… is from page 65 of the late Wesleyan University economic historian Stanley Lebergott’s brilliant 1993 book, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century:
Machines and fertilizer shortened U.S. work hours. So did the immense division of labor involved in making all the other goods the nation produces. That is why Papuans worked ten hours a day for their food, while Americans could earn the same diet in ten minutes.
DBx: It’s easy to look with full bellies from air-conditioned rooms contemptuously upon bourgeois virtues, market innovations, and capitalism’s countless fruits. Easy, too, is imagining how market realities might, were god in charge, be rearranged to satisfy even better this or that intellectual fancy. “I’d prefer a world in which the financial sector were smaller!” think some intellectuals, mistaking their preference for knowledge of what in fact would improve the lives of ordinary people. “I’d prefer a world in which the top one-percent of income earners earn less and the bottom fifty percent earn more!” think some other intellectuals, mistaking their preference for knowledge of what in fact would improve the lives of ordinary people. “I’d prefer a world powered less by petroleum and more by wind, sunbeams, and fairy dust,” think yet other intellectuals, mistaking their preference for knowledge of what is possible and what would in fact improve the lives of ordinary people.
Apparently for many people it’s extraordinarily difficult or emotionally troubling actually to look at reality realistically, learning some history, and recognizing that open markets and entrepreneurial innovation are astoundingly productive and a far truer friend of ordinary people than any horde of social reformers or high-minded government officials have ever been or ever could be.
