re: "I'm sure you don't deny the Industrial Revolution happened and made billions of people filthy rich compared with the impoverished, short, nasty and brutish existence for most people in the 19th century [and earlier centuries]."
You are displaying a very limited knowledge of history. FYI, the Industrial Revolution started in the late 1700s in England (that's the 18th Century). By the end of the 19th Century, the Industrial Revolution had spread to N. America, all of Europe, and was beginning in Japan. And, for the first 50 years of industrialization, in all those places, living conditions actually worsened for all but the elites. As peasants moved into cities and got jobs in factories, their lives became nasty and brutish. Lifespan in the cities was shorter than in the countryside, in the 19th Century (no indoor plumbing and crowding caused higher disease rates; 12-hour days weakened workers). Eventually (it took about 50 years into the process, till the early 20th Century in the U.S.), industrialization made people's lives better.
You are a Believer in Progress (capital B, capital P). You are the type who thought World War I was "the War to End All Wars". You are the type who thought (in the 1920s) the business cycle had been abolished. By the way, the only times this century that Americans have been this optimistic about the future, were right before WWI, and right before the Depression.
JS@reversiontothemean.com
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