EXACTLY!

If things were different then things would be different but they're not so things are the same.

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"What has changed between the mills and child labour of the early industrial revolution and now? "

Your argument was the first cousin to my own: Too many variables from which to infer causation. How does one partial-out the variates on a single historical track?

One doesn't. At best, it is correlative.

Botnst