea:
[13:30] Yes, it was only really with the Industrial Revolution and the beginnings of mass prosperity, more people rising out of poverty, that many of the pre-existing problems first began to be questioned, and action taken against them. Child labor, as you point out, had been with humanity from time immemorial. It used to be the case that from the moment you could walk, you were expected to help out on the farm doing what subsistence agricultural labor you could. So childhood was much shorter in the past, both because you were likely to die and because you were initiated very quickly into the world of adult responsibilities.
Doug:
[14:07] I think you mentioned in the book, though, that even like play was like you had to do something productive with your play. Like kids just didn't have toys for the sake of having toys.
Chelsea:
[14:16] That's right. If you were going to whittle, you would whittle with a purpose and try to create something that was useful. And people sought out entertainment in what ways they could. Slaughtering animals on the farm became a festive activity and they could be very inventive and actually torture animals for fun out of extreme boredom. Because this was a world where on the one hand, you were constantly engaged in backbreaking labor. But on the other hand even though you were always busy you were also quite bored because this sort of monotonous work could not fulfill the human desire for novelty and amusement and the amusements, that they did find in the past would horrify a modern person executions were considered a wholesome entertainment fit for the whole family you mean like town square.
Doug:
[15:09] Execution type stuff like that's like the event for the evening?
Chelsea:
[15:13] Yes. So public executions were a sort of festival-like atmosphere. People would travel for them. They'd bring their families. They'd have picnics. They would jostle for the best viewing spots during Europe's wars of religion. The most enthusiastic viewers could be identified by the ashes on their clothes from being so close to the flames as they tried to watch the facial expression more clearly of the condemned during their death. This was a very grotesque and violent time. I don't think people realize just how violent the past really was and how normalized it was.
Chelsea:
[15:57] Our norms really are so different today. It's not just that we're materially wealthier. There has been social progress as well. Progress in how we treat one another. People have become so much more compassionate. We've.
Chelsea:
[16:13] Eliminated torture that had been normalized from time immemorial and child labor is no longer accepted. Treatment of women, treatment of employees is also something that started to improve, oddly enough, around the time of industrialization. We started to change our norms, whereas before beating one's servants and verbally abusing them as well, that was never given a thought, those were widely accepted throughout most of history in practically every society.
Chelsea:
[16:47] It was only around the time of industrialization when some people did start to rise out of this extreme destitution that for the first time, instead of just accepting that this is the way things are, people started to question these norms and they started to see poverty because it wasn't for everyone. It was only for some groups as others rose out of it. They started to see poverty as more of a problem. And you do get all of these writings around that time about the horrible conditions that did persist for some during the Industrial Revolution.
Chelsea:
[17:25] And I think that is why we associate this time period with such terrible conditions, even though, of course, those conditions were pre-existing and in fact more pervasive prior to industrialization. But because people have this extremely negative view of the effect of the Industrial Revolution on living standards, when people talk about how AI or technological progress could grow the economy, to a great extent. I don't think people understand what that means, even if only a small share of those predictions turns out to be true in terms of economic growth. People don't know what that means for living standards. All that they think about are, well, data centers are loud, they're noisy, self-driving cars are new, Are they really something we can trust? There is so much distrust toward technological change in part because people, underestimate the impact of economic growth. And so they don't fully appreciate the potential of new technologies and economic growth to transform human lives for the better.
Doug:
[18:37] Yeah, I, I know you work with humanprogress.org. So this is like, you know, the main messaging here, right? Like there is, we have, we have come out of the grim old days and do something amazingly fantastic, extreme prosperity. The word I was gonna, I was gonna say earlier, I forgot to say it, that the word industrial, industrial, you know, connotes, you know, smoke tax, smokestacks, foul air sweatshops and all of that for a lot of people. But for me, it sort of connotes things like industriousness, stewardship, an idea of like, hey, I want to be thrifty and efficient. And those obviously tie into, you know, some of the reasons, not all the reasons, but some of the reasons why we have prosperity is that we are able to trade and we are able to do things for other people. And so it's interesting to me how how you view something actually sort of, you know, sort of colors your understanding of of its importance. You and I can sit here and say capitalism and the Industrial Revolution was a positive revolution and not just for material reasons, but also for emotional, spiritual, internal reasons. Right. Like to to be bored is not a good human existence, even if it was, you know, even if you weren't in a sweatshop, you didn't want to be bored. And so to have I mean, we could we could name all kinds of different things that we are now better off for.
Doug:
[20:02] I have a question. Can I talk to you a little bit about the process of writing the book? Because I think it's notable to me, you know, some of how you approach it. And I think it might also tie in a little bit to like any pushback that others might have. I mean, I'm a fan, but I wouldn't be a good host if I didn't have
Doug:
[20:20] any sort of pushback at all. I'm going to read the chat. I'm not going to read every one of the chapter names because these are all single titles. But you start off after your introduction. Chapter one is on birth. Chapter two is infancy, then childhood, education, marriage, shelter, sleep, darkness. You go through basically kind of like a life cycle. I mean, death is the last chapter. You talk about entertainment, animals, work, transportation, hygiene. So these these chapters, while they are thematic in one sense, they do tie into one another pretty well. When you went about to research this, the first question I thought of is, you know, we talk about the word pre-industrial. Well, that's most of history minus 250 years, 300 years. So are you just talking about like Europe in the last 2000 years? Or are you talking about like, what are we talking about here? How did you kind of draw the line there?
Chelsea:
[21:14] So again, thinking about that famous hockey stick chart of wealth throughout history, where it is practically flat until around the time of industrialization. Then you get that huge takeoff of exponential growth. What I was interested in is looking at the world prior to economic growth, prior to sustained economic growth. And so I was interested in that entire period of time where you just have that flat line of barely perceptible growth before the industrial revolution. Because if you were to look at the life of an average subsistence agricultural laborer around the time of the Roman Empire in antiquity.
Chelsea:
[22:01] And compare it to the life of an impoverished agricultural laborer peasant living just prior to industrialization.
Chelsea:
[22:12] While their lives were somewhat different, certainly some innovations did occur over that span of time, they would find each other's worlds surprisingly very familiar. Life expectancy remained extremely low for the average person, practically the same over this period. Average income levels remained very low. They barely budged. The actual standard of living did not change dramatically over this time period of hundreds of years. And so this book actually concerns itself with the entirety of the pre-industrial period from antiquity until just prior to the Industrial, Revolution, with special attention to that period just prior to industrialization in the early modern era. And most of the examples are drawn from Europe, but I do bring in some examples from other areas of the world as well. And because the lifestyle of a subsistence agricultural laborer was so similar, even in vastly different societies across the world, no matter where your ancestors come from, I believe that this book will provide you with insights into the sort of life that they lived.
Doug:
[23:38] The hockey stick graph, I remember when I first saw that, I think it was when Deirdre McCloskey's, one of her, I think, Bergeois Virtue's book. And I remember, like, there's this, like, little blip, like, a couple thousand years ago, maybe, I might have been in China or something, and I remember her making the remark about, you know, every now and then there's these, like, little hiccups where things look like they could be the turning of something, but they ended up not being. I'm kind of curious, did your previous book, Centers of Progress, did it ever, what, And I'm kind of wondering if there's an intersection there where like there were civilizations here and there where they helped these where they helped the blip kind of happen, so to speak. Sorry, I'm using that word wrong. I'm sure those little hiccups did. When we think about the pre-industrial past and we think about in terms of your research, did you did any of those things intersect with you with your previous book?
Chelsea:
[24:29] Absolutely. Even though the previous book is much happier and more optimistic in many ways, right? Centers of Progress, 40 cities that changed the world, highlighting these wonderful stories of innovation and human creativity in history's most innovative cities. There is also a very dark lesson from that book, which is that these golden ages of various cities tend not to last very long. All too soon, things tend to come crashing down in the Song Dynasty in China. They arguably came close to having an industrial revolution, as you alluded to, but they didn't. The conditions needed for progress seem to be very unusual and very fragile. And this is another reason why.
Chelsea:
[25:23] I hope to help people realize just how unusual the modern world is, how different the world that we now inhabit is compared to most of history, because I don't think that's fully appreciated. Some people ask, why are some people poor? Why is there poverty? But the correct question is, why is anyone rich? Why is anyone even middle class? Because poverty, extreme poverty is the default. That was the norm throughout most of history. And so the million-dollar question, the central question of economic history is why did everything change? Why is it that we went from extreme poverty, ill health, violence, ignorance, and so on throughout most of history to suddenly living in a world where we can be fairly confident that our children will make it happen? It to adulthood, where we don't have to worry about a famine every three or four years, a world where the air smells clean, where we have modern sanitation, where mortality is not just around the corner at all points in time, and where we treat each other with far greater kindness and respect than our ancestors did. We're much less violent.
Chelsea:
[26:47] How did everything change? What caused the Industrial Revolution? And why did it occur when and where it did?
Doug:
[26:55] Now, I was just going to ask you, do you where I know there's like economists and even in our world of, you know, libertarian, classical liberal space have their opinions. Where do you where do you come out on that?
Chelsea:
[27:07] So there are a bunch of different explanations, as you say, even in the world of classical liberal economics, right? Was it change in the way people thought about commerce, as Deirdre McCloskey believes? Was it the Enlightenment, as Steven Pinker opines? Was it institutions? Was it interstate competition in fragmented Europe, whereas parts of the world that were united in empires may have had more of an incentive to suppress potentially destabilizing technologies? There are many different explanations that people put forward, and they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. It could be a bit of all of these explanations is correct. Maybe it is a very complex and fragile series of conditions that were needed to bring about this incredible takeoff, that somehow or other a classical liberal revolution did occur and the world became exponentially richer and also became freer. And I do believe those two trends are related.
Doug:
[28:16] You said a few minutes ago that some of these descriptions and stories and sources you use were kind of like just before the Industrial Revolution. And I think part of that is we probably had more sources. When somebody uses a primary source with something like this where it's a lot about like daily life, especially if it's not a description of daily life for royalty, so to speak, right? So like you're talking about the everyday lives of people. How do you know, how do you vet the content of that as like, this is what it was like versus maybe it's apocryphal. And I'll give you an example, like one of the sources you cite about the 14th century plague was from the 16th century. So that's 200 years removed, right? And I don't know what record keeping was like back then. And I don't know what the source was. I mean, I didn't chase down your sources the way you did, I'm sure. But I'm just kind of curious, like, how did you figure out that this was an accurate picture versus, again, somebody who's really critical of the Industrial Revolution might say, well, you're just cherry picking it to make it sound like it was just really terrible back then. And that's not true. So that's kind of two questions, like the source documentation and then the cherry picking question.
Chelsea:
[29:34] Absolutely. So I do try where I can to have firsthand accounts. As you point out, that's not the case with every single quote, but there are a lot of firsthand accounts, and that's obviously the most trustworthy. There are a lot of revisionist versions of history these days trying to rehabilitate the image of the pre-industrial past. There are those like Tucker Carlson on the far right who claim that actually feudalism was fantastic for workers. And there are some on the far left, such as in the degrowth movement, who want to shrink the economy and return to this allegedly simpler, more sustainable way of life that they imagine characterized the world of our ancestors.
Chelsea:
[30:22] But the reality, I believe, is very far removed from these romantic revisionist versions of history. So it is true that there are some accounts that people have questioned. For example, the skull towers that the ancient Mesoamerican civilizations built. For a long time, people wondered, was this just propaganda from the conquistadors? Was it the case that the ancient Aztecs actually built towers and towers of racks of human skulls? That sounds a bit over the top. That must have been an exaggeration, at least, right? But recent archaeological finds have actually confirmed that, sadly, yes, they did have industrial scale human sacrifice. There were skull towers upon skull towers. This, unfortunately, was the reality that they lived.
Doug:
[31:18] Yeah. Were there any, so I read all those topics from your chapters, were there any that you found more intriguing than others? Like ones that you were like, wow, I really am interested in this. you know, we talked beforehand that you had young children and, I can imagine that the early parts of your book were probably not very researching while feeding your children and be like, ah, this is not good. But were there, I mean, maybe you were fine with that. But there's a sense of morbid curiosity, I guess we all have to some extent. But what were some more fascinating elements, I guess?
Chelsea:
[31:53] There are some particularly shocking anecdotes in the book, like the time the Dutch cannibalized their prime minister and were never prosecuted. A mob ripped apart this elected official and consumed at least part of his body and never faced any punishment. That was in the 1600s.
Doug:
[32:14] There are moments where, you know what, Chelsea, though, there are moments where I feel like that might just be okay to retain. I think all of us have those moments. That's a little much.
Chelsea:
[32:23] I suppose it gives a new meaning to eat the rich, right? There are all these horrific incidents in history. The Erfurt Latrine Disaster is another particularly memorable one. I'm not even going to describe that one, but the book's available for pre-order now, or maybe by the time you put up this podcast, it will be available for order. Again, The Grim Old Days and Introductions of the Pre-Industrial Past. And you can learn about all of these horrific stories that you can bring up at a cocktail party to make people uncomfortable if you'd like, right? How even the Palace of Versailles lacked restrooms and human waste would just accumulate in the corridors, on the wall hangings.
Chelsea:
[33:01] There are so many horrific facts about history that people have perhaps fortunately forgotten. But as to what affected me the most while writing it, as you intuited, it really would be just the omnipresence of death and the extent to which everyone had firsthand familiarity with losing a loved one. It was also much more hands-on in the past. You would personally often be the one to dig the grave and to bury your loved one's body.
Chelsea:
[33:35] And there are some, like Philippe Arhier, a French historian, who, have posited that because child loss was so frequent in the past, people probably didn't feel anything. They became numb to it. But that seems to not be the case. If you look at the actual firsthand accounts of parents describing what it was like to lose their children, if you look at the grave epitaphs, if you look at the poetry, every major poet pretty much touched on this topic because, again, practically everyone, poets included, had real firsthand experience of child loss. You see so much pain in their words and that definitely was difficult to read at times as a parent while i was writing this book, toward the end when i was almost done with it, my daughter who was a toddler at the time developed this spotty red rash over her face and she had a fever and she was crying and at first we were terrified that maybe it was measles because it kind of looked like that. And she was at an age where she had not yet been vaccinated for that because she was too young. And we rushed her to an emergency room. And fortunately, it wasn't measles. That is a blessedly rare illness now, thanks to widespread vaccination, technological medical progress.
Chelsea:
[35:00] And the doctor said that what she had instead was actually scarlet fever. And when I heard those words, at first a chill went through me because we're familiar with that term from works of classic literature like Little Women, where that was a deadly ailment. And in reality, countless children did lose their lives to scarlet fever. In the 17th century, Rene Descartes' young daughter died of that illness. But even though that sounds like a terrifying diagnosis, the doctor very quickly assured me, don't worry, we'll give her an antibiotic and she'll be better within a week. And she was. And that really drove home for me just, how incredibly fortunate we are to live now in a time period where most people will never have to suffer the pain of child loss and untimely death. Economic growth is not just a line on a chart. It's not an abstraction. It is the difference between getting to see your children reach adulthood and going to their funeral.
Doug:
[36:15] I don't know how to follow up with that comment. You must be great at parties, Chelsea.
Chelsea:
[36:21] Seat i'm not actually a morbid you know gothic type person so this book was a roller coaster ride emotionally, it was very depressing at times but it's also uplifting in a way because it does help you to feel grateful for how different the world is now yeah than it was through much of history.
Doug:
[36:39] Yeah yeah no i i mean i agree i mean it's obviously oh wow it was so bad back then I can go inside if I'm cold reading on my porch or whatever, you know, like, um, what's the, let's, Do you hear people say things about the past? I mean, I don't know what circles of friends you hang out in, but my guess is a lot of them probably do understand, some of what you're saying here. And so they're not going to just spout off these terrible, you know, mythical things about the past. But are there any of these things that just really, really great against you when people say things about the past, when they romanticize it?
Chelsea:
[37:17] Sure. One of the more common myths about the past that even very well-educated, intelligent people often believe, would be this myth that in the Middle Ages, peasants worked less than people today. This idea that, okay, yes, they were poor and their work was difficult, but there's this idea that they had many festival days and they actually had more free time than the modern person. This myth was popularized by a book in the 1990s called The Overworked American by sociologist Juliette Shore. She was working with an early estimate, by the historian Gregory Clark, who had estimated that medieval peasants worked perhaps only 150 days in a year. He later revised that upward to around 300 days a year, which is a little rounding error.
Doug:
[38:18] Huh?
Chelsea:
[38:18] Yeah, a bit of a change there, which is, of course, significantly more days in a year than people work today. And you have to remember that even on nominal festival days, cows do not milk themselves. You cannot just skip that task. Wheat doesn't harvest itself either. Farm work is very much tied to times of day into seasons. And you cannot just take a week off the way you can from your nice office job in the post-industrial world. And so even on a nominal festival day, the average medieval peasant might spend their day exactly like on any other day doing farm labor from the moment the sun came up. And the only difference might be a communal meal at the end of the day to mark the festival. And that was it. So this myth that medieval peasants had more free time, I would say, is one of the more grading ones. And it is very pervasive. So many intelligent, educated people have come to believe that. And it circulates very widely online.
Doug:
[39:28] So you're basically telling me that not everything from the 90s was awesome.
Chelsea:
[39:35] Well, the 90s obviously were, you know, better than the pre-industrial age. But I think actually one of my next projects might be trying to de-romanticize the latter half of the 20th century. Because I also think there is a lot of romanticization of, you know, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s. The 90s, people talk about how we had these wonderful screen-free childhoods and more freedom in childhood. But the 90s also was in the midst of a crime wave, right? Now, the 90s were not necessarily a paradise either. But this book, The Grim Old Days, an introduction to the pre-industrial past, really tries to illuminate the world that existed, again, for the vast majority, of human history, for most of your ancestors, from antiquity all the way until just before, economic growth really took off around the time of the Industrial Revolution. And I think that understanding the pre-industrial world is necessary to secure continued economic growth in the future and the future of AI and technology and so on.
Doug:
[40:50] I agree with you, and I hope our listeners and viewers on this show will run out and get a copy. If you want to hold it up again, I can have you do that so you can see the really, really great cover design as well. I'm really into book cover designs lately, so I notice when they're really nice. Chelsea Follett, she's the author of The Grim Old Days, An Introduction to the Pre-Industrial Past, published by the Cato Institute, and it is endorsed by some really big names. Congratulations. That's just really great. I'm sure you're honored by all that. And by the time this episode goes live, the book will be still available for pre-order, but not for long. So you can get it wherever books are sold, I suppose.
Chelsea:
[41:29] Thank you so much for having me on, Doug.
Doug:
[41:30] Thanks for being here, Chelsea.