Rich Lowry: A Stupendous Bounty

We live in an age of miracles. Throughout all of human history, material progress essentially didn't exist until around 1800. The economic trajectory was flat until the human lot began to improve in ways that would have been unimaginable in prior millennia.

This change gave us the world as we know it. In her brilliant book on the transformation, "Bourgeois Dignity," Deirdre McCloskey writes how the average person in the world subsisted on roughly $3 a day during humanity's long economic stasis. Then, with the breakout, countries that experienced modern growth over the past couple of centuries...