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."
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
siblings: visa is always in his own world, in books, and on the computer. also guitar.
friends: visa is a kind earnest optimistic prolific hyperverbal shameless nerd
joined first role bc I needed money, stayed 5+ years because it was a great work environment, my boss was like my therapist/mentor/coach, kept learning and growing
since leaving I’ve been working for myself bc I value creative freedom & personal autonomy more than anything else
always interesting to look at older characters and witness my brain parse them in terms of contemporary characters, archetypes. I’m seeing her as “Jennifer Lawrence x Taylor Swift”
mentioned this on a podcast yesterday and it struck me that it’s so much more powerful than I properly convey. Getting good at asking for help means you get a lot more help, it’s one of the major cheat codes of life. It’s kind of like actual free money but sometimes even better
this can be “duh” obvious to people who are good at it and shockingly counter-intuitive to people who aren’t:
giving people a discrete, specific, simple, finite, straightforward way to contribute to something... can be *you* doing *them* a favor. Even as *they’re* helping *you*!
Because most people love to help, and to feel like they’re helping! They just don’t want to be *responsible* for you. So you have to convey that you’re responsible for yourself, and the outcome, and that you won’t judge them. in fact you give them a space to experiment/explore
oh the shark is hypothesized, not part of the fossil
so maybe the shark got bored or something
the squid got killed while it was eating
F
oh man for some reason this gave me flashbacks to an game I played as a kid... googled "submarine shark educational game"... wow, this is amazing. it's several years older and way more pixellated than I guessed / remember...
I sometimes remind myself that there are lovely people in the world who are terrible at Being Online. One of my favorite dudes is this guy who ran a jamming studio – delightful, generous, sweetheart host vibes, but on the forum he would type things that made me wanna punch him
to be clear it's not like he was posting bad takes or anything – he was being his typical cheeky self, but in his plaintext voice it came across as obnoxious, rude. he would be great on tiktok or youtube or something, you can fall in love with him in seconds
actually he's kinda like michael pena's character in ant-man. imagine this guy posting tweets but everyone just dunks on him because he types like a fool
and then he chuckles and tosses his phone aside and is like "internet's crazy, man, what can you do. hey let's get ice cream"