The Great Fact About Human Progress

For 99.7 percent of the time that we bipedal, scantily haired, language-blessed apes have trod this globe, we did so under material conditions that you and I from 2011 would find utterly intolerable. As another economist, Todd Buchholz, correctly noted, "For most of man's life on earth, he has lived no better on two legs than he had on four." Then all of a sudden, starting a mere 200 or so years ago in northwestern Europe, boom! Material riches start pouring forth.