As to the economic underpinnings of freedom and democracy, it's a two-way deal. Not chicken and egg, but a dynamic interlinking. (The "success" of the Nazi economy was posited on war and could only lead headlong into that, thus containing the seeds of its own demise).
All of which doesn't counter Wolf's point. I think the distribution graph Jerome posts does that most effectively. For the greater part of the population today, growth is barely perceptible.
That is, innovations always come in waves, and the waves of innovations themselves comes in waves of bigger innovation waves separated by less dramatic innovation waves. If you want to label the biggest wave of innovations in a particular period a Revolution, then if you look around, you will find others just as dramatic.
Now, certainly it is likely to have felt "especially Revolutionary" inside England, since that was the wave of innovations that led to the reversal of the balance of trade between the Indian subcontinent and the European subcontinent, which was, in turn, the foundation for the establishment of the Raj. After all, the armies and munitions that England used to conquer India primarily originated inside India ... the power that came from England was its superior financial clout.
However, with respect to our current limits of growth, what is critical about the changes in institutional structures associated with the Industrial Revolution and later fossil fuel waves of innovation is the way that we have become dependent upon regular, annual economic growth.
That is, technological growth, resulting from more efficient use of given material inputs by a given population, necessarily involves innovation, and so inherits the wavelike character of innovation.
By contrast, extensive growth, resulting from acquiring more material input per person, permits economic growth without improved material efficiency, and so can proceed on a regular annual basis, except for the occasional recessions ... provided that it is possible to acquire an every increasing material input per person, and possible to generate the effective demand for the newly produced products.
At one time, conventional wisdom took both requisites for ongoing extensive growth for granted ... but as a result of the Great Depression, our societies learned that effective demand could not be taken for granted (of course, some individuals understood that previously, but there is a big difference between a conclusion of individual analysis and having that knowledge sink into the structure of social institutions).
Now, we are entering a period when as societies we will discover that the material input requisite can't be taken for granted either. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
This is an important insight, at least for me. We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
