Bradford DeLong

“In 1870 the daily wages of an unskilled male worker in London, the city then at the forefront of world economic growth and development, would buy him and his family about 5,000 calories worth of bread. That was progress: in 1800, his daily wages would have bought him and his family perhaps 4,000 coarser-bread calories, and in 1600, some 3,000 calories, coarser still. (But isn’t coarser, more fiber-heavy bread better for you? For us, yes—but only for those of us who are getting enough calories, and so have the energy to do our daily work and then worry about things like fiber intake. In the old days, you were desperate to absorb as many calories as possible, and for that, whiter and finer bread was better.) Today, the daily wages of an unskilled male worker in London would buy him 2.4 million wheat calories that they could then straightforwardly bake into bread at home: nearly five hundred times as much as in 1870.”
― Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

“In 1840, when the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened connecting the Mississippi River with the Great Lakes, Chicago had a population of four thousand. In 1871, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow burned down a third, perhaps, of the city. Chicago built the world’s first steel-framed skyscraper in 1885, the city had a population of two million by 1900, and at that point 70 percent of its citizens had been born outside the United States.”
― Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century