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The Industrial Revolution and Its Aftermath

Before about 1800, the wealth of human societies had been largely stagnant for thousands of years. But once the Industrial Revolution began—surely it was the most important event in the history of human civilization—societal wealth began to grow at unprecedented rates. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the end of the twentieth century, average incomes would grow tenfold at the same time that the population was growing sixfold. This astonishing increase in human wealth came about for a variety of reasons that are still not fully understood, but clearly implicated were scientific and technological progress, the protection of property rights, the rise of representative democracies, intense competition among the industrializing countries, vastly improved health, and so on.⁹

Whatever the cause of the increased wealth of societies, it would have extraordinary consequences, not the least of which was how the wealth should be distributed. Western societies differed in how wealth should be spread around, but they all agreed that it should be vastly more widely distributed than it actually was by the late nineteenth century.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the industrializing world¹⁰ would experiment with three strategies that were designed to capture and redistribute the wealth created by the Industrial Revolution (and, later, the Post-Industrial Revolution). These strategies were, in rough order of their appearance:

• Seizing ...