Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 228 of the late Wesleyan University economic historian Stanley Lebergott’s indispensable 1984 book, The Americans: An Economic Record:

[A]nnual deaths in the entire United States from air and water pollution a century later about equaled New Orleans’ yellow fever deaths in 1853-1854.

DBx: History done well provides valuable perspective. And few scholars ever did economic history as well as did Stanley Lebergott.

…..

Pictured above is New Orleans’s Odd Fellow’s Rest cemetery, where many of the victims of that yellow-fever epidemic are buried. How many times over the years I’ve driven past this cemetery I cannot say beyond “countless.” I didn’t appreciate as a child and young man just how fortunate I am to have been born when and in what country I was born.