"No one is arguing that household solar replaces heavy industry, nor that it delivers a Western lifestyle overnight."

No, you were just ignoring it, assuming that Pakistan was a model for the third world when in fact its a model as to how to stay in the third world.

That's simply repeating the same mischaracterisation, mhaze.

//No, you were just ignoring it, assuming that Pakistan was a model for the third world when in fact its a model as to how to stay in the third world.//

Pakistan was not presented as a "model to emulate", but as evidence of a mechanism: when the unit cost of electricity falls low enough, electrification can begin bottom-up rather than waiting decades for capital-intensive grid projects.

Historically, household electrification, lighting, refrigeration, communications and small enterprise preceded heavy industry; they didn't prevent it. That sequencing is not controversial.

So the relevant question isn't whether Pakistan represents an end state, but whether early-stage electrification retards or accelerates development.

If you're claiming it retards it, explain the mechanism. Simply asserting "it keeps them poor" isn't an argument.

John, you have it upside down.
Heavy industry proceeded the lightweight economy.
Everything but everything needed the steelworks up and running.
It was steam engines and electricity generation that came first.
Heavy industry or the smokestack towns was where it started.
That is why farmstead weaving ended and the wives and daughters moved
to those developing towns to work the weaving machines.
Steam engines ran the weaving machines until electricity became
available perhaps from the facories own steam generator.
Their wages increased the farm household so they could spend money on
better stoves and ovens etc etc etc.
A better lifestyle and the demand for better everything went from there.
Before steel almost everything was rural.

Bezza,

You're describing early industrial Britain pretty accurately. Steam power, steelworks, factory towns, then wages, then household improvements. No argument there.

Where I think the jump happens is treating that sequence as something that must always be replayed, rather than something that happened under very specific technological constraints.

In the 18th and 19th centuries there was no cheap, modular way to deliver energy to households independently of factories. Everything was local and steam-driven because there were no alternatives. That doesn't mean household electrification was some kind of historical mistake or dead end, just that it wasn't available yet.

By the 20th century, the picture changes. Broad electrification of homes, farms, clinics and schools wasn't a luxury add-on after "real" development; it was part of what made productivity, education and small enterprise scale in the first place. That's why rural electrification shows up so consistently in development histories.

None of this is an argument that rooftop solar runs steel mills, or that heavy industry doesn't need large, reliable power. It's an argument about sequencing and speed. If early-stage electrification can now happen without waiting decades for capital-intensive megaprojects, that changes the on-ramp to development.

The open question is still the same one: what's the evidence that early household electrification slows development, rather than helping create the conditions where larger industry becomes viable?