He also emphasized that on its own, a chart doesn’t demonstrate causation - we’d need to look at the timing of industrialization by region, and the timing of changes in well-being, to draw any conclusions there. He emphasized how many metrics are missing from this picture, because we don’t have good data on them going back for centuries. I reached out to Muehlhauser to ask him about the biggest takeaways from this chart and from this view of human progress. The most striking lessons from this chart But historians broadly agree that extraordinary gains were associated with the Industrial Revolution. Historians disagree on many details of this story - for example, on when the Industrial Revolution can be said to have begun, and on when it started producing real gains in standards of living for the average person. That sudden, drastic rise in standards of living is what the chart reflects.
The lower middle class in Western and Asian industrialized societies today has a higher living standard than the pope and the emperors of a few centuries back, in every dimension.” The notion that today we would live for 80 years, and spend much of those in leisure, is totally unexpected. Life expectancy in 1750 was around 38 at most, and much lower in some places. And when I say poor, I mean they were on the brink of physical starvation for most of their lives. “Until about 1800,” Mokyr told the Washington Post, “the vast bulk of people on this planet were poor. This transition affected almost every industry, from textiles and ironworking to transportation and agriculture.
The Industrial Revolution refers to the transition, beginning in Britain and spreading around the world in the 19th century, to new - often factory-based - manufacturing processes. What made the Industrial Revolution different? Within 200 years, the human experience looked very different. In short, for most of history, all human events - the rise and fall of empires, the spread of plagues, the spread and schisms of religions, the invention of wheels and aqueducts and the printing press - barely affected the typical person’s life span, political freedom, economic productivity, or wealth.Īnd then, with the Industrial Revolution, all those things changed at once. The fall of the Roman Empire did affect some measures of well-being, but on a scale that is barely visible on this graph. The Black Death killed 10 percent of everyone alive and still barely moved these numbers. The most significant events of history had - when we zoom out and take a look at the big picture - only a small impact on overall well-being. Almost the entire world lived in extreme poverty. Life expectancy at birth is believed by historians to have hovered in the range of 25 to 30 years (though this is mostly due to child deaths, not deaths in early adulthood). The same share of people lived in a democratic society - approximately none. Over almost all of human history, each of these metrics of well-being was completely flat. The Industrial Revolution is generally agreed to have begun in the late 1700s or first half of the 1800s, and that’s also when most of these markers of human well-being started to change.Įconomic historian Joel Mokyr has called the 19th and 20th centuries “the most transformative centuries in all of human history.” From this chart, it’s easy to see why. The graph starts in 1000 BC and goes to the present day.
The resulting graph is startling: The impact of historical events on six measures of global well-being. He plotted those measures across the entire sweep of human history. Obviously, we don’t have a precise measure of many of these things for most of history - but we have enough to get a strong sense of some trends. The six metrics he charted were life expectancy GDP per capita the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty “war-making capacity,” a measure of technological advancement for which we have the most historical data “energy capture,” which reflects access to food, livestock, firewood, and, in the modern day, electricity and the percentage of people living in a democracy. Last year, he embarked on an amateur macrohistory project: collecting all the data we have available for six different metrics of human well-being, and graphing those metrics to get a picture of how the world has changed over time. Luke Muehlhauser is a researcher who studies risks to human civilization.
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