The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacobs (review)

164 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 about the necessary and difficult connection between the mind and the body), The Creative Matrix would finally seem to be a book addressed to scientifically oriented psychoanalytic readers. Despite its investment in a general theory of creativity, The Creative Matrix=s priorities are not literary. (NAOMI MORGENSTERN) Jane Jacobs. The Nature of Economies Modern Library. x, 190. US $21.95 An instant contemporary classic, The Nature of Economies joins in the Modern Library Jane Jacobs=s pathbreaking The Death and Life of Great American Cities. A sequel of sorts to her earlier Systems of Survival (1992), Jacobs=s new study, infused with >evolutionary theory and economic history,= extends themes there and in her earlier books. Unlike Carlyle, who deemed economics >the dismal-science,= Jacobs regards economics, potentially at least, as >the hopeful science.= From her perspective it can be so only if theories engage >ever more deeply with the real world.= Most economic theorists since Adam Smith, she believes, have >retreated= from reality >into their own heads.= Not Jacobs. Concrete examples always undergird Jacobs=s own aphoristic generalizations . She takes up why the Titanic sank; the advantages of vegetable over aniline dyes for Oriental rugs; how an old farm regenerates itself; the lessons to be learned from the Soviet Union=s failed economic policies; the problems we face with outdated computers; the differences between good automobile and good streetcar routes; why the metallurgy industry initially scorned plastics. The >form= of Jacobs=s book, like that of Systems of Survival, draws on the long literary tradition of the didactic dialogue, particularly Plato=s Symposium. >The democratic ideal is a permanent and inconclusive Socratic seminar in which we all learn from one another,= recently wrote Jacobs=s long-time editor Jason Epstein in Book Business. That seems essential to Jacobs=s take on economic systems, and her dialoguists exemplify it. Figures from Systems of Survival B Armbruster, Kate, and Hortense B carry the argument again here. Hiram has replaced Ben, the ecologist, Hortense=s boyfriend in Systems. Early on, Hiram=s father, Murray, joins them. All five participants form a kind of extended family, somewhat like Jacobs=s own, perhaps; they know each other pretty well and interact with the understanding that comes of mutual affection. The talkative foursome, soon fivesome, meet every Saturday either in Manhattan or in Hoboken across the Hudson, often over a meal. Through informed and sharply focused discussion they try to bring economic abstractions into closer relationship with earthly realities. Armbruster, mischievously impetuous, even a bit grumpy, is Jacobs=s HUMANITIES 165 Socratic gadfly who initiates the dialogues and prods the participants (and us) to hard thinking. Kate, a >fringe ecologist,= has left academia (never highly regarded by Jacobs) and now edits >a prospering science newsweekly .= Hiram, shrewder and more practical than his predecessor Ben, is a >fundraiser and a facilitator= who consults for environmental causes. Murray, older than the others, voices the perspective of long-considered experience. The dialogues of these five loosely spiral through eight chapters. Chapter 1, >Damn, Another Ecologist,= sets the stage and introduces biomimicry: the study of how societal developments might mimic nature, perhaps the book=s underlying premise. Chapter 2, >The Nature of Development,= argues that positive economic development, like nature, abhors monopoly and depends on adaptative competition. Chapter 3, >The Nature of Expansion,= follows up on this theme. >Diverse ecosystems,= Kate opines, in words that could have come from the ecologist and poet Wendell Berry, >are so much more stable than one-crop plantations.= Chapter 4, >The Nature of Self-Refueling,= stresses the importance of cities in the economic networking necessary for economic health. Detroit=s economy declined because of its narrow focus; Taiwan=s flourished through diversity. Chapter 5, >Evading Collapse,= explores the positive limit principles learned from the redwoods, whose high branches catch the fog that helps water their vast bulk, and negative ones, which necessitated Canada=s ban on cod fishing in 1992. Chapter 6, >The Double Nature of Fitness for Survival,= follows up, among other matters, how cats large and small cope sensibly with oversupply of prey. In Chapter 7, >Unpredictability,= the group circles round again the networking principle via chaos...