Interesting interview from the Libertarian Christian Institute  (@LCIOfficial) Podcast of Chelsea Follett discussing her forthcoming book The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past (Cato; forthcoming October 20, 2026). The book sounds really good, despite praise from the usual suspects like Stephen “Pinker.” (Overcast; youtube below)

LCP Youtube shownotes:

Life before the Industrial Revolution was not simpler, slower, or more humane. It was short, violent, filthy, and saturated with grief, and almost nobody alive today can picture it accurately. That gap is not harmless. It shapes how people respond to economic growth, to AI, and to every technology that promises to change how we live.

Chelsea Follett, research fellow at the Cato Institute and the mind behind HumanProgress.org, returns to the show with a new book, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past. The argument is blunt: we have not only solved many of the problems our ancestors faced, we have erased the memory of them. Nostalgia fills the vacuum, and nostalgia is a terrible guide to policy. What follows takes the romantic version of the past apart and argues that gratitude for what we have is the first step toward keeping it.

Chapters:

• 0:00 Introduction and New Book
• 1:35 Why Write The Grim Old Days
• 6:38 Why We Romanticize the Past
• 10:55 Life, Death, and Family Hardship
• 13:33 Industrialization Changed Everything
• 18:44 Christians for Liberty Conference 2026
• 23:46 Defining the Pre-Industrial Era
• 26:39 Progress, Fragility, and Poverty
• 29:51 What Drove the Industrial Revolution?
• 32:23 Sources and Historical Accuracy
• 34:46 The Darkest Historical Anecdotes
• 37:12 Child Loss and Modern Medicine
• 40:23 Debunking the Leisure Myth
• 42:42 De-Romanticizing the Recent Past

Additional Resources

• HumanProgress.org
• Centers of Progress
• Follow Chelsea on X

Related

• Hoppe on the Industrial Revolution:
  • PFP041 | Hans-Hermann Hoppe, From the Malthusian Trap to the Industrial Revolution: An Explanation of Social Evolution (PFS 2009)
  • From the Malthusian Trap to the Industrial Revolution: An Explanation of Social Evolution (PFS 2009)
• Hoppe on “Pinker”
  • Afterword to Hoppe’s The Great Fiction, Second Expanded Edition
  • PFP200 | Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Progress According to Pinker (Part II) (PFS 2018)
  • Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Progress According to Pinker (Part II) (PFS 2018),
  • Hans-Hermann Hoppe, The Libertarian Search for a Grand Historical Narrative (Part I) (PFS 2018)
• LCI:
  • Faith Seeking Freedom: Libertarian Christian Answers to Tough Questions (Libertarian Christian Institute)
  • KOL490 | Libertarian Christian Institute: Rothbard at 100: Why His Ideas Still Matter, with Stephan Kinsella
  • KOL243 | Libertarian Christians Podcast with Norman Horn: Intellectual Property

Libertarian and Objectivist commentary on the Anti-Industrial Revolution

• Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., “My Vice: Hating the Environment” (LewRockwell.com, August 11, 2000). The piece usually cited in place of the 1990 manifesto: nature as dangerous until tamed, environmentalism as an official religion, and a rejection of “free-market environmentalism” for accepting the greens’ ends. The 1990 “An Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto,” written for Pat Buchanan’s From the Right, is not freely online.
• Murray N. Rothbard, “Conservation, Ecology, and Growth” (chapter 13 of For a New Liberty, 1973). Pollution as a failure to defend property rights, not a case against industry; the zero-growth and back-to-nature program as a demand to freeze living standards.
• Murray N. Rothbard, “Conservation in the Free Market” (1970; chapter 9 of Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature). Against the Romanticist abhorrence of technology: the market already conserves resources by price, and pollution is invasion of property, not a reason to scrap industrial civilization.
• Murray N. Rothbard, “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” (Cato Journal, Spring 1982). The strict tort standard: enjoin proven invasion, reject statistical and administrative substitutes for proof of harm. The Rothbardian alternative to both ignoring pollution and regulating industry out of existence.
• Ludwig von Mises, “The Popular (and Wrong) Interpretation of the ‘Industrial Revolution’” (from Human Action; Mises Daily). The Austrian source Rothbardians rely on: the evils blamed on the factories were the order of the “good old days,” and factory work was salvation for a surplus population the pre-capitalist system could not feed.
• Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution” (The Objectivist, January–February 1971; collected in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971, and Return of the Primitive, 1999). The direct Objectivist attack on the New Left ecology movement: technology as life-saving, a restricted technology as a contradiction, and the pre-industrial past as the thing the anti-industrialists want to restore.
• Ayn Rand, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), later expanded as Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1999, ed. Peter Schwartz). Essays on the campus New Left, “The Age of Envy,” and the claim that once the old Marxists learned a modern factory could not shoe the world by expropriation, they decided going barefoot was superior to wearing shoes.
• George Reisman, “The Toxicity of Environmentalism” (1990; excerpted from Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics). Argues that the ecology movement’s premise of nature’s intrinsic value implies hostility to man and to industrial civilization, and that the greens are the death rattle of socialism: control no longer in the name of prosperity, but in the name of forbidding engineering.
• George Reisman, “The Global Warming Bugaboo” (Mises Daily, March 8, 2006). On the demand to abandon the Industrial Revolution on the strength of a weather forecast, and the inversion in which destroying refrigerators, tractors, and hospitals is treated as the way to cope with heat, hunger, and disease.
• George Reisman, “Wages: The Anti-Capitalist and Pro-Capitalist View” (Mises, April 1, 2019). The rising age at which children go to work, from about four in 1780 to the twenties now, as a product of rising real wages under capitalism, not of the anti-industrial story that the factories created child labor.
• George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996; free PDF from the author). The long treatment of the Industrial Revolution as the escape from mass poverty, famine, and child mortality, against both the Marxist immiseration thesis and the later environmentalist case for reversing it.

Follett

• Chelsea Follett, Research Fellow, Cato Institute
• Previous LCP podcast, Ep. 360: How Cities Emerged as Centers of Progress, with Chelsea Follett
• Human Progress (HumanProgress.org) — a project of the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity
• Doomslayer: The Newsletter of Human Progress — Human Progress newsletter, edited by Malcolm Cochran
• Past Imperfect — Chelsea Follett’s Substack on preindustrial life
• Chelsea Follett, Visiting Fellow, Independent Women
• The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past — Simon & Schuster (Cato Institute, October 20, 2026)
• The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past — Amazon
• Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World (Simon & Schuster/Cato Institute, 2023)

David Harewood wrote a piece called “I have seen with pride how British overseas aid saves children’s lives. That is why I say cuts should be reversed”. He describes, movingly, how while visiting a hospital in Sierra Leone,

… I noticed a UK aid sticker fixed above a tiny incubator. Inside was a premature baby fighting for breath. Nearby stood oxygen equipment that staff explained had been funded through UK support. I learned that when power outages struck the hospital, as they often did, that equipment helped keep vulnerable newborns alive.

Being in the presence of these sometimes inconceivably small children, seeing the UK aid sticker labelled across the incubators that were keeping them alive, emotion completely overcame me. It was not only sadness. It was pride. Pride that people in Britain, most of whom would never meet that baby or their family, had helped make survival possible. Seven years later, that moment remains one of the most impactful of my life.

Many years ago, I turned against foreign aid – well, against most government-to-government foreign aid except immediately after natural disasters. How can I justify such a stance? Don’t I want premature babies in Sierra Leone to have incubators? I do want it. I want it very much. But take a look at this graph comparing the change in GDP per capita in current USA dollars of Sierra Leone and South Korea from 1960 to the present. In 1960, South Korea was at $158.8, a little higher than Sierra Leone’s $142.0, but still desperately poor. The next year South Korea’s figure ($94.2) was actually lower than Sierra Leone’s $142.3. I don’t know why that sudden year-on-year dip in South Korea’s wealth happened or if the effect were even real, but there can be no possible doubt about the reality of what happened over the next six and a half decades. The GDP per capita of the Republic of Korea is now $36,227.0, forty-three times higher than that of Sierra Leone, which is $846.7.

I want Sierra Leone to have incubators the way South Korea has incubators.“The Republic of Korea (South Korea) maintains excellent maternal and newborn health outcomes through its advanced healthcare system. With a maternal mortality ratio of approximately 8.1 deaths per 100,000 live births and a neonatal mortality rate of approximately 1.3 deaths per 1,000 live births, the country ranks among the world’s safest for childbirth.” South Korea did receive some foreign aid in the 1960s and 70s. Then it stopped. The country is now a donor rather than a recipient. Sierra Leone has received orders of magnitude more aid, and it has never stopped. In terms of things you can point to, like the incubators Mr Harewood saw, no doubt all that aid did some good. But in terms of that which is not seen, I believe that aid did more harm than good. The unceasing torrent of money made it less likely that Sierra Leone would do as South Korea did and so get South Korea-like outcomes.

So I’m not a fan of foreign aid. You knew that. Bet you didn’t know until you saw the headline to this post that Guardian readers are scarcely more enthusiastic about it than I am. Here are the top-level comments to Mr Harewood’s article ordered by number of recommendations:

misterrusty
27 Sep 2026 8.51
133

If Africa, which is 3 times the size of Europe stopped all the tribal infighting, it might become rich enough to support itself. The question is why a continent with such huge resources is so poor it has to rely on aid.

–

aunib
27 Sep 2026 9.07
120

We’re currently running a 4% GDP deficit and the interest on our debt is £110B a year. Charity is for surplus cash, and our government doesn’t have any of that at the moment.

–

Manchotte
27 Sep 2026 8.52
110

But the question remains: when will these African countries be able to support themselves? Sixty years since independence and they are still relying on British aid. Where did all the £100 billion go? apart from Swiss bank accounts!

–

Firtree
27 Sep 2026 9.26
92

Can someone please explain to me how it is okay for the government to borrow 10s of billions every month to keep us afloat while giving a big chunk of of it to others for free?

–

Bathreader
27 Sep 2026 8.50
83

Foreign aid is laudable but has to take its place with other priorities.Defence is the urgent priority after years of underspend.

–

The Guardian does its best to hide this preponderance of aid-sceptical sentiment among its readers by taking all eight of its “Guardian picks” from among the pro-aid comments, but anyone who sorts by “recommends”, as most people do, cannot fail to note that it is only on the sixth comment down that we finally reach one that is unambiguously in favour of foreign aid.

Edit: if the link to the graph comparing historical GDP per capita for the Republic of Korea and Sierra Leone is too much for your browser, you can generate it yourself by going to the World Bank “GDP per capita” page, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD , and entering both “Sierra Leone” and “Korea, Rep” into the search bar.

Ethnicity is not an opinion, but a fact of history, intermarriage and statistics of known populations: Romano-British, Anglo-Saxon, a few Scandinavian and, later, Normans. If you care to look up ethnogenesis, pedigree collapse and “identical ancestry” you can learn that, over several hundred years and assuming intermarriage, these groups have by now mixed almost entirely.

English ethnicity, at the end of those several centuries, is more clearly defined than most. To deny an English ethnicity is to say ethnicity does not exist, which would pose quite the shock to parts of our current political establishment.

– Isabel Paterson