Garahs said:
Considering that most of the things that we could mass-produce (outside electronics) could be done by any halfway competent wizard and in a fraction of the time, what's so important about industrialization?
Industrialization, by necessity, requires a society capable of relatively efficient large-scale organizational efforts. You have a
lot of moving parts, and they all have to jam together efficiently.
From the dude what mines the ore and coal to the people who ship it to the guys who turn it into steel to the guys who ship that to the factories what machine that steel into thousands of complex, precisely-shaped little parts, to the guys what ship those to another factory where people turn those parts into, oh, let's say clocks, to the guys who ship, warehouse, wholesale, and retail those, until, shazam, you have something sitting on your table that wakes you up at the same time every morning.
Repeat all of the above for every single other thing you own.
Now add in the complex, multi-level recordkeeping that was invented to not only keep track of all this, but keep track of all the $$$ that everybody in the chain owed everybody else. And the international financial system that evolved so they could all pay each other. And the legal codes and framework of civlizaiton that provided a relatively stable enough environment that people actually
could do business this way, because even with all the lying, cheating, and stealing that human beings do to each other you can still be relatively sure that
most people will pay on time, and
most competitors won't be coming around to try and blow your factory up, and
most people who try to screw you can be sued in court and forced to fork over, because, hey, we have procedures and systems and law and order for all of that.
Wizards don't have any of this, as they've never needed to learn it.
Or to put it another way; even if there were one million wizards, you couldn't possibly imagine them being as organized in large-scale efforts as one million muggles. Which is why muggles are on the moon and wizards are still partying like its 1699.
In short: I wasn't simply referring to modern technology when I said "industrialization", I was referring to an industrialized
economy, with everything that implied both on the economic and social levels.