The Grim Old Days, with Chelsea Follett: Libertarian Christian Podcast

by Stephan Kinsella on October 9, 2026

Interesting interview from the Libertarian Christian Institute (@LCIOfficial) Podcast of Chelsea Follett discussing her forthcoming book The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past (Cato; forthcoming October 20, 2026). The book sounds really good, despite praise from the usual suspects like Stephen “Pinker.” (Overcast; youtube below)

LCP Youtube shownotes:

Life before the Industrial Revolution was not simpler, slower, or more humane. It was short, violent, filthy, and saturated with grief, and almost nobody alive today can picture it accurately. That gap is not harmless. It shapes how people respond to economic growth, to AI, and to every technology that promises to change how we live.

Chelsea Follett, research fellow at the Cato Institute and the mind behind HumanProgress.org, returns to the show with a new book, The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past. The argument is blunt: we have not only solved many of the problems our ancestors faced, we have erased the memory of them. Nostalgia fills the vacuum, and nostalgia is a terrible guide to policy. What follows takes the romantic version of the past apart and argues that gratitude for what we have is the first step toward keeping it.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction and New Book

1:35 Why Write The Grim Old Days

6:38 Why We Romanticize the Past

10:55 Life, Death, and Family Hardship

13:33 Industrialization Changed Everything

18:44 Christians for Liberty Conference 2026

23:46 Defining the Pre-Industrial Era

26:39 Progress, Fragility, and Poverty

29:51 What Drove the Industrial Revolution?

32:23 Sources and Historical Accuracy

34:46 The Darkest Historical Anecdotes

37:12 Child Loss and Modern Medicine

40:23 Debunking the Leisure Myth

42:42 De-Romanticizing the Recent Past

Additional Resources

HumanProgress.org

Centers of Progress

Follow Chelsea on X

Libertarian and Objectivist commentary on the Anti-Industrial Revolution

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., “My Vice: Hating the Environment” (LewRockwell.com, August 11, 2000). The piece usually cited in place of the 1990 manifesto: nature as dangerous until tamed, environmentalism as an official religion, and a rejection of “free-market environmentalism” for accepting the greens’ ends. The 1990 “An Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto,” written for Pat Buchanan’s From the Right, is not freely online.
Murray N. Rothbard, “Conservation, Ecology, and Growth” (chapter 13 of For a New Liberty, 1973). Pollution as a failure to defend property rights, not a case against industry; the zero-growth and back-to-nature program as a demand to freeze living standards.
Murray N. Rothbard, “Conservation in the Free Market” (1970; chapter 9 of Egalitarianism as a Revolt against Nature). Against the Romanticist abhorrence of technology: the market already conserves resources by price, and pollution is invasion of property, not a reason to scrap industrial civilization.
Murray N. Rothbard, “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” (Cato Journal, Spring 1982). The strict tort standard: enjoin proven invasion, reject statistical and administrative substitutes for proof of harm. The Rothbardian alternative to both ignoring pollution and regulating industry out of existence.
Ludwig von Mises, “The Popular (and Wrong) Interpretation of the ‘Industrial Revolution’” (from Human Action; Mises Daily). The Austrian source Rothbardians rely on: the evils blamed on the factories were the order of the “good old days,” and factory work was salvation for a surplus population the pre-capitalist system could not feed.
Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution” (The Objectivist, January–February 1971; collected in The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 1971, and Return of the Primitive, 1999). The direct Objectivist attack on the New Left ecology movement: technology as life-saving, a restricted technology as a contradiction, and the pre-industrial past as the thing the anti-industrialists want to restore.
Ayn Rand, The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), later expanded as Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1999, ed. Peter Schwartz). Essays on the campus New Left, “The Age of Envy,” and the claim that once the old Marxists learned a modern factory could not shoe the world by expropriation, they decided going barefoot was superior to wearing shoes.
George Reisman, “The Toxicity of Environmentalism” (1990; excerpted from Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics). Argues that the ecology movement’s premise of nature’s intrinsic value implies hostility to man and to industrial civilization, and that the greens are the death rattle of socialism: control no longer in the name of prosperity, but in the name of forbidding engineering.
George Reisman, “The Global Warming Bugaboo” (Mises Daily, March 8, 2006). On the demand to abandon the Industrial Revolution on the strength of a weather forecast, and the inversion in which destroying refrigerators, tractors, and hospitals is treated as the way to cope with heat, hunger, and disease.
George Reisman, “Wages: The Anti-Capitalist and Pro-Capitalist View” (Mises, April 1, 2019). The rising age at which children go to work, from about four in 1780 to the twenties now, as a product of rising real wages under capitalism, not of the anti-industrial story that the factories created child labor.
George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996; free PDF from the author). The long treatment of the Industrial Revolution as the escape from mass poverty, famine, and child mortality, against both the Marxist immiseration thesis and the later environmentalist case for reversing it.