“Drivers struck and killed 3,024 people walking in the United States in first six months of 2025, down 10.9% from the year before – the largest annual decline since GHSA began tracking pedestrain deaths 15 years ago.

While the 10.9% decrease is encouraging, pedestrian deaths remain 2.5% above the 2019 level, the last year before a steep rise in dangerous driving behaviors and traffic deaths caused by the pandemic.”

From Governors Highway Safety Association.

“An educational programme for young girls in northern Nigeria that involved local religious leaders massively reduced the number of child marriages, a study reported in Nature today has found…

In the first year of the programme, out-of-school girls were offered accelerated learning in reading, mathematics, life skills and business skills in ‘safe spaces’ dedicated to them. In the second year, the emphasis was on ensuring that the girls return to school. Parents were helped with the costs of school fees and uniforms, and girls continued to have access to tutoring and mentoring in the safe spaces, which were like after-school clubs. Those who did not return to school were offered vocational training to work in local shops.

What is new about this approach is that the researchers tested its effectiveness in a randomized control trial. The researchers enrolled 1,181 adolescent girls from 18 communities in the states of Borno, Kaduna and Kano who were both out of school and unmarried at the start of the programme. The communities were divided into nine pairs: one community of each pair participated in the programme while the other did not. The involvement of local leaders helped the programme to recruit almost all of the girls that met the inclusion criteria in each community, Abubakar says.

The trial took place between 2018 and 2020, and participants were surveyed at the beginning and at the end of the programme. By the final survey, 79% of the girls participating in the programme were still unmarried, versus about 14% in the group that did not participate. This corresponds to an 80% decrease in the likelihood of marriage during the study period, the researchers say.”

From Nature.

Summary: Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral—some people claim that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. This article addresses seven supposed negative effects of the Industrial Revolution. The conclusion is that history bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination.

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When Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online.

Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era. Some are even claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past. “The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages,” journalist Amanda Mull wrote in a piece for The Atlantic. Samuel Matlack, managing editor of The New Atlantis, observed that there is currently an “endless debate around whether the preindustrial past was clearly better than what we have now and we must go back to save humanity, or whether modern technological society is unambiguously a forward leap we must forever extend.”

In the popular imagination, the Industrial Revolution was the birth of many evils, a time when smoke-belching factories disrupted humanity’s erstwhile idyllic existence. Economics professor Vincent Geloso’s informal survey of university students found that they believed “living standards did not increase for the poor; only the rich got richer; the cities were dirty and the poor suffered from ill-health.” Pundit Tucker Carlson has even suggested that feudalism was preferable to modern liberal democracy.

Different groups tend to idealize different aspects of the past. Environmentalists might idealize preindustrial harmony with nature, while social traditionalists romanticize our ancestors’ family lives. People from across the political spectrum share the sense that the Industrial Revolution brought little real improvement for ordinary people.

In 2021, History.com published “7 Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution,” an article reflecting much of the thinking behind the popular impression that industrialization was a step backward for humanity, rather than a period of tremendous progress. But was industrialization really to blame for each of the ills detailed in the article?

“Horrible Living Conditions for Workers”

Were horrible living conditions a result of industrialization? To be sure, industrial-era living conditions did not meet modern standards—but neither did the living conditions that preceded them.

As historian Kirstin Olsen put it in her book, Daily Life in 18th-Century England, “The rural poor . . . crowded together, often in a single room of little more than 100 square feet, sometimes in a single bed, or sometimes in a simple pile of shavings or straw or matted wool on the floor. In the country, the livestock might be brought indoors at night for additional warmth.” In 18th-century Wales, one observer claimed that in the homes of the common people, “every edifice” was practically a miniature “Noah’s Ark” filled with a great variety of animals. One shudders to think of the barnlike smell that bedchambers took on, in addition to the chorus of barnyard sounds that likely filled every night. Our forebears put up with the stench and noise and cuddled up with their livestock, if only to stave off hypothermia.

Homes were often so poorly constructed that they were unstable. The din of collapsing buildings was such a common sound that in 1688, Randle Holme defined a crash as “a noise proceeding from a breach of a house or wall.” The poet Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote that in 1730s London, “falling houses thunder on your head.” In the 1740s, “props to houses” keeping them from collapsing were listed among the most common obstacles that blocked free passage along London’s walkways.

“Poor Nutrition”

What about poor nutrition? From liberal flower children to the “Make America Healthy Again” crowd, fetishizing the supposedly chemical-free, wholesome diets of yore is bipartisan. The truth, however, is stomach-churning.

Our ancestors not only failed to eat well, but they sometimes didn’t eat at all. Historian William Manchester noted that in preindustrial Europe, famines occurred every four years on average. In the lean years, “cannibalism was not unknown. Strangers and travelers were waylaid and killed to be eaten.” Historian Fernand Braudel recorded a 1662 account from Burgundy, France, that lamented that “famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families . . . and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to eat wild plants. . . . Some people ate human flesh.” A third of Finland’s population is estimated to have died of starvation during a famine in the 1690s.

Even when food was available, it was often far from appetizing. Our forebears lived in a world where adulterated bread and milk, spoiled meat, and vegetables tainted with human waste were everyday occurrences. London bread was described in a 1771 novel as “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.” According to historian Emily Cockayne, the 1757 public health treatise Poison Detected noted that “in 1736 a bundle of rags that concealed a suffocated newborn baby was mistaken for a joint of meat by its stinking smell.”

Water was also far from pristine. “For the most part, filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water,” according to environmental law professor James Salzman. This ensured that each swig included a copious dose of human excreta and noxious bacteria. Waterborne illnesses were frequent.

“A Stressful, Unsatisfying Lifestyle”

Did stressful lifestyles originate with industrialization? Did our preindustrial ancestors generally enjoy a sense of inner peace? Doubtful. Sadly, many of them suffered from what they called melancholia, roughly analogous to the modern concepts of anxiety and depression.

In 1621, physician Robert Burton described a common symptom of melancholia as waking in the night due to mental stress among the upper classes. An observer said the poor similarly “feel their sleep interrupted by the cold, the filth, the screams and infants’ cries, and by a thousand other anxieties.” Richard Napier, a 17th-century physician, recorded over several decades that some 20 percent of his patients suffered from insomnia. Today, in comparison, 12 percent of Americans say they have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia. Stress is nothing new.

Sky-high preindustrial mortality rates caused profound emotional suffering to those in mourning. Losing a child to death in infancy was once a common—indeed, near-universal—experience among parents, but the loss was no less painful for all its ordinariness. Many surviving testimonies suggest that mothers and fathers felt acute grief with each loss. The 18th-century poem, “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth,” by Mehetabel “Hetty” Wright—who lost several of her own children prematurely—heartrendingly urges her infant to look at her one last time before passing away.

So common were child deaths that practically every major poet explored the subject. Robert Burns wrote “On the Birth of a Posthumous Child.” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote multiple poems to his deceased son. Consider the pain captured by these lines from William Shakespeare’s play King John, spoken by the character Constance upon her son’s death: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child. . . . O Lord! My boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!” Shakespeare’s own son died in 1596, around the time the playwright would have finished writing King John.

Only in the modern world has child loss changed from extraordinarily common to exceedingly rare. As stressful as modern life can be, our ancestors faced forms of heartache that most people today will never endure.

“Dangerous Workplaces” and “Child Labor”

Dangerous workplaces and child labor both predate the Industrial Revolution. In agrarian societies, entire families would labor in fields and pastures, including pregnant women and young children. Many preindustrial children entered the workforce at what today would be considered preschool or kindergarten age.

In poorer families, children were sent to work by age 4 or 5. If children failed to find gainful employment by age 8, even social reformers unusually sympathetic to the plight of the poor, would express open disgust at such a lack of industriousness. Jonas Hanway was reportedly “revolted by families who sought charity when they had children aged 8 to 14 earning no wages.”

For most, work was backbreaking and unending. A common myth suggests that preindustrial peasants worked fewer days than modern people do. This misconception originated from an early estimate by historian Gregory Clark, who initially proposed that peasants labored only 150 days a year. He later revised this figure to around 300 days—higher than the modern average of 260 working days, even before factoring in today’s paid holidays and vacation time.

Physically harming one’s employees was once widely accepted, too, and authorities stepped in only when the mistreatment was exceptionally severe. In 1666, one such case occurred in Kittery, in what is now Maine, when Nicholas and Judith Weekes caused the death of a servant. Judith confessed that she cut off the servant’s toes with an axe. The couple, however, was not indicted for murder, merely for cruelty.

“Discrimination Against Women”

The preindustrial world was hardly a model of gender equality—discrimination against women was not an invention of the early industrialists but a long-standing feature of many societies.

Domestic violence was widely tolerated. In London, a 1595 law dictated: “No man shall after the houre of nine at the Night, keepe any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the Night, as making any affray, or beating hys Wife, or servant.” In other words, no beating your wife after 9:00 p.m. That was a noise regulation. A similar law forbade using a hammer after 9:00 p.m. Beating one’s wife until she screamed was an ordinary and acceptable activity.

Domestic violence was celebrated in popular culture, as in the lively folk song “The Cooper of Fife,” a traditional Scottish tune that inspired a country dance and influenced similar English and American ballads. To modern ears, the contrast between its violent lyrics and upbeat melody is unsettling. The song portrays a husband as entirely justified in his acts of domestic violence, inviting the audience to side with the wifebeater and cheer as he beats his wife into submission for her failure to perform domestic chores to her husband’s satisfaction.

Sexist laws often empowered men to abuse women. If a woman earned money, her husband could legally claim it at any time. For instance, in 18th-century Britain, a wife could not enter into contracts, make a will without her husband’s approval, or decide on her children’s education or apprenticeships; moreover, in the event of a separation, she automatically lost custody. Mistreatment of women, in other words, long predated industrialization. Arguably, it was the increase in female labor force participation during the Industrial Revolution that ultimately gave women greater economic independence and strengthened their social bargaining power.

“Environmental Harm”

While many of today’s environmental challenges—such as climate change and plastic pollution—differ from those our forebears faced, environmental degradation is not a recent phenomenon. Worrying about environmental impact, however, is rather new. Indeed, as historian Richard Hoffmann has pointed out, “Medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to . . . humankind.”

Consider deforestation. The Domesday Survey of 1086 found that trees covered 15 percent of England; by 1340, the share had fallen to 6 percent. France’s forests more than halved from about 30 million hectares in Charlemagne’s time (768–814) to 13 million by Philip IV’s reign (1285–1314).

Europe was hardly the only part of the world to abuse its forests. A 16th-century witness observed that at every proclamation demanding more wood for imperial buildings, the peasants of what are today the Hubei and Sichuan provinces in China “wept with despair until they choked,” for there was scarcely any wood left to be found.

Despeciation is also nothing new. Humans have been exterminating wildlife since prehistory. The past 50,000 years saw about 90 genera of large mammals go extinct, amounting to over 70 percent of America’s large species and over 90 percent of Australia’s. 

Exterminations of species occurred throughout the preindustrial era. People first settled in New Zealand in the late 13th century. In only 100 years, humans exterminated 10 species of moa in addition to at least 15 other kinds of native birds, including ducks, geese, pelicans, coots, Haast’s eagle, and an indigenous harrier. Today, few people realize that lions, hyenas, and leopards were once native to Europe, but by the first century, human activity eliminated them from the continent. The final known auroch, Europe’s native wild ox, was killed in Poland by a noble hunter in 1627.

Progress Is Real

History bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination—that is, a beautiful scene of idyllic country villages with pristine air and residents merrily dancing around maypoles. The healthy, peaceful, and prosperous people in this fantasy of pastoral bliss do not realize their contented, leisurely lives will soon be disrupted by the story’s villain: the dark smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution’s “satanic mills.”

Such rose-colored views of the past bear little resemblance to reality. A closer look shatters the illusion. The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific.

A popular saying holds that “the past is a foreign country,” and based on recorded accounts, it is not one where you would wish to vacation. If you could visit the preindustrial past, you would likely give the experience a zero-star rating. Indeed, the trip might leave you permanently scarred, both physically and psychologically. You might long to unsee the horrors encountered on your adventure and to forget the shocking, gory details.

The upside is that the visit would help deromanticize the past and show how far humanity has truly come—emphasizing the utter transformation of everyday lives and the reality of progress.

This article was published at Big Think on 11/19/2025.

Summary: Free trade is often accused of being unfair and corrosive to democratic institutions, concentrating power in the hands of elites while leaving ordinary people behind. The evidence suggests the opposite. Participation in markets cultivates norms of fairness, impartiality, and trust that strengthen democratic institutions and expand individual rights.

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In earlier essays, I argued that trade makes us more prosperous, more trusting, and less corrupt. But isn’t trade unfair? Doesn’t the constant churn of global competition take power out of the hands of ordinary people and place it in the hands of wealthy individuals and corporations? Is democracy dying a slow death from the disease of globalization? As I show in this essay, the answer to each of these questions is an emphatic no. Trade, it turns out, strengthens democratic institutions and encourages more impartial treatment of one another. Overall, the complexity of the globalized economy has made us a much fairer bunch.

The French philosopher Montesquieu wrote, “The spirit of commerce produces in men a certain feeling for exact justice.” As Middlebury political scientist Keegan Callanan notes, Montesquieu believed that everyday trade trains us in habits of fair dealing. Over time, these small, routine acts of fairness cultivate a broader sense of exact justice that extends far beyond the marketplace. And researchers have tried to test this philosophical hunch.

Take the Ultimatum Game as an example. In this experiment, two participants are provided a specific sum of money. One participant is granted the power to divide the sum between the two. If the other player accepts the division—whether it is 50:50 or 99:1—both players keep their share. If the receiver rejects the offer, both go home empty-handed. Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich has found that proposers from industrial societies (e.g., United States, Indonesia, Japan, and Israel) tend to make offers between 44 and 48 percent, while the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon offer only 26 percent.

Experiments by Henrich and fellow researchers involving 15 small-scale agrarian societies—consisting of hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, nomadic herders, and sedentary farmers—have also shown that groups more heavily immersed in trade and market exchange with outsiders are less likely to make inequitable offers. Later experiments confirmed “that fairness (making more equal offers) in transactions with anonymous partners is robustly correlated with increasing market integration.”

Within the Ultimatum Game, however, there is still a risk for the proposer: the possibility of going home with nothing if the offer is too small. A proposer might therefore make a more generous offer out of self-interest simply as a strategy to avoid missing out on free money. To explore how deeply rooted this sense of fairness is, Henrich and his colleagues added the Dictator Game to their experiments. In this economic game, the receiver has no opportunity to reject the offer: they get whatever they are given. Yet even under these new rules, Henrich reported that  

people living in more market-integrated communities again made higher offers (closer to 50 percent of the stake). People with little or no market integration offered only about a quarter of the stake. Going from a fully subsistence-oriented population with no market integration…to a fully market-integrated community increases offers by 10 to 20 percentile points [see Figure 1].

Even when fairness and generosity have no strategic payoff, market integration predicts more equal treatment.

Figure 1. Dictator Game offers and market integration

As Montesquieu observed, the habits of fairness developed through everyday trade can extend well beyond the marketplace. Over time, they spill into our civic and political institutions. Democratic governments, in particular, seek to concretize fairness through their procedures and protections. This may help explain why the 2025 Index of Economic Freedom report finds a positive relationship between economic freedom and democratic governance (see Figure 2). Economic freedom, it argues, is “an important stepping stone on the road to democracy.”

Figure 2. Economic freedom and democratic governance

Research has consistently shown trade and market exchange to be champions of democracy. Economists Marco Tabellini and Giacomo Magistretti found that economic integration with democratic countries significantly boosts a country’s democracy scores (see Figure 3). Trade not only transmits goods and services across borders, but also democratic values and institutions. Studies by University of Maribor sociologist Tibor Rutar have also found a positive relationship between trade openness and democracy. Economic freedom has been shown to improve the durability of democratic institutions, while democratic backsliding is often preceded by restrictions on the economy. Political and civil liberties struggle to survive under a heavy-handed state, yet flourish with the expansion of economic freedom (see Figure 4). All in all, democracy and global capitalism appear to be two peas in a pod. As AEI’s Michael Strain explains:

It is no surprise that the rise of populism and economic nationalism has coincided with growing skepticism toward liberal democracy and growing comfort with political violence. The erosion of economic liberalism – free people, free markets, limited government, openness, global commerce – reflects a loss of respect for the choices people make in the marketplace. If we devalue choices made in markets, why wouldn’t we devalue choices made at the ballot box?

Figure 3. Trade with democracies and democratization

Figure 4. Economic freedom and personal freedom

Consider a specific case of unfairness: gender inequality. Generally, fairness is about impartial treatment between various groups. Gender inequality, however, is about impartiality within a group. In Sex and World Peace, Texas A&M’s Valerie Hudson and her colleagues argue that women are often treated as “the boundaries of their nations” because “women physically and culturally reproduce their group.” Far from being outsiders that are merely tolerated, women are seen as the creators and perpetuators of the group itself. “Indeed,” Hudson and her coauthors explain, “this is one of the reasons why the symbol of a nation is often personified as a woman, in order to elicit these deep feelings of protection. A woman becomes a ‘protectee’ of the men of the group, especially those in her own family.”

Unfortunately, the desire to protect women often translates into controlling them. In order to preserve the supposed cultural integrity of the in-group, women’s freedom is restricted. Their behavior becomes closely bound to the honor of their family and community—especially the men of both.

Greater exposure to the global economy, however, weakens this unfair patriarchal hold. For example, political scientists David Richards and Ronald Gelleny explored the effects of economic globalization—measured by foreign direct investment, portfolio investment, trade openness, and IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies—on what they termed “women’s status” or women’s ability to fully exercise specific rights found in the corpus of international human rights law. Overall, they found that “sixty-seven percent of the statistically significant coefficients indicated an association with improved women’s status.” Similar measures—along with additional indicators such as the number of McDonald’s restaurants and IKEA stores per capita—are associated with improvements in women’s decision-making power within households, freedom in movement and dress, safety from physical violence, ownership rights, and declines in son preference and the number of “missing women.”

Supporting these findings, political scientists Eric Neumayer and Indra de Soysa have shown that increased trade openness reduces forced labor among women and increases their economic rights, including equal pay for equal work, equality in hiring and promotion practices, and the right to gainful employment without the permission of a husband or male relative. Other studies reach similar conclusions. Analyzing global data from 1981 to 2007, Neumayer and de Soysa also found that increased trade openness improves both economic and social rights, including the right to initiate divorce, the right to an education, and freedom from forced sterilization and female genital mutilation.

A study published in the journal International Organization examined four measures of women’s equality: (1) life expectancy at birth, (2) female illiteracy rates among those over age 15, (3) women’s share of the workforce, and (4) women’s share of seats in parliament. The study found that international trade and investment led to improvements in women’s health, literacy, and economic and political participation. The evidence makes clear that economic freedom matters for the well-being of women everywhere (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Economic freedom and gender equality

Unfairness is one of the most common criticisms leveled against commercial society, often accompanied by claims that it undermines democracy and fosters partiality. The evidence presented here suggests the opposite. Engaging in trade and market exchange teaches us to treat others more generously and impartially. The natural outcome of these values is the institutional protection of certain rights. Fair treatment for all becomes the name of the game. We begin to trust one another’s choices and to believe in our shared ability to build society together.