Indeed, if you want dystopian industrialization I'd say OTL is probably near the limit. If industrialization is not guided, successfully, by humanistic goals and regulated with the common good shrewdly but ethically borne in mind, then one gets laissez-faire development and that quite naturally tends, motivated by greed, to push to the very limits of available short-term profitability. Thus I would think quite maximizing the rate of development possible in conditions where a conscious, ethical guiding hand does not observe clashes of interest, and resolve them in an ethical manner--which I think, offset as it may be by short term opportunity costs and the overhead burden of maintaining the infrastructure (or if you like, guiding superstructure) of intelligent and comprehensive oversight, would increase the potentials for long term expansion and accelerate the rate of successful innovation. If the investment in ethical superstructure pays off as I think it would, it would tend to be accepted and taken for granted, and thus people who without this governance would "naturally" be suspicious and resentful and resist would instead have grounds for optimism when someone comes along with a brilliant new money making scheme they are asked to be involved in. If they know that if things go sour someone sympathetic will help them dig themselves out of the hole and set them back on their feet, and if it turns out they went sour due to someone's disingenuous malice and greed that that person will be tracked down and made to help set things right, then they need be less suspicious of change. If ethics in due course comes to incorporate the idea of ecological responsibility and sustainability, then yet other constraints in the long run are avoided (by of course, accepting prudent restraints and caution in the short run as unavoidable necessities to be factored into general optimization schemes.
In OTL, the idea that ethics should be incorporated into business is pretty quaint, and appears as an opposition between the natural self interest of individuals and the debated level of required state oversight and regulation, with the latter under deep ideological suspicion.
I suspect then that we are operating near the limits of the possible versus dystopian potentials; we pretty much only bring ethics onto the table when things have broken down manifestly. We can imagine a world where this that or the other restraint on raw greed might be absent, but I suspect in such a world a short run surge beyond what is accomplished in a certain field OTL is followed by a crash which OTL with our empirically compelled rudimentary rules of fair play avoids or postpones until overall production is somewhat more, and either this hellhole ATL we imagine learns to acquire a comparable grab bag of ethical restraints comparable in magnitude and effectiveness to our own, or else it keeps crashing and burning and thus overall falling behind OTL potentials. So I am not saying OTL is the worst imaginable, but I do think it lies near the raw edge of what is the worst optimal, if you see what I mean.
Mind, I am not saying ATLs as bad as ours, which is to say in some respects worse in particular matters, are unlikely, nor that an ethically guided more extensive productivity is more likely or even as likely. Rather I am saying that such higher industrialized worlds would be as rare as Utopias, because they would have to be Utopias!
If you want to see what dumb raw greed can accomplish at the limits of its effectiveness--look around!
