There is a narrow sense in which the debate on The Stages ended with the publication in 1971 of Simon Kuznets's Economic Growth of Nations: Total Output and Production Structure (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). That book is mainly an extended summary of his previous findings. But at three points he modified positions that lay at the center of his attack on The Stages: (i) Kuznets argued at Konstanz in 1960 that, in general, ‘there is no clear distinction between the “pre-conditions” and the “take-off stages”’; (ii) more specifically, he held that the data available in 1960 were inadequate to support the view that the rate of investment rises substantially during the period I designated as the take-off; and (iii) we should proceed with growth analysis on the highly aggregated basis he had adopted in his post-1945 work because the linkage of the leading sectors incorporating new technologies and the aggregates could not be rigorously established in statistical terms. In any case, he argued: ‘Growth is an aggregate process. …’

In his Economic Growth of Nations (p. 24) Kuznets addressed directly the question of whether the transition from pre-modern to modern growth could be reasonably dated. He decided that a discontinuity could be established and supplied a set of dates for the ‘beginning of modern growth in eight countries’. These proved quite consistent with my take-off dates.