Narratives matter in public policy, often in an unfortunate manner.
People used to believe (and some still do) that the Great Depression was caused by capitalism and that President Roosevelt’s interventions rescued the economy. Those people arewrong.- People used to believe (and some still do) that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by Wall Street “greed” and that laws such as Dodd-Frank will protect us in the future. Those people arewrong.
Another narrative is that the industrial revolution was a horrible period in American economic history that produced immense wealth for so-called robber barons while leading to suffering and deprivation for everyone else.
Today, we will look at why that is nonsense.
We’ll start with this chart from Oxford University’s Our World in Data. As you can see, per-capita GDP increased sharply in the latter part of the 19th century (the period most associated…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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