A little acknowledgment that global free market capitalism is creating a global middle class would be nice, but Mr. Leonard doesn't have the stones to say it.

The Socialist economies of Europe have created an enormous middle class. The Socialist economy of the United States from about 1939 - 1979 created an enormous middle class. There is no enormous middle class in China, yet, and even if there were one, you'd have to be crazy to think they were going to consume a significant amount of manufactured goods from the United States. Hell, we don't even consume much of our own manufactured goods anymore. All our multinationals have done is destroy our manufacturing base for their own short-term gain. Long term, they're all doomed as going concerns, but the guys at the top don't care so long as they get their inflated CEO salaries, hundred million dollar bonuses and can cash out their billions in options.

India may end up with a large middle class, eventually, and may actually buy American made goods, if only because they don't want to rely too heavily on China. Then again, they could buy from Europe too, or develop heavy industry themselves.

You free trade rightwingers have been promising us all Big Rock Candy Mountain here in the US for over 3 decades. In that time budget deficits have skyrocketed, consumer debt has exploded, trade deficits have spiraled out of control, millions of manufacturing sector jobs have been lost with absolutely no replacements, the cost of higher education has increased by a factor of 10, healthcare costs are totally out of control, and taxes on the poor and middle class have gone up while services have decreased.

Any idiot can see this hairbrained rightwingnut scheme hasn't work and isn't going to work, any more than your dimwitted Iraq War. If exporting jobs were the key to creating wealth and a robust middle class, the Chinese would have exported their manufacturing base to America, not the other way around.

I mean, duh!

Yeah, Rome and China may have both had a lot of bodies to throw at their problems, but so what? Even they realized how expensive servants and slaves were. It's not like there were NO machines and NO technology in either civilization. They simply never industrialized.

Surely there were other civilizations with their own periodic labor shortages prior to the Europeans. Why didn't they experience their own "Industrial Revolutions"?

I think the "no Newton" theory holds more water. And Newton only existed thanks to the rediscovery of Greek science and a climate in Europe which was slowly coming to emphasize reason. That same climate was worsening in the Islamic world by that point, and in China was suppressed by a well-established bureaucracy. If anyone wants to see what government bureaucracy can do to scientific and technological progress, just look at Soviet agriculture.

Perhaps, Europe did not need coal and iron from the New World, but Europe did need the capital boost it got from the New World to be able to reach the levels of prosperity that made the Industrial Revolution possible.

The problem with this is, China had high technology relative to Europe for centuries, and tons of capital. So clearly having a superior technological base and some spending money <> industrial revolution.

This combination of wealth and diminished manpower was unique and could explain why the balance of factors tipped towards industrialization in Europe, and Britain, in particular, for the first time in history.

Except by the time the IR really got underway European populations had largely recovered, and then some. There wasn't any great labor shortage - if anything, there was a seemingly endless supply of peasants. I don't think the Plague comes close to explaining the IR, or really even merits mention as a major factor.

Greek Science as an explanation does not fit the facts very well because the people who produced the technological innovations that enabled the industrial revolution in Europe were not scientists.

Actually, quite a lot of the technology which made the IR possible was developed by scientists. James Burke's Connections did a pretty good job laying out how one scientific insight or invention lead to another, and then another, and then another. You weren't getting that kind of progress out of Asia at that point.

And it wasn't just the technology - it was the attitude, the cover the scientific method gave people to question long held assumptions. The idea that the Universe is knowable, and they you can perform controlled experiments on isolated bits and pieces of it to understand how the whole operates, was not obvious to early man. Once this concept came to be widely held in Europe, the status quo was less rigidly enforced across at least most of the continent than it was in China and much of Asia.

And yes, it did take a long time for the scientific method to really take hold in Europe - something like 2,000 years. But it was a crucial philosophical development, and one which, if it made its way to Asia, wasn't widely adopted prior to the IR swept European technology centuries ahead of the rest of the globe.

Kenneth Pommeranz, who in "The Great Divergence" ascribes European ascendancy over Asia to the acquisition of material resources in the New World which enabled the Industrial Revolution.

Huh?!? What "New World" resources enabled the Industrial Revolution? Seems to me Europe had all the resources it needed.

Europe invented science - the Greeks to be specific - and I suspect this has a lot more to do with European ascendancy than any New World resources. Competition between European states probably didn't hurt either, and while it's true China went thru periods of instability, they were nothing like what went on in Europe pretty much from the fall of the Roman Empire thru WWII.

Not many American households have $69,000 to plunk down on a downpayment. Checked our savings rate lately? It's negative - a legacy of 30 years of right wing control and the bankrupting of America.