Thread by @visakanv

Some interesting riffs from this blogpost by Mark Rosenfelder about Jane Jacobs' ideas: zompist.com/jacobs.html

1. "Western economists mistook the fitful but constant economic boom from Smith's time on as a permanent condition."

2. "Thinking in terms of national economies smears over the economic facts. Once we take off these lenses, we can see that the world consists not of developed and poor nations, but of dynamic and poor regions."

3. "All economic progress originates in cities, Jacobs tells us; and cheekily adds that all agricultural progress originates in cities."

4. "Grady is eloquently describing the circumstances of a passive economic region: despite all its resources, it makes nothing."

5. "The engine Jacobs finds for all economic life-- is import replacement. [...] This process not only creates work, it creates expertise and innovation. And it creates wealth."

6. "Perhaps Jacobs's most productive insight as that these forces (supplies, jobs, productivity, transplants, capital) act in balance only in cities and city regions. Outside them, they act singly, and most often destructively."

7. "A city region is used to change, is constantly innovating; a supply region is not. It treats its resources as God's gift, a presumably eternal windfall; it prepares only half-heartedly for the end of the boom, and when it comes it's caught short."

8. "Factories (or any transplantable work operation) are not the cause of development; they're a late effect."

9. "A city generates enormous outflows of capital, which can be deployed around the world. But capital alone does not make a region productive, for reasons that by now should be familiar: it does not create a web of interconnected, diverse, creative suppliers."

10. "The value of a currency is a feedback mechanism. If a currency starts to decline, this acts as an automatic, temporary, calibrated tariff: imports become more expensive, exports easier. This should spur import substitution and the development of new export work."

11. "National currencies, however, are a smeary blur of the economies of all the nation's cities. This is particularly bad for a depressed city in a booming nation, because it gets precisely the wrong feedback."

12. On "transactions of decline", aka the "killers of city economies":

13. How cities stab themselves in the back:

- restrict enterprise (new growth nearly always comes from producers finding new export work)

- over-specialize

- worship bigness

14. How to develop economies

- concentrate on cities (not nations) urban areas (not rural), avoid transactions of decline

(I'm guessing this is politically difficult in large countries?)

15. "The good news is that city development is a natural process, and oftentimes the problem is not to get it going but to remove obstacles to it."

16. "A Jacobean nation would worry not about rivalry abroad, but about the innovation of new work locally."

17. "A nation's exports aren't the sum of its cities' exports, for instance, because cities' exports to each other are as important as their exports abroad."