[jackyli02]

Reasons this piece is unimpressive:

1. It never really seemed to explain WHY poor countries stopped doing better. It just framed it as "sike, they never were getting better!". But the WHY is still missing.

2. The penultimate paragraph present a thesis that China's commodity boom is the main driver behind the "great convergence". This claim is baseless. Just because the commodity boom in China coincide with the great convergence does make one the "product" (verbatim quote) of the other. In fact these two events are structurally connected and there is no simple one-way causation relationship. Other factors like financial deregularization played a vital role in the great convergence but was completely ignored.

3. Some of the evidences (eg. "Dutch disease") are over-generalizations and ignore the differences between nations.