Assignment 8 – Response to Required Reading

Response to the Required Reading:

Chapter 2, “Back to Reality” from Jane Jacobs’ book Cities and the Wealth of Nations was no easy read.  There seems to be this overarching view by economists, past and present, that the nation-state itself is the most important thing for understanding the structures of economies.  Jacobs maintains that this view is essentially misleading, broad, and ineffective.  She validates her point by the fact that our diminishing economies are only ever evaluated by the “back to the drawing board” strategy, which can be summarized in part by the familiar Albert Einstein quote, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” 

Perhaps our view of the big picture is better summarized in looking at the smaller parts.  If you look deeper in to national economies, it can be seen that most nations are a collective of very different economies, operating the rich and poor regions throughout.  The focus here is really at the city level.  She presents an example of the Bardou province in France, which has gone through the cycle of a once flourishing economy, withered away by opportunity elsewhere, dormant, and then emergent and now productive.  She calls this a passive economy that does not create change, but just reacts to change and forces around it.  Here presents the idea that the city economy and the nation economy are two different organisms and that the implementation of an overarching policy is not effective when all of the individual factors are unique and affected by one another. 

A productive and sustainable way of harnessing these interrelations between city economies is to focus on “import-replacing”.  This “import-replacing”, as coined by Jacobs, is a characteristic “city process” by which these unique city economies develop and sustain, but this requires versatility and diversity, which may come about by taking the means of production in to the collective communal hands.  Although economists may not be completely oblivious to this idea, this thinking in terms of national economies considers only foreign imports as perhaps those that need replacing, without looking further in to domestic imports between cities.

Much of this was hard to grasp and required re-reading most of it, but I was able to get a glimpse of the regenerative and degenerative cycle playing out in this idea.  A city or community forms and requires the means to sustain life. This disturbance brings forth the act of production whereby the solution becomes to replace previously imported goods, fostering a community’s sustainability and lessened dependence.  As the main production takes off, resources are required to supplement this production, and instead of once-again importing, the community is able to improvise or create the supplements to the initial means of production, called adaptations.  These adaptations foster a greater amount of diversity in production, physical capital, and human capital.  This process is the “explosive episode” between the periods of stagnation, where the adaptations become slowly assimilated and new needs arise.