“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.”
Cato Podcast · October 2026
Context
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.
Transcript
…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.
…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?
…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…
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…
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…
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…
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