There has been more material progress in the United States in the 20th century than there was in the entire world in all the previous centuries combined. Almost every indicator of health, wealth, safety, nutrition, affordability and availability of consumer goods and services, environmental quality, and social conditions indicates rapid improvement over the past century. The gains have been most pronounced for women and minorities.
Among the most heartening trends: life expectancy has increased by 30 years; infant mortality rates have fallen 10-fold; the number of cases of (and the death rate from) the major killer diseases,such as tuberculosis, polio, typhoid, whooping cough and pneumonia,has fallen to fewer than 50 per 100,000; air quality has improved by about 30% in major cities since 1977; agricultural productivity has risen five- to 10-fold; real per capita gross domestic product has risen from $4,800 to $31,500; and real wages have nearly quadrupled from $3.45 an hour to $12.50.
The roughly fourfold rise in the living standards of Americans in this century is particularly impressive when we consider that for thousands of years human progress occurred at a glacial pace. For the thousand years before the Industrial Revolution, incomes were virtually flat, growing by about 0.5% per year. Life expectancy was not much greater in 1700 than it was at the time of the Greek and Roman Empires. Throughout most of human history, life was, as Thomas Hobbes famously put it, “nasty, brutish and short.”
The latter part of the 19th century was an era of tuberculosis, typhoid, sanitariums, child labor, child death, horses, horse manure, candles, 12-hour workdays, Jim Crow laws, tenements, slaughterhouses and outhouses. Lynchings,not just of blacks,were common. (In the South 11 Italians were lynched in one month.) To live to 50 was to count one’s blessings. For a mother to have all four of her children live to adulthood was to beat the odds of nature. One in 10 children died before his or her first birthday. One hundred years ago parents lived in eternal fear of a child’s dying; nowadays, many parents live in eternal fear of their child’s not making the county select soccer team.
Industrial cities were typically enveloped in clouds of black soot and smoke. Factories belching poisons into the air were regarded as a sign of prosperity and progress. Leading killers of the day included pneumonia, tuberculosis, diarrhea and violence. In 1918, pneumonia killed 675,000 Americans. Pollution killed people,lots and lots of people. Deadly diseases were carried by milk and what then qualified as “drinking water.” Cancer was not one of the primary causes of death as it is today, because most Americans first succumbed to infectious diseases and occasional epidemics.
Medical care was astonishingly primitive by today’s standards. Health historian Theodore Dalrymple notes that until the late 19th century it was often considered “beneath a physician’s dignity to actually examine a patient.” Most of the drugs used throughout the ages, including arsenic, were useless and in many cases poisonous. Oliver Wendell Holmes was reported to have declared that if all of the drugs in his time were tossed into the ocean it would be better for mankind and worse for the fish.
So why did mankind experience such a burst of progress all of a sudden at the start of the 20th century? And why did so much of that progress originate in the United States? The shorthand answer to the second question is this: Freedom works. The unique American formula of individual liberty and free enterprise has encouraged risk taking, experimentation, innovation, and scientific exploration of a magnitude that is unprecedented in human history.
Economic freedom and freedom from government repression, in particular, are necessary ingredients for human progress. In the United States the government has, for the most part, set down a reasonable rule of law and then gotten out of the way.
America also enjoys a unique advantage over other nations because we are a nation that remakes itself through the new blood of immigrants. The tens of millions of new Americans who came through Ellis Island or the Golden Gate or across the Rio Grande have been some of the brightest and most ambitious people of the rest of the world.
The answer to the first question, why all this progress has been compressed into the historical nanosecond of the 20th century, is not so straightforward. We believe, however, that three relatively modern developments have revolutionized human life.
The first was modern medicine and vaccines. Scientists generally attribute up to half the increase in life expectancy in this century to improved drugs, vaccines and other medical treatment breakthroughs.
The second development was the harnessing of electrical power. Electricity started to become widely available in homes and factories only in the early decades of this century. The third transforming development was the invention of the microchip. The average American worker with a $799 Pentium-chip laptop computer has more computing power at his fingertips than was contained in all the computers in the entire world during World War II. One hundred years ago, all of the greatest mathematicians in the world together did not have the problem-solving resources of today’s fourth grader with a $19.95 Texas Instruments pocket calculator.
The doubters will wonder whether our present glorious age in America is just another blip in history, like the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman Empires and the Golden Age of Greece. Skeptics moan that either the progress we have experienced in the 20th century will be reversed or, as some environmentalists fear, we will be done in by growth mania itself.
We doubt it. The advance of civilization that we are now living through is different from previous advances.
Ours is the first age in which affluence has been enjoyed by more than just a tiny fraction of the population. In previous times, even in the great empires, at least 90% of the populace remained at a Malthusian level of subsistence.
Most Americans who are considered “poor” today have routine access to a quality of food, healthcare, consumer products, entertainment, communications and transportation that even the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers and 19th-century European royalty could not have afforded. No mountain of gold 100 years ago could have purchased the basics of everyday life today: a television set, a stereo with the first music ever recorded, a cellular telephone, a car, a vaccination against polio, a H & #228;agen Dazs ice cream bar, a sinus tablet, contact lenses (to say nothing of laser surgery), or the thrill of seeing Michael Jordan dunking a basketball.
Moreover, the gains that have been made in the 20th century are primarily the result of the wondrous advances of human knowledge. That knowledge can never be erased, even if barbarians or Luddites were to burn every library to the ground. Encyclopedias can now be stored on a six-inch, $10 computer disk.
We are hard-pressed to find more than a small handful of trends that have gotten worse in this century. Taxes are higher and government is a lot bigger and more intrusive than 100 years ago in the United States. (We believe that big government may be a consequence, but surely not the cause, of prosperity.)
And some social trends, of course, indicate deterioration over the past 30 to 40 years. There have been worrisome increases in family breakups, abortions, illegitimate births and teen suicide, for example. However, in recent years, most of these troubling trends of social decay have been improving, and for almost all the other social problems, the arrow points to improvement on a grand scale.
Moore is director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Simon is a retired professor of business administration at the University of Maryland. This article is adapted and condensed from a paper. Stephen A. Slivinski and Philip Kerpen provided research assistance.
