August 7, 2022
My title references Hans Rosling, who Lewis Chapman channels to remind us of the dual realities of human progress and human pessimism.
His opening paragraph is one of the most succinct, yet colorful, summaries of the Great Enrichment I’ve read: 
“Progress that is both rapid enough to be noticed and stable enough to continue over many generations has been achieved only once in human history: right now. Around 1800, humanity made a stark turn from misery and stagnation to prosperity and progress. This is a truly unique moment in time, and yet one that most of us aren’t even aware of.”
Regardless of whether one accepts the McCloskey explanation whole-cloth or not, the Great Fact raises the most important question in the social sciences.
Chapman’s contrast of linear vs. exponential growth is also quite startling:
“If you were to place a drop of water in the middle of London’s Wembley stadium, wait for a minute, place two drops, wait for another minute, place three drops, then 4 drops and so on, it would take 11 years to fill the stadium. If instead the number of drops increased exponentially; in other words, you place one drop, then two drops after a minute, then four, then eight and so on, the stadium would be full by the 48th minute.”
Someone once famously quipped about the obsession with GDP that you “can’t eat growth rates.” That retort misses the mark. GDP gets translated into all the good things in life, including life itself. Chapman again:
“It’s not just GDP. Poverty and child mortality rates over the last two centuries have dropped while literacy and vaccination rates have climbed. Many more people live under democratic forms of government.”
Were these facts less secret and less silent, they’d instill much gratitude. And how’s this for gratitude?
Yet, people are remarkably pessimistic:
As Max Roser helpfully put it in a recent post: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.”
Visualize more of the Great Enrichment below:
What’s more, the Great Enrichment has happened at warp speed:
Ludwig von Mises famously observed that capitalism transforms “luxuries” into “necessities.” A theoretical claim—but the empirical question is “how fast?” More detailed research from the “Our World in Data” crew suggests that the answer—technical term alert here—is “fast.” Of course, the speed differs, case by case, due to a host of constraints, notably the quality of the institutional environment. But exponential rates of adoption seem to be the norm. Just look at the slope on “microwaves,” “smartphones,” or “tablets”.
Meanwhile, Timothy Lee reports on an impressive research project. He scoured 1,566 pages of the 1980 Sears catalogue so you didn’t have to. He was looking for products that continue to have contemporary analogues. He wanted to discover how long it would take an average person working to afford various items—then and now. For various reasons, measuring the number of labor hours required to purchase an item has advantages over alternative measures, especially in an inflationary environment (ours).
How have the real prices changed? One picture tells the story:
Does someone have a theory to explain high chairs??
Here are a few old posts from Don Boudreaux working through the same exercise. Don catalogues the following goods:
– Manual treadmill: 1975 price was $89.99 (or 18.5 hours of work in 1975); 2013 price is $127.99 (or 6.5 hours of work today)
– adult athletic shoes: 1975 price was $9.95 (or 2.0 hours); 2013 price is $19.99 (or 1.0 hour)
– adult jeans:* 1975 price was $6.99 (or 1.4 hours); 2013 price is $19.99 (or 1.0 hour)
– television (19″ color): 1975 price was $294.95 (or 60.6 hours); 2013 price is $129.99 (or 6.6 hours)
– 30″ kitchen all-electric range/oven: 1975 price was $159.95 (or 32.8 hours); 2013 price is $369.99 (or 18.6 hours)
– frost-free refrigerator/freezer:** 1975 price was $319.95 [for 14.1 cubic feet] (or 65.7 hours); 2013 price is $404.99 [for 14.8 cubic feet] (or 20.4 hours)
– “standard size” all-electric washer/dryer combo: 1975 price was $329.90 (or 67.7 hours); 2013 price is $593.98 (or 29.9 hours)
What’s more—does anyone want to argue that the quality of treadmills or refrigerators was higher in 1975 than it is now? Though I like the time cost measure of real income, even it tends to understate progress for this reason.
Meanwhile:
Economic progress is not automatic. It demands institutional prerequisites, which have been explained elsewhere.
For the last two hundred years, more and more societies have approximated that institutional ideal.
More reason for gratitude. Ours is a privileged time.