They grew most of their own food.
They built their own dwellings.
They made a lot of their own clothing.
Our ancestors ate gruel
They wore the same home-made underwear over and over.
The filth was horrible and often toxic.
There were no toilets.
Today we expect to live to be about eighty.
Most of our ancestors lived in huts with dirt floors and thatched roofs.
Smallpox was eradicated in 1977.
Everything was infested with insects and rodents.
Streets and alleys were open sewers.
Today it is more like 1 in 200.
We grow to be four inches taller than we were just 250 ago.
The astonishing growth in prosperity is one of the greatest events ever.
The enrichment of the last centuries is the hockey stick of human prosperity
One in four kids would die before the age of 5.
Life expectancy was around thirty years.
