Abstract
Larry Gonick has written a five-volume cartoon history of the universe that has many virtues but could have been better. While full of facts, wisdom, horror, humor, and insightful asides, it barely mentions the amazing and almost unprecedented facts of the last two centuries: the doubling of life expectancy, the six-fold increase in the population, and the ten-fold increase in per-capita income. His leftist economics leads him to make snide references to free trade and write about 19th-century socialists’ critiques of industrialization as if they had a point, missing that free-market policies are an important reason for rapid progress. Gonick’s historian’s sense that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” leads him to assume that free-market policies are just the latest window dressing for plunder rather than appreciating the modern world as a miracle that defies the prior history of humanity. – AI-generated abstract.
