Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek is an economics professor. In Half Mad with the Itch for ‘Simpler Times’? he explain how he opens his Principles of Microeconomics class each year:
I began this class as I begin all of my Principles classes — namely, by informing my students that each of them is among the very wealthiest people ever to live. Some of my evidence for this claim is the fact that my students are alive, that their parents probably are still alive, that they never worry about starving to death or being killed or disfigured by small pox, that they bathe regularly, and that they each live a home with solid floors, walls, and ceilings and into which livestock do not routinely roam, defecate, and urinate.
Why does he start his class this way?
I want my students to be in awe of what the market economy and its deep, deep division of labor achieves. Even the most modest — indeed, even the very poorest — of living standards in the United States today is vastly more comfortable, safe, and hygienic than were living standards for ordinary people just a few generations ago.
An illustrative passage from Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England on the life of a highland Scot in the 17th century:
His lodging would sometimes have been in a hut of which every nook would have swarmed with vermin. He would have inhaled an atmosphere thick with peat smoke, and foul with a hundred noisome exhalations. At supper grain fit only for horses would have been set before him, accompanied by a cake of blood drawn from living cows. Some of the company with which he would have feasted would have been covered with cutaneous eruptions, and others would have been smeared with tar like sheep. His couch would have been the bare earth, dry or wet as the weather might be; and from that couch he would have risen half poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek of turf, and half mad with the itch.