Chelsea Follett is a research fellow at the Cato Institutes Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, working with HumanProgress.org, a project of the Cato Institute that seeks to educate the public on the global improvements in well-being by providing free empirical data on long-term developments. She is the author of Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World. Her writing has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, Forbes, The Hill, Business Insider, National Review, Washington Examiner, and Reason, among other outlets. She was named to Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2018 in law and policy. Follett earned a BA magna cum laude in government and English from the College of William & Mary, as well as an MA in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia, where she focused on international relations and political theory. She lives in Virginia with her husband and four children.
Description
"Critics frequently imagine that growth conflicts with other things we value such as health, leisure, or the environment. In reality, the opposite is often the case as Chelsea Follett beautifully demonstrates in this fascinating and revealing account of how life was experienced prior to the Industrial Revolution. . . . Rather than romanticize what was lost to industrialization, Follett asks us to look clearly at what it actually was."--Mark Koyama, coauthor of How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth
"In 1954, F. A. Hayek edited Capitalism and the Historians, a book that refuted the myth that capitalism banished a green and pleasant pre-industrial existence. Now comes Chelsea Follett with an even more powerful demolition of capitalisms critics. Read it and rejoice that the enemies of progress lost their argument against economic freedom."--George F. Will, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Washington Post
"The fact that life before the modern era was more violent, squalid, ignorant, and dangerous is perhaps the most important realization that an educated person should command because it underpins everything that makes life meaningful today: knowledge, universal human rights, and the confidence that human ingenuity and fellow feeling can improve our condition. Yet most people are unaware of how life was lived before modernity, seduced by romantic images or misled by revisionist quibbles and asterisks. This richly researched and vividly written book sets the record straight. Every student and intellectually curious person should read it."--Steven Pinker, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
"This book is a rich feast of horrors: a detailed, scholarly but eloquent account of just how cruel, violent, filthy, prejudiced, and tedious life was in the past for almost everybody, even the rich. Chelsea Follett reminds us to dispel nostalgia and stop taking the wonders of the modern world for granted."--Matt Ridley, author of How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
"Too many of us have a view of the past, and particularly the premodern past, as somehow better than the present. Even if we accept that it was poorer, surely that was compensated for by greater meaning or stronger social connections? This is the definitive answer to such sentimental nonsense. . . . Read this and give thanks for your good fortune in being alive now and not in the grim old days."--Stephen Davies, historian and author of The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity
"Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. And nothing cures a bad memory better than Chelsea Folletts remarkable new book. This deeply researched and wonderfully written account of how our ancestors lived is eye-opening, shocking, and surprisingly entertaining."--Johan Norberg, author of Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages