A felicitous find in a used bookstore yesterday: The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacobs. Two bucks. The paper cover claims it was a “#1 National Bestseller” (in Canada, in 2000) but I doubt whether everyone who bought it actually read it. [They should!]
I suspect a lot of left-leaning folks (as Robert Fulford pointed out, ironically, most of Jacobs’s neighbours) might have assumed it would be a nicey-nice new age diatribe against market capitalism. It’s precisely the opposite.
Her argument that we “exist wholly within nature as part of natural order in every respect” isn’t simply about respecting nature or “getting back to nature,” it’s about understanding that our economies are nature – human economies exhibit the same complex adaptive qualites as biological evolution — whether we mean them to or not.
Jacobs’s ecological vision is closer to the libertarianism of Julian Simon than the environmentalism of Rachel Carson (btw, it’s written in the form of dialogue; it’s very non-technical):
“In spite of my panegyrics to nature’s order,” Hiram went on, “nature is far from perfect by criteria that would guide what we conceive as intelligent, careful planning. Embryos go awry in their development. Species fail to adjust to changed circumstances and go extinct. A case can be made that development and co-development foster disorder by throwing new uncertainties into the pot. But within the confusion, redundancy, and unpredictability, the stupendous process we’re been discussing are operating: development and co-development through differentiation; expansion through diversification; continuation through self-refueling; stabilization through self-correction — all brought into order through unpredictable self-organization.”
Murry raised his glass. “To the unpredictable, uncommandable future in the making. And not forgetting that ‘in the making’ is always and forever now….” [p. 145]
To use my own example, it’s human creativity that is responsible for making oil a resource in the first place, and it’s human creativity that will eventually find new resources and technologies to resolve the problem of diminishing oil supplies – perhaps (or probably) not through deliberate, coordinated projects, but through a natural process of development, from the ‘ground up.’
The book makes these ideas fairly accessible and relevant. Also, here’s an interview with Jacobs when it was published in 2000.
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