Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 15 of the 2003 3rd edition of Patricia Crone’s 1989 book, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World:

The pre-industrial world was not of course unfamiliar with mechanical devices, and some of these devices were driven by inanimate energy too (water wheels, windmills, ships); but most of them depended on human or animal energy for their operation, and though they certainly increased the productivity of human labour, they industrial breakthrough freed production from its dependence on animal and human muscle on an unprecedented scale, generating the huge quantity and range of goods which we have come to take for granted. By our standards, the products of the pre-industrial world were both few and very expensive.

DBx: In their attempts to push humanity away from using petroleum and other enormously efficient carbon fuels – combined with their irrational hostility to nuclear energy – today’s “progressives” would propel humanity back into the poverty, muck, and misery of pre-industrial times.