Two quantitative facts of note from When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order: From page 33:
Although the passage to modernity universally involves the transition from an agrarian to service-based society via an industrial one, here we find another instance of European exceptionalism. European countries (sixteen in all)...are the only ones in the world that have been through a phase in which the relative size of industrial employment was larger than either agrarian or service employment. In Britain, industrial employment reached its peak in 1911, when it accounted for 52.2 percent of the total labor force...the peak figure for the United States was 35.8 percent in 1967 and for Japan 37.1 percent in 1973...From a global perspective, a different and far more common path has been to move directly, in terms of employment, from a largely agrarian to ...
