purely contingent and accidental reasons. Pomeranz puts great stress on one factor, that China’s coal reserves were both geologically inaccessible and geographically remote, making a steam-powered industrial revolution like the one in Europe impossible

More broadly, progress depends not just on the technology but on having the right preconditions — complementary innovations as well as cultural, economic, and political factors. If all it took to create the industrial revolution was the invention of steam power, the RomanEmpire would have done it.

So I think the story is more nuanced than Lettieri makes it out to be. The surge in middle-class and working-class wages in the late 1990s might have come in spite of some small headwinds from NAFTA, and the China Shock might have exerted a drag on American wages during the 2000s. But the much bigger story that these charts tell is that the biggest... See more