As the economist Nathan Rosenberg and the legal scholar L. E. Birdzell Jr. point out, “We are led to forget the dominating misery of other times in part by the grace of literature, poetry, romance, and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologized and may even be remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not.”

— Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker