In Remembrance of Jane Jacobs

In an interview a few years back Jane Jacobs was asked what it was that she would be remembered for in generations to come. She replied, to the great surprise of the interviewer, that it would not be for her work on urban development. Instead she said that if she were to be remembered, it would be for her insights into economies.

The interviewer didn't have much of a response to that. He probably had never read that aspect of her work.

Having read and listened to the tributes and accolades bestowed upon Jacobs this week, I can say that almost without exception they have focused on a single work, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, and on her contributions to urban planning and development. Make no mistake, this was terribly important work, and she should be commended for fighting the fallacies of the over-zealous and under-endowed who took it as their destiny to gut our inner-cities. But to focus singularly on her work as urbanologist is to miss the wealth of her other contributions, particularly her ideas about economies and how they develop. These ideas, I suspect, will prove in the long run to be of greater consequence.

In truth, the ideas about economies that Jacobs discovered are radically different from traditional economic thought. It is no surprise then that most who read them, drifting themselves with the tide of common convention, cannot hear the truth that the ideas hold. That is why much of her work is forgotten, brushed over with at best a sentence at the end of her eulogy.

There are a few, however, that recognize the importance of what she has given us. Donald Coxe, Chairman of Jones Heward Investment, paid tribute to Jacobs this week, calling her a remarkable woman, and making the same point that I make here, that her work on economies may one day prove to be even more influential that her work on urban development.

For the rest, who choose to ignore these pivotal ideas, it is best said that some insights are just too radical for the time in which they are conceived. Art, literature, and philosophy are all littered with the bones of the lately revered genius who, while alive, had to scrape away in anonymity. The world is never kind to the original thinker. And as for the idea itself, which always threatens the core of convention, and more pointedly the heart of those with a vested interest in the matter, well, it is at best ignored and at worst reviled, often heaped with scorn for a minor flaw that is besides the fundamental point.

In Jacobs’s case, her primary fault was that she never gave herself to the tedium of getting a degree. Given our preoccupation with letters behind the name, we are skeptical of how someone without a Harvard PhD might come up with a meaningful economic contribution, let alone a revolutionary theory that turns the subject quite onto its head. It is simply inconceivable to our culture that such independent learning is possible, as we are ingrained with the premise that academic credentials must precede anything of worth.

Jacobs had no degree. She had no formal training in economics. It is true that she probably could not have worked out the Black-Scholes present value of a synthetic derivative, which of course we all know is the mark of a great economist, as the success of Long Term Capital Management so aptly demonstrates.

What she did have was an incredible wisdom that could see through convention and stereotype, and through the novels of imagined theory that we pretend to be the canon of our reality. She could pierce through the gobbledygook of false premises and poorly achieved conclusions and see things as they actually work. She was an engineer in its truest sense.

By doing so, she provided us with a conception of an economy as it relates to nature, an economy not premised on the whims of paper currency traders and forever oscillating yields, but instead upon energy flows and the laws of nature that hold themselves no differently in the concrete jungle then they do in the rain forests of Brazil.

She understood that economies, like ecosystems, grow not from restriction, regulation or subsidies, but from freedom, and that it is freedom that is essential to allow for the adaptability and uncertainty that is at the heart of economic growth.

She perceived that the growth of an economy is driven not by exports, a traditional belief proven wrong so often that it must take real skill on the part of its commissars to keep up its adherence, but by the simple idea that economies develop by imitation, and by replacing the goods that they previously imported with goods that they make themselves.

Finally, she pointed out a premise that has been wrongly conceived in most all previous economic thought; that it is the city, not the nation-state, which is the essential building block of an economy. She is the first to conceive of the city as a discrete, interdependent organism, alive and growing, an eco-system within the biosphere that grows and dies by the same principles as nature itself.

Jane Jacobs has taken the first steps towards moving the science of economics away from its theoretical stasis and into the practical world where the human economy is not an aberration of nature, but a part of it. More generally, she has shown us the superiority of having two eyes and a good pair of ears over any number of plaques on the wall. No one with a Harvard degree could have come up with her theories. They are simply too elegant, too precise, to be anything but the work of an unbiased observer.

This week we mourn the death of Jane Jacobs, and for most that means the mourning of a tireless activist and the mother of modern urban planning. But we must also acknowledge a different woman, the writer of what will without doubt someday be seminal texts of economics. The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, The Nature of Economies, to name a few. That the title of the book Cities and the Wealth of Nations follows in name to the great book written by Adam Smith is fitting, for Jacob's book is the next real step towards an understanding of economics based upon how the world actually works.

I don't expect that this recognition of Jacobs, as mother of modern economic thought, will happen today or tomorrow or any time soon. True genius takes time to be digested, and the audience of our time is not yet ready for such upheaval. But the day will come. I would not be surprised at all if 100 years from now Jane Jacobs is spoken of in the same breath as Adam Smith, referred to as the brilliant economist whose ideas have rebuilt nations, along with a great contributor to urban planning and the savior of many an inner-city. When that day comes, the world will be a better place because of it.
- posted by Sigurd4/28/2006 09:41:00 PM