Sure the Industrial Revolution made the average person better off,
but it made the wealthy better off on orders of magnitude that we'd never seen before,
even including literal royalty! You had people amassing fortunes bigger than those of small
countries and they were effectively above the law, and that's why they're called the robber barons.
It's true that some of these people should be criticized because they wanted to use political
influence to benefit themselves at the expense of other people, but we have to be fairer as
historians than just lumping a whole bunch of people together, calling them a nasty name, and
moving on. Because in fact the bulk of these people dramatically improved people's living
conditions, including the workers who worked for them, and this is why they became so wealthy.
So for example John D Rockefeller in oil refinery took a product that is now the lifeblood of modern
economies and made it vastly less expensive. He was able to take the price of kerosene and
lower it from a dollar to 10 cents a gallon, a 90 percent decrease. And at the same time he
took the byproducts of the refinery process and made 300 products out of those. We read
in our textbook about how terrible these people were and they monopolized different industries,
and the implication is they could just set prices at whatever level they wanted to. Well when one
economic historian, Thomas DiLorenzo, actually bothered to look at the data, what he found was
of the 17 industries most commonly accused of being monopolized and for which we have data,
15 of them saw prices fall dramatically, falling faster than any other prices in the economy.
When people think of Monopoly think of Boardwalk and Park Place, but there's some better examples:
Heinz Ketchup, Scotch Tape, Coke, Subway Sandwiches. Those are basically monopolies where you have
one company whose name is synonymous with the product that everyone likes and everyone buys.
But it's important for those companies to have those products cheap and available even though
there are cheaper and more available alternatives because everyone prefers to buy them. No,
Pepsi is not okay. Now it's true there were some people in American history who were lobbying
government to get special privileges they were going to use to get advantages for themselves
at the expense of the rest of us and those people should be condemned. So for example
Edward Collins got a government subsidy for his steamship business and he was supposed to provide
mail delivery across the Atlantic. He was getting $858,000 a year. Cornelius Vanderbilt comes along
in the mid 1850s, he gets no subsidy at all, and he's outperforming Collins both in passenger
travel and in mail delivery. So we should admire Cornelius Vanderbilt and criticize Edward Collins
but in the 7th grade textbook they're more or less treated the same. You know I mentioned Cornelius
Vanderbilt and he was really a heroic figure in some ways because he was dealing with the fact
that the governor of New York in 1798 had granted a monopoly on steamboat traffic for 30 years
to Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton. Vanderbilt was hired to run a steamboat
between New Jersey and Manhattan defying that monopoly, and he managed to evade capture
while at the same time charging only one quarter the fare that the monopolists were charging. Well
finally the New York steamboat monopoly was overturned, and under Vanderbilt's pressure
the fare from a trip from New York City to Albany dropped from seven dollars to three. The trip from
New York to Philadelphia which had been three dollars fell to one dollar. if you were going
from New Brunswick to Manhattan you paid only six cents and you ate for free. And when he moved his
steamboat operation to the Hudson River he charged a fare of 10 cents instead of three dollars,
and later he didn't even charge the 10 cents he figured people would probably buy food and drink
on board, he'd make his money that way. This is such a cost savings that it means people who could
simply not travel before now have basic travel within their grasp. Yeah, if that guy has more
money than I do he deserves it, good for him, and for me to pause and resent this for even a moment
is ridiculous. I think people have this idea that all these so-called robber barons were like my
buddy uncle penny bags over here, but they actually had this very Protestant world view
where you acquire money not to have some kind of big Donald Trump golden house,
the money is meant to be returned to the community to uplift the general population. Carnegie's a
great example of this, he's the one who wanted to make literacy within the reach of the common man.
This was a big problem for many of these people which prevent them from getting better jobs,
so he endowed libraries all over the place. Most of them took that money and said "hey, I'm going
to put it to good use, my legacy isn't going to be kids losing their arms in factories, it's
going to be kids not having to work because they have an education and they better themselves."