Capitalism versus the good old days

Some wise words from Deirdre McCloskey, for those who fear that things were healthier in the good old days and that we are degrading our environment and living less authentic lives:

“‘Ah, but the environment was better.’ Briefly for now, no. Consider that you may be mistaken. Air quality during the past fifty years has improved in some respects in every rich city in the world. Let us then be rich. Remember smoky crofters’ cabins. Remember being tied in Japan by law and cost to one locale. Remember American outhouses and iced-over rain barrels and cold and wet and dirt. Remember in Denmark ten people living in one room, the cows and chickens in the other room. Remember in Nebraska sod houses and isolation. Remember a very reasonable terror in the face of nature, wolves roaming in packs during the seventeenth century even in the highly urbanized Low Countries. Remember horse manure in New York and soft coal in London. This is what we have escaped, thanks to that used-up liberal capitalism.”

That’s from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (University of Chicago Press, 2006), which I discussed briefly here: “Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800.”

McCloskey mentions another datum, excerpts from a diary kept by midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine from 1785 to 1812:

“I attended funeral of [name of child obscure], who deceased being 4 years and 1 day old … Captain Lamb’s wife, and Solon Cook’s, and Ebeneezer Davis, Jr.’s wives died in child bed; infants deceased also … A storm of snow; cold for March … I had two falls; one on my way there, the other on my return … I traveled some roads in the snow where it was almost as high as my waist … I was at home this day making soap and knitting … Was called at a little past 12 in morning by Mr. Edson, to go to his wife being in travail … The river [was] dangerous but [I] arrived safe through Divine protection … I could not sleep for fleas. I found 80 fleas on my clothes after I came home … Cleared some of the manure from under the out house … Iced-over rain barrel.”

McCloskey notes: “Martha Ballard lived a typical precapitalist life. Is any of this, dear reader, typical of your life in a modern bourgeois society?”

(Perhaps not, he answers to himself, sitting in his air-conditioned family room on a humid day, sipping imported coffee while browsing the web on his laptop and watching a soccer game broadcast live from the other side of the world, kids splashing noisily in the backyard pool).