“The cell phone’s radical evolutionary improvement happened only because people had the right to walk away from devices and service providers that did not satisfy them. It seems an obvious point, but it is one that is often overlooked and misunderstood. We talk about technological progress as though Moore’s law were an immutable law of thermodynamics, as though technological development just happened, a force of nature like a flood or a tadpole becoming a frog. But that is not the case. If you make a chart of the world’s per capita GDP from A.D. 1 until now, you will see a flat line that lasts for the better part of two thousand years. And then the line goes vertical around 1750. “For the first time in history,” writes economist Robert Lucas, “the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth. . . . Nothing remotely like this economic behavior has happened before.” Something changed in a few years, and it wasn’t the people. It’s not like we were monkeys in 1749 and Ben Franklins in 1750. All of the ingredients of the Industrial Revolution had been in place for years. We already knew how to make iron, build machines, and burn coal, and we’d been printing books with movable type since the fifteenth century, so such knowledge as there was could be distributed. Trade played a role, but there had been global trade for centuries before that.”

“The main change was that English people won the right to say no, and what they said no to largely was a lifetime of farmwork. They exercised a literal right of Exit, leaving the farms for the factories and the cities, or even for the colonies or the frontier. A two-thousand-year period of economic stagnation was broken in a matter of years, and the world was changed. We can do that again.

The power of Exit does not come only from political or contractual arrangements. It can come from informal social norms, and even from hard physical factors such as geography. The economist Arnold Kling argues that what kept the United States so remarkably free in its early days was not the presence of the Bill of Rights, but the presence of the frontier. The energetic, entrepreneurial people most likely to bridle at political restrictions had an out: lighting out for the territories.”

Excerpt From: Kevin D. Williamson. “The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome.” HarperCollins, 2013-05-01. iBooks.

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