Chelsea Follett joins Brian Anderson to talk about how technology has improved urban living from earlier times.

Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks Podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Chelsea Follett. She's the author of the recent book, Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Change the World, managing editor of humanprogress.org, which is a project of the Cato Institute that looks at global improvements in wellbeing. And on the subject of improving wellbeing, she's here to discuss her recent City Journal story, “Think the Present Is Tough? Try the Past.” So Chelsea, thanks so much for coming on 10 Blocks.

Chelsea Follett: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Anderson: Your essay, it offers what you could call a corrective to a powerful mood in politics these days, which is a sense that things are uniquely awful. Human beings do often feel nostalgia. This was already true. You go back to ancient Greece, but they can romanticize what the past was actually like. Yet in one 2023 poll, almost 20 percent of Americans said they believed it would've been easier to have a thriving and fulfilling life hundreds of years ago. So why do you think that in an age of what has to be described as widespread material abundance, people seem to feel so overwhelmed and unhappy with their quality of life?

Chelsea Follett: I think it's because humanity has not only overcome many of the problems that our ancestors faced, but also lost the memory that those problems existed in the first place. We've come so far that we have lost that historical perspective. And so sometimes it's nice to zoom out and take a broader historical view of things to put today's very real challenges into perspective and remind ourselves just how far we've come. And that humanity is actually amazing at solving problems and improving our standard of living over time when given the freedom and opportunity to do so.

Brian Anderson: Well, this essay is a description of pre-industrial New York. And it's almost shocking to somebody who doesn't know this history, filth, disease, contaminated water, a lot more pervasive and nasty things. So maybe you could give listeners a quick tour of what urban life was like in that earlier time. We hear a lot of talk about affordability these days in American politics and in urban politics. That theme certainly helped Zohran Mamdani get elected in New York City last year's mayor. But back then, subsistence living was closer to the norm for many American city dwellers, so real affordability problems. But yeah, maybe you could just describe a bit what it was like.

Chelsea Follett: Absolutely. And Mamdani is not alone in this, although his political views are definitely rooted in a philosophy that emerged in response to the challenges of the early industrial age. History.com published a piece not long ago, titled “Seven Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution” that argued that horrible living conditions for workers were among those effects. And that captures a very common view actually that all these terrible things about modern life first emerged during the industrial era, but actually terrible living conditions preceded industrialization by quite a lot. Even if you go back to the very beginnings of New York City, back when it was New Amsterdam founded by the Dutch as this bustling port city, it had a lot of problems. Filth was rampant in the streets. There were animals everywhere. It was actually very rural until much more recently than people remember. There was a huge issue with homelessness, unfortunately. Life before industrialization wasn't uniquely bad in New York City, it was terrible everywhere. Extreme poverty, exhausting labor, filth, brutality, and suffering, just characterized life across the planet. But New York City was no exception. And by remembering what people went through in early New York City, my hope is that we can put today's challenges into perspective.

Brian Anderson: Well, today in the developed world, even the poorest households have access to clean water. That's an example. This was an achievement of technology, especially through chlorination. Yet we feel such enormous anxiety about technology these days, and many critics blame technology for certain kinds of disease that are becoming rampant in their view. What is the role of our attitude toward technology in some of these misperceptions of what history was like?

Chelsea Follett: I think that the anxieties of our own digital age with rapidly advancing technology contribute to this nostalgic view of the past when technological progress was much slower. But as you say, so many things that we take for granted, take it to be the default such as clean water were not the norm historically. This is actually a very unusual moment in history to have so many things that our ancestors would've considered to be luxuries, to be widely available. And people were aware throughout history that their situation when it came to things like water was not ideal. There are a bunch of quotes in the piece on City Journal discussing the water supply. We have a quote from 1748 from someone saying that the well water in New York City was so filthy that horses from out of town refused to drink it. And there's another quote from 1798 from the Commercial Advertiser claiming that Manhattan's main well is a “shocking hole where all impure things center together and engender the worst of unwholesome productions, foul with excrement, frog spawn and reptiles that delicate pump system is supplied. The water has grown worse manifestly within a few years. It is so bad as to be very sickly and nauseating and the larger the city grows, the worse this evil will be.” So again, that's from the late 18th century. New York City having problems is not something new, and that's not to minimize the current challenges of the city. I don't believe the idea that some people have that fostering a proper historical perspective engenders complacency regarding our current problems. I think on the contrary, it helps us to realize just how far we've come and how far we can continue to go, how incredibly talented humanity actually is at raising our standard of living over time. And so I would encourage, of course, people to push back against any policies that are making the standard of living in New York City today less than desirable, but keeping that historical perspective of just how bad things have been is very important.

Brian Anderson: It's also the case that people were moving to these urban centers from the countryside. There is, I think, a misperception of what the countryside was like. Rural life was not particularly pleasant for many people either. So they were, in many cases, moving to these cities for opportunity as challenging as those environments were. Would you agree with that?

Chelsea Follett: Absolutely. Part of the romanticization that we see today of the pre-industrial era is a romanticization of rural life. This idea that before the dark smoke stacks of the Industrial Revolution, our ancestors were these happy rural villagers dancing around May poles without a care in the world. In reality, everyday struggle of backbreaking labor that the typical person who was an agricultural laborer experienced, this was terrible. It took a toll on the body, early aging, and farms, as anyone who has been on one knows smell terrible. There were fertilizing cesspits that filled the air with foul odors. People brought their farm animals inside at night, actually, to help stave off the cold, which also cannot have smelled very good. It would've been very loud as well. Rural living conditions were so undesirable that people left rural areas and droves and flooded into cities with the first wave of urbanization, even though living conditions in cities were not necessarily much better. But people in urban areas did tend to own more possessions often and be slightly better off than the rural counterparts.

Brian Anderson: Your essay is a kind of historical corrective. For those listeners who haven't read it, it's an entertaining read. Your recent book, Centers of Progress, is about how cities really do drive human flourishing over time. What are the key ingredients in your view that have allowed cities to become historically engines of progress to leave behind the conditions you vividly describe in the City Journal essay? And are modern Western cities losing sight of them? You mentioned New York. Things are not all going great in New York or Chicago or LA or many other American cities right at the moment. So two questions. Yeah. What are the drivers of urban success historically and are we beginning to lose sight of some of those?

Chelsea Follett: In the book, Centers of Progress, I try to lay out the history of the most innovative cities throughout time without a lot of commentary on what drove those cities to be creative. But in the introduction, you can find some of my thoughts on that, which are that while the cities that have driven forward progress throughout time are very diverse. They're from different areas of the world, different eras, they do share some things in common. They tend to be relatively free for their era. They tend to be relatively open societies, open to peoples and ideas, and they also tend to be at peace. Although there are some exceptions to that, some people believe war drives forward progress and it does drive forward certain forms of technological change, but it's not that people under conditions of peace cease to compete with one another technologically. It's just that they're competing to fulfill human needs under market conditions, right? If they have relative freedom, rather than competing to create ways to destroy one another. But as optimistic as that book was, and it contains these very inspiring episodes from history, including a chapter on New York City, which is probably of interest to listeners of this podcast, a modern person would not want to go back in time to any of these great cities during their golden age, which is why my forthcoming book this fall tries to deromanticize the past and provide a more realistic look at what our forebearers experienced. And that book, which the article on pre-industrial New York City is based on, is called The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Pre-industrial Past. It will be out this October, and it's available for pre-order now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other major retailers. And it's something that you should consider recommending to anyone in your life who does idealize the past. And that's the reality of progress that humanity has experienced.

Brian Anderson: Interesting. So it is sort of a sequel to Centers of Progress in a way, right?

Chelsea Follett: In a way. But that book was optimistic highlighting these moments in history when humanity did make progress through these very innovative cities. It looked at the places that have helped to drive us forward. And I was often asked after writing that book, if you could visit any of history's most innovative cities, any of the centers of progress in your book, which one would you visit? And my answer to that is none of them, because today we are free to read the philosophical works that came out of ancient Athens without seeing human beings offered up for sale in their slave markets. And we were able to view the artworks that came out of Renaissance Florence without any risk of contracting the bubonic plague. People do not realize just how far we have come. And so that's the purpose of this next book, The Grim Old Days, an introduction to the pre-industrial past, to de- romanticize our view of history and really shine a light on what an everyday person would have experienced prior to industrialization, and then hopefully foster conversations on what has caused this tremendous leap in progress since then.Why when throughout most of history, living conditions were just horrific. People were extremely poor. They were working on farms doing backbreaking, subsistence agricultural labor. They lived in filth. There was incredible violence, prejudice, suffering. What caused everything to change suddenly? But before we can even have that conversation, we first do need to get people to acknowledge that any progress has been made and hopefully get them to stop romanticizing the distant past. And so that's where this book fits in.

Brian Anderson: Final question. Looking ahead, do you have some optimism that American cities can rediscover some of the spirit of growth and possibility, or do you think we might be entering into a longer period of stagnant urban life?

Chelsea Follett: It really depends on the choices that people make because progress is not guaranteed. I'm a big believer, as I think I've expressed in the historical reality of progress. We have come a long way, but I do not think that future progress is something that will necessarily continue. It depends on the choices that people make. It depends on whether or not we can correctly identify the causes of the progress that we have made thus far. And so that's why it's so important to have those conversations about what institutions, what policies help us to thrive, help our urban environments to foster creativity and innovation. And if voters and people of New York City and elsewhere can make the correct choices to drive innovation forward, then yes, hopefully we can continue to make incredible progress.

Brian Anderson: Well, thanks very much. You can read Chelsea Follet’s story, “Think the Present is Tough? Try the Past” in our winter print issue and on the City Journal website, we'll have a link to her author page in the description. You can find her on X with the tag @chellivia, so that's @chellivia. And you can find City Journal there too with the address @cityjournal and on Instagram @cityjournal_mi. If you like what you've heard on today's podcast, please like, subscribe and give us a nice rating. So Chelsea, thank you very much for this informative discussion and thanks for coming on 10 Blocks.

Chelsea Follett: Thank you so much, Brian.