It wasn't openly talked about very much, in the sense that people said they wanted to beat GB at this or that, but there would however be sidelong comparisons frequently in press commentary. And it was also pretty quickly obvious that no other countries were developing the kind of technological depth of industry as were the US and the UK.

We demonstrated what you could do when a band of entrepreneurs settles an empty country with vast resources. The Chinese have a billion people and are running out of water. Tougher problem for sure.

I would speculate that a critical mass of the population has to internalize a middle class outlook first. International aid experience has demonstrated many times that just building railroads doesn't get you there. You need people ready to sue them.

My neck is too arthritic to snap around. The big shift in my perspective that happened in the writing process, however, was the paramount importance of the "West" epitomized by Cincinnati.

No specific technology. My guess is that it was the instinct always to go to maximum scale. Great Britain kept much more of a small shop mindset well into the twentieth century, for instance.

It may not be replicable: One of the hardest transition that a developing country can make is the transition to middle-class status. Governments have to let go, people start insisting on following their own lights, etc.

The drive to scale in almost every endeavor. The British went very large scale in ship building and a few other industries. Their steel plants were bigger and much more advanced than ours after the Civil War, but we had blown past them by the mid-80s.