Things Chelsea Follett Has Said on Podcasts

“There is a modern myth that the reason for such a low average life expectancy in the past was entirely due to high rates of childhood death. If you could just make it to age 50, you would have as good a chance of reaching age 60 as you do today, goes the thinking. This is not true. In reality, at every single age, mortality rates were higher in the past.” — Chelsea Follett, Cato Podcast

Meany had suggested that short average lifespans in the past were mostly about the dangerous first five years. Follett agreed child mortality was astronomical but said adults died more often at every age too, before antibiotics turned a small scrape into a survivable event.

Cato Podcast · 2026-10-27 Permalink → Listen →

Cato Podcast Around 19:31 into the episode

Chelsea Follett

…showing life expectancy throughout time that you can look up. Flat throughout most of history, barely any progress from the days of the Roman Empire all the way until just prior to the Industrial Revolution. People continued to live very short lives on average and then suddenly a huge upswing.

Paul Meany

And people live short lives on average because the most dangerous part of your life was the first five years.

Chelsea Follett

That is definitely true. However, there is a modern myth that the reason for high rates of mortality in the past, the reason for such a low average life expectancy in the past was entirely due to high rates of childhood death. If you could just make it to age 50, you would have as good a chance of reaching age 60 as you do today, goes the thinking. This is not true. In reality, at every single age, mortality rates were higher in the past. For children and for infants in their first year of life in particular, mortality rates were astronomical. But for every age group, mortality rates were higher. As you point out, prior to antibiotics, the simplest infection, a small scrape, could result in your death. And of course, people were often malnourished, itching from fleas. Dental care forms its own chapter in this book because the state of dentistry was abominable. Most people had toothaches and teeth actually ground down to the point that you could see the wiggling nerve endings from under the teeth, resulting in a very widespread belief across different cultures in toothworms as the cause of toothaches. This theory lasted for quite a long…

Paul Meany

Okay, but for the people who love the fantasy.

Chelsea Follett

Yes.

Paul Meany

Healthcare was worse. Housing was miserable. No dentistry. Food was pretty bland, pretty hard to get. Possibility of famine around the corner. Let's grant you all that. Human society might be pretty terrible. But one thing some people might say is human society might not have been so hot, but the…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

“In London in 1595, a law was passed … which meant no beating your wife after 9 p.m. That was a noise regulation. It was in a list of laws that also forbid using a hammer after 9 p.m., because it was just accepted that beating your spouse until she screamed was as ordinary as using a hammer.” — Chelsea Follett, Cato Podcast

Host Paul Meany asked whether pre-industrial people at least had stronger communities and families. Follett, discussing her book on the "good old days," said no: nearly every parent lost a child, marriages were economic necessities, and domestic violence was widely tolerated.

Cato Podcast · 2026-10-27 Permalink → Listen →

Cato Podcast Around 26:33 into the episode

Chelsea Follett

…getting the task over with quickly. But the fact that torturing animals was in some cases actually legally required before you could sell their meat, I think really puts current debates into perspective. The people of the past truly did not care about animal welfare or protecting the natural world.

Paul Meany

…as a result, we live with less communal ties, less fellow feeling, and we're more miserable people. Is that a nostalgic kind of rose-tinted view of the past? Or is there some truth there to that idea that they did live in strong communities that worked together that gave a great sense of meaning?

Chelsea Follett

…firsthand experience of child loss as a happier world. Almost everyone would have lost a child, a sibling. It was common for parents to pre-decease their children in childhood as well because of the astronomical rate of death and childbirth, among other things. And if you look at the way our ancestors treated one another, it was not always this warm, fuzzy picture that we might like to imagine. In London in 1595, a law was passed saying, No man shall, after the hour of nine at night, keep any rule whereby any such sudden outcry be made in the still of the night as making any affray or beating his wife or servant, which meant no beating your wife after 9 p.m. That was a noise regulation. It was in a list of laws that also forbid using a hammer after 9 p.m. because it was just accepted that beating your spouse until she…

Paul Meany

So, we talked about the hockey stick graph and that the vast majority of human history is described as kind of a flat, straight line, not really much economic growth. Then, all of a sudden, some point in the 1800s, the line goes up, we become immensely richer. But I think a lot of people are under…

Chelsea Follett

New technologies bring trade-offs, sure. But the problems that we have today differ so dramatically from the problems that our ancestors faced throughout much of history. Our problems today are champagne problems compared to what they went through. I'm glad that you brought up AI because so many…

Paul Meany

I think throughout the book, there's kind of an obvious question that's coming up under the surface, which is, how did we get so rich? I think this is what a lot of people wonder: how we went from living in, you know, kind of huts and caves and then castles to modern skyscrapers today. And I think…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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