The Wall Street Journal often provides its readers with eye-opening arguments in the “Notable and Quotable” column hosted in its editorial page.
On March 13, the WSJ quoted William Baumol, Robert Litan, and Carl Schramm, “Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity“. The argument won’t sound new to EconLog readers, but it is quite well and succinctly put:
The most astonishing thing about the extraordinary outpouring of growth and innovation that the United States and other economies have achieved over the past two centuries is that it does not astonish us. Throughout most of human history, life expectancy was about half what it now is, or even less. We could not record voices or speech, so no one knows how Shakespeare sounded or how “to be or not to be” was pronounced. The streets of the greatest cities were dark every night. No one traveled on land faster than a horse could gallop. The Battle of New Orleans took place after the peace treaty had been signed in Europe because General Andrew Jackson had no way of knowing this. In Europe, famines were expected about once a decade and the streets would be littered with corpses, and in American homes, every winter the ink in the inkwells froze.
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