Domestic Reshufflings, Such as Transport and Coal, Do Not Explain the Modern World

Transportation improvements cannot have caused anything close to the factor of 16 in British economic growth. By Harberger’s (and Fogel’s) Law, an industry that is 10% of national product, improving by 50 percent on the 50% of non-natural routes, results in a mere one-time increase of product of 2.5% (= .1 x .5 x .5), when the thing to be explained is an increase of 1500%. Nor is transport rescued by “dynamic” effects, which are undermined by (1.) the small size of the static gain to start them off and (2.) the instable economic models necessary to make them nonlinear dynamic. The same holds for many other suggested causes of the modern world: enclosure, for example, or the division of labor or the Kuznets-Williamson Hypothesis of reallocation from agriculture to industry, country to town. Wider geographical arguments, such as Diamond’s or Sachs’, turn out to be ill-timed to explain what we wish to explain. And “resources,” such as oil or gold, have both the Harberger Problem and the timing problem. Not even coal---the favorite of Wrigley, Pomeranz, Allen, and Harris---can survive the criticism that it was transportable and substitutable. The factor-bias arguments of Allen have the old problem of the Habbakuk Hypothesis, namely, that all factors are scarce. Even if we add up all the static and quasi-dynamic effects of resources, they do not explain Britain’s lead, or Japan’s or Hong Kong’s catching up.British economic growth, transportation, coal, growth hypotheses, industrial revolution

Science, Bourgeois Dignity, and the Industrial Revolution

What happened to make for the factor of 16 were new ideas, what Mokyr calls “industrial Enlightenment.” But the Scientific Revolution did not suffice. Non-Europeans like the Chinese outstripped the West in science until quite late. Britain did not lead in science---yet clearly did in technology. Indeed, applied technology depended on science only a little even in 1900.scientific revolution, science, technology, industrial enlightenment, applied technology

Crystallographic actions on contractible algebraic manifolds

We study properly discontinuous and cocompact actions of a discrete subgroup $\Gamma$ of an algebraic group $G$ on a contractible algebraic manifold $X$. We suppose that this action comes from an algebraic action of $G$ on $X$ such that a maximal reductive subgroup of $G$ fixes a point. When the real rank of any simple subgroup of $G$ is at most one or the dimension of $X$ is at most three, we show that $\Gamma$ is virtually polycyclic. When $\Gamma$ is virtually polycyclic, we show that $\Gamma$ is virtually polycyclic. When $\Gamma$ is virtually polycyclic, we show that the action reduces to a NIL-affine crystallographic action. As applications, we prove that the generalized Auslander conjecture for NIL-affine actions holds up to dimension six and give a new proof of the fact that every virtually polycyclic group admits a NIL-affine crystallographic action.Comment: This final version has been accepted for publication in 2013. The statements of the main results are now more general as they cover algebraic groups G where the real rank of any simple subgroup of G is at most on