Feb. 20--I had the opportunity recently to visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where I toured the Asian and African art sections.

Among the art objects on display were pots, dishes, tools, clothing and jewelry. Each item, many of which were hundreds of years old, had been carefully crafted and was one-of-a-kind. While these items were finely made and beautiful, it's a safe bet most people who lived at the time they were made did not enjoy the ownership of such objects.

After touring the museum, I next visited the museum gift shop. Here I found ballpoint pens with the IMA logo, erasers, puzzles, books, postcards, key chains and hundreds of other items for sale. Most were almost certainly products of mass production and were definitely not one-of-a-kind. It's also a safe bet that practically anyone, if he wanted it, could afford to own something from the IMA gift shop.

What happened from the time when things were crafted by hand to today's mass production was a little miracle we call the Industrial Revolution. This period, which started in England in the latter 1700s, transformed production of consumer goods from something geared for the very few to something for the very many.

Despite the abundance it has provided, for many people the Industrial Revolution has a bad name. To them, it conjures up images of smokestacks, children and women working and grimy cities. For generations, it was taught in schools that the Industrial Revolution spoiled an ideal pastoral life and made life miserable for most people.

The truth, however, is something different. There is no reason to believe pre-industrial people enjoyed blissful lives. Writing in 1987, Stanford economist Nathan Rosenberg and legal scholar L.E. Birdzell wrote that the "romantic view" of work in pre-industrial Europe is "pure fantasy." The first factories were able to attract workers because the wages they offered, however low, were still better than the alternatives.

"In fact, conditions prior to the Industrial Revolution were catastrophically poor," writes historian Thomas Woods. "The economy on the eve of the Revolution was hopelessly static, and possessed no outlet whatever for the increasingly sizable number of people for whom a living in agriculture or [the trades] was impossible."

Furthermore, the factory system, when it arrived, was not opposed by the workers; rather, it was opposed by vested interests -- established guilds and "Tories" in England -- who felt threatened by the new wealth and social mobility provided by mass production and greater economic freedom.