Here’s a fact that astounds many of my friends: the average person in 1800 was not materially better off than his counterpart 10,000 years earlier. Prior to about 1776, wellbeing measured by food, clothing, shelter, and heat varied across societies, but was generally miserable.

Last April, Yale Press published historian Emily Cockayne’s Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770. The book recounts normal assaults to the eyes, ears, nose, taste, and skin in pre-Industrial Revolution cities. People experienced smallpox, refuse rotting in streets, and domestic animals roaming free. Lacking knowledge of disease and parasites, food hygiene was abominable—and often fatal.

In A World Lit Only by Fire, William Manchester gives this account of life in renaissance Europe. Dwellings were constructed of “...thatch, wattles, mud, and dirty brown wood.... Beneath its sagging roof were a pigpen, a henhouse, cattle sheds, corncribs, straw and hay, and, last and least, the family's apartment, actually a single room whose walls and timbers were coated with soot.... The centerpiece of the room was a gigantic bedstead, piled high with straw pallets, all seething with vermin.” Everyone slept there. And these were the prosperous peasants.

For thousands of years, there was no upward trend. Not until the mid 1800s did cities replace their populations through natural increase.

Folks find these facts astounding; we take wealth and progress as given. We take deviations from this trend as aberrations to be fixed by politicians. And they may be—but only by political entrepreneurs who utilize technology and foster institutions favoring progress. As our founders noted, ethics in commerce fosters progress.

Our remarkably productive market economy was made possible only through such institutional reforms as those of the U.S. Constitution. Its institutions made productive behavior more advantageous than predation. The rules it established are always at risk from politicians responding to their constituencies. Today’s ethanol mandates are a prime example of legalized predation of taxpayers and the poor.

As we’ve become wealthier, our standards rise. This applies to health, environmental quality, equality, access to education, and life expectancy. These qualities complement and reinforce one another.

Conditions accepted as normal a few decades ago are now abhorrent aberrations. Consider air in LA or Pittsburgh, water in Cleveland, or educational access for blacks in the Deep South. All are inferior to what we desire and to which we reasonably aspire. Generally however, all are far better than 40 years ago. We lament our failures, but we can and should celebrate our remarkable progress.

While improvements involve long slogs against traditions and laws, there are benchmarks of breakthroughs. In this sense, 1776 was a very good year, one exemplifying achievements of the Enlightenment. In addition to our Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, and the academic society Phi Beta Kappa was established at the College of William and Mary to promote freedom of inquiry.

Another breakthrough was the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The Court's unanimous decision stated, “...separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” It held that racial segregation is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and promoted integration and the civil rights movement.

I happened to be visiting Decatur, Georgia just after the decision and heard emotional denunciations of the decision and assertions of its folly and predictions of serious dangers to America. It seemed impossible that in a few decades a black would be the likely victor of our presidential election. This is surely remarkable progress.

1970 was another breakthrough year for it initiated the modern environmental movement with the first Earth Day. Underlying this event was the implicit realization that material plenty was not the only value that matters; quality of life involves much more than economic prosperity.

This realization lead to a host of environmental regulations, such as, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. They constrained actions that produced environmental danger and damage. Each still has wide support and only a return to poverty would reverse this progress. While some regulatory excesses threaten prosperity, I am hopeful political entrepreneurs will find another Breakthrough to progress.