Celebrate the Industrial Revolution and What Fueled It

The Industrial Revolution largely eradicated subsistence, child labor and slavery in much of the world.

Marian L. Tupy
June 16, 2019

In an article for CapX last week, I discussed Johan Norberg’s new book, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. As Norberg notes, over the last two centuries, humanity has made massive improvements in terms of nutrition, sanitation, life expectancy, poverty, violence, literacy, environmental quality, political freedom and child labor. 

Today, I want to discuss the role that the Industrial Revolution in general and fossil fuels in particular have played in bringing those improvements about.

Those readers who are familiar with Alex Epstein’s excellent The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels will recognize the gist of my argument: fossil fuels, which drive, among other things, modern agriculture and industrial production, make present-day abundance possible.

Remove cheap energy and most aspects of modern life, from car manufacturing and cheap flights to microwaves and hospital incubators, become a luxury, rather than a mundane, everyday occurrence and expecta…