In the long run,
the facts are on the side of the optimists.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of history bends toward progress. But progress doesn't just happen. People work hard to discover ways forward.
The What Works Initiative
highlights positive outcomes on difficult issues – and how people achieved them.
Philadelphia was the biggest city, at 30,000. New York City had about 25,000. Today those would be towns just big enough to support one medium-size high school.
Most Americans were self-employed farmers, and their world was powered by muscle – human and animal – with some added boost from firewood and water power. Today, one American can do the physical work in a day that would have required hundreds or even thousands of colonial-era people. We are exponentially more empowered.
That’s not just about trucks, trains, and cranes. Lighting a room for several evenings with tallow candles cost the equivalent of 50 hours of colonial-era labor. Lighting the same room with modern LED lamps costs less than three seconds of labor now.
Life expectancy has doubled from between 35 and 40 years to about 80 years. In 1776, about 43 percent of infants died before their fifth birthday. Now it’s well under 1 percent.
Violent crime varied wildly from place to place, but some research puts overall rates at about three times higher than the modern peak around 1990. It’s fallen by about half again since.
Literacy was a lower bar then, often meaning simply the ability to write one’s name. Among whites, literacy is estimated at above 70 percent in the Northern states but much lower in the rural South. Slaves were barred by law from learning to read in many states. Literacy was much higher among men than women. Today, the vast majority of Americans can manage life in a literacy-based world.
Economically, America’s founders lived in a more equal world of small landholders working their own plots — among free citizens, at least; enslaved people held no wealth at all. The top 1 percent held about 14 percent of total wealth. Today it’s 32 percent.
The words we value most in the Declaration of Independence – “all men are created equal” – have dramatically expanded their reach. For a couple of generations, the only people who could vote were white men who owned real estate. Black people were included, at least technically, in 1870 and in practice over the following generations. Women in 1920. Native Americans became citizens in 1924 and won the vote over the next 40 years.
Our imperfect union has grown better in uncountable ways.
Sources: NIH; BLS; Claude Fischer; Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson; William Nordhaus