High productivity is certainly necessary for high wages. But this makes the original article's point even more mysterious: if the workers had high productivity before the industrial revolution, that high productivity was not caused by the industrial revolution: so what caused it?

And high-productivity is certainly no guarantee of high wages. E.g. mothers arguably produce everything, but that's not a waged job at all.

So what was it which was propping up workers wages in pre-industrial England? What was preventing employers from eroding workers wages using the same tactics which, say, software companies are eroding engineering wages? w.g. making unnecessary layoffs, firing older workers and replacing them with younger workers, negotiating tacit anti-poaching agreements, etc?

What were they doing right that we are doing wrong :-)

> And high-productivity is certainly no guarantee of high wages. E.g. mothers arguably produce everything, but that's not a waged job at all.

Productivity means work over time. Being a mom is low productivity because you can (mostly) only do one at a time.

Productivity is not just work over time--its how much value you produce per unit of time. Mothers produce all value. Without them, nothing would have any value at all.