Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Keeley’s questions inspired a long response from Jane: “When I start exploring some subject, I hardly know what I think.” Again she referred to what sounds like a kind of intellectual pain as she wandered through the misshapen byways of her own confusion. It was all “very messy,” she wrote, and “very uncomfortable. I don’t like all this confusion.” But she endured it, pushing through it, only to finally reach the patterns, ideas, and conclusions that held up.

  “If I wanted, I could go on and on and on,” she concluded her letter to Keeley, “but that would only be tiresome and repetitive and perhaps self-indulgent in displaying my industriousness and labor!” There was, however, “a different type of self-indulgence” to which she succumbed: “While I’m not an artist, I do feel bound to try, as far as I’m able, to produce a work of art as well as a piece of truth.”

  —

  Two-thirds of the way through this difficult period, as she struggled to complete Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane was pulled away by another project. Coming when it did, when she was already so late with the book, is it best seen as a distraction to which, unfortunately, she gave in? Or as a welcome and refreshing detour, an opportunity too good to refuse?

  It came in 1979, when Jane was approached by Max Allen, a prominent Canadian broadcaster representing a group charged with selecting that year’s Massey Lecturer. The Massey Lectures—radio lectures without, in fact, a live audience, broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—were named for former governor general Vincent Massey and were immensely prestigious; past lecturers included Paul Goodman, Martin Luther King Jr., Willy Brandt, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Jane could speak on any subject she pleased. Architecture or planning, for sure, Allen figured. But no, Jane wanted to talk about Quebec separatism.

  Canada was just then embroiled in a great national dialogue about the fate of French-speaking Quebec, whether it should remain within Canada or define its national destiny outside it. The British defeat of the French on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec in 1759 had hardly resolved the question once and for all. Recently, the leader of the separatist Parti Québécois, René Lévesque, had issued an impassioned argument for Quebec independence—which, duly translated into English, could scarcely be found in Toronto bookstores. A few months hence, a referendum was to be held in Quebec, presumably to settle the issue. And now Jane, a Canadian citizen for barely five years, was determined to weigh in on it, too, in a series of five half-hour radio addresses she would later flesh out in book form as The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty, published in 1980.

  In fact, her lecture topic wasn’t entirely remote from the book she’d been working on for so long, whose original title was Cities and Countries. In her Massey Lectures, Toronto and Montreal, the great cities of English- and French-speaking Canada, respectively, figured prominently. So did the size of things, which had interested Jane all the way back to Death and Life—the size of neighborhoods, buildings, and cities, the relationship of small things to big. In the separatism book, she’d devote a chapter to “National Size and Economic Development,” another to “Paradoxes of Size.” Over the years, she’d mostly favored small entities free from the corrosive bullying of the big; little Quebec versus big Canada was a natural. And so were the “city regions,” set against whole nations, that would figure in Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

  In the Massey Lectures Jane didn’t quite say Quebec should split from Canada. What she did say was that, if it did, no terrible fate would befall either English-speaking Canada or Quebec. Given the success of small countries like Switzerland and Norway, Quebec was not too small to thrive. Canada would not disintegrate with Quebec’s secession; its slimming in size and population would not prove crippling. In fact, there was a charming historical parallel for the sort of split Quebec might engineer, namely that of Norway from Sweden in 1905. That, Jane showed, was achieved peaceably and respectfully, at no loss to the two countries even a century later—a model of civilized behavior on both sides.

  Here in Toronto, where I live, in two different office buildings about a mile apart, are to be found two trade commissions, one Norwegian, one Swedish. To me, the two establishments seem more than busy, competently run commercial offices, staffed by cheerful, helpful people. To me, they seem the concrete evidence of a miracle—a secession achieved without armed rebellion, without terrorism, without the military defeat of a former ruler.

  Canada and Quebec, she as much as said, could do the same.

  It was a nuanced response to a nagging national problem, and when her lectures came out in book form the following year, its extraordinary finesse was recognized. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Edgar Z. Friedenberg called it “a tour de force, the kind of force that expresses itself through restraint and precision, like a laser beam used with such exquisite care as not to insult the distressed body it is intended to relieve.” In it, she brought insight and lucidity to “the most inflamed social question of a very touchy people, her fellow-citizens in her adopted country. She does so with a tact so fine that it’s scary.”

  Max Allen, who had invited Jane to do the Massey Lectures and became a friend, would say that Jane had produced “perfect lectures”—but that, on the other hand, she “was not a great lecturer. It was not a compelling performance.” Not fiery, not dramatic, not the work of a gifted performer; you can hear the schoolmarm in her speaking. In the national dialogue over separatism, admits Allen, her lectures “made no difference at all.” They were rarely cited, little influenced public debate. Among English speakers, Jane would recall in 2005, “there was practically no reaction.” In part, perhaps, because as one critic, Alex Mazer, has cogently written, Jane had refuted “some of the weaker arguments against secession” while failing to address some of the stronger.

  In a New York Times review of the book, John Leonard concluded of Jane that “about Canada, including Quebec, she is shrewd; about Quebec, excluding Canada, she merely dreams in very good prose.”

  CHAPTER 22

  ADAM, KARL, AND JANE

  AND THEN, FINALLY, there was Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Jane pictured it as “a kind of overhaul of macro-economics.” It began like this:

  For a little while in the middle of this century it seemed that the wild, intractable, dismal science of economics had yielded up something we all want: instructions for getting or keeping prosperity. Economists and the rulers they advise had thought up so many ideas for ridding national and international economies of chanciness and disaster, the ideas had such an air of rationality, predictability and informed statistical analysis, that governments took to supposing they need only muster up commitment, expertise and money to make economic life do their bidding.

  But, it seems, economic life wasn’t doing anyone’s bidding. Jane cataloged economic failure and its consequences in Poland and Uruguay, southern Italy and India, the Soviet Union and China, Britain and the United States. In America, she wrote, “the manufacturing economy has gradually but steadily been eroding, and much of what remains has been slipping into technological backwardness,” compared to Japan and parts of Europe. For failing to predict or forestall economic stagnation around the world, she pronounced macroeconomics, devoted to explaining economics at a national and international scale, “a shambles.”

  Jane began by taking on a seemingly unlikely target, the Marshall Plan, almost universally credited with rescuing Europe, then in ruins, from its post–World War II economic afflictions. Yes, Jane allowed, its billions in bulldozers, tractors, trucks, pumps, pipes, and machine tools had helped heal the continent. But if you really wanted to make a healthy economy from a sick one, a Marshall Plan wouldn’t do it—hadn’t done it: southern Italy, poor before the war, remained so despite all the development aid thrown at it, was still losing workers to Italy’s prosperous north. Backward regions of Europe remained backward. The Marshall Plan’s outsized claims, and those of the international development agencies grown up around it, were
unjustified. “The consequences of such groundless promises are appalling: angry disillusioned populations in countries that have remained stagnant and poor after hopes were raised so high; cynicism about the worth of aiding others, and worse, about the worth of people who have gotten aid,” backward countries bowed down under the weight of unpayable debt.

  One clue to the failure of conventional macroeconomic thinking, Jane argued, was “stagflation,” an economic malediction combining high unemployment and high prices—stagnation and inflation, together. The two miseries weren’t “supposed” to go together, but in 1975, for example, the United States recorded 8.5 percent unemployment and 9.1 percent inflation, both painfully high. “The puzzle of stagflation,” according to Jane, had destroyed the intellectual foundations upon which most macroeconomic theory rested. Thinkers from Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, and on to the latest lights in the field, had failed to predict the phenomenon, or account for it, or were left baffled by it in the first place. “Fool’s Paradise,” Jane titled the chapter.

  While treated as new and troubling, stagflation—the word itself was a 1964 coinage—wasn’t new at all, argued Jane. Prices too high? Too few jobs? Why, that was the lot of most of the world. Jane told of a visit to Portugal in 1974, where, as a middle-class American, she found the prices for bus fares, fish, and restaurant meals all enticingly cheap. “But to the Portuguese the prices were very high.” For most Portuguese, middle-class comforts were beyond reach and jobs were hard to come by. In this sense, then, stagflation was not odd or newfangled, but, rather, “the normal and ordinary condition to be found in poor and backward economies the world over.” It was new only in that now it threatened advanced economies with “profound economic decline.” And conventional macroeconomics couldn’t explain it.

  “One thing we do know,” she concluded this provocative first chapter,

  because events have rubbed our faces in it: it would be rash to suppose that macro-economics, as it stands today, has useful guidance for us. Several centuries of hard, ingenious thought about supply and demand chasing each other around, tails in their mouths, have told us almost nothing about the rise and decline of wealth.

  There was no future, she declared, in choosing among existing lines of economic thought. “We are on our own.”

  Which meant, of course, that for the next two hundred pages, Jane was on her own.

  —

  Conventional macroeconomics. she felt, hewed to faulty premises. You want to understand the causes of prosperity, the dynamics of decline? Well, said economists from Adam Smith on, you look to national economies as the “salient entities”—England, not London; Russia, not St. Petersburg. Smith had titled his pathbreaking book of 1776 The Wealth of Nations, and nations, big and small, had remained the focus of economists since.

  But the nation, said Jane, was too large a unit of study, obscuring insight rightly gained only at smaller scale. Nations comprised cities, rural districts, poor regions and rich; at this larger scale, telling details of economic life were lost in numbers and facts bundled up for measuring whole countries, like “gross national product.” The focus needed to be on where economies really developed, in cities and the regions they enriched. At their best, cities were the high-revving engines responsible for economic development, hothouses of innovation, forever inventing and reinventing themselves, creating new work; this, for Jane, was what made them cities. Cities, not nations, were the “salient entity” through which you could come to understand growth.

  Look to the small, advised Jane. Look, for example, to Bardou, a hamlet situated high in the Cévennes Mountains of south-central France. Two thousand years ago, when Gaul was a Roman province, iron was mined there. Iron reached the cities, where it was fabricated into swords, chisels, and hinges, by a network of roads that, when Jane wrote, still served as hikers’ trails. But, probably in the fourth century, the iron gave out and the mines were abandoned. The area reverted to wilderness. Then, in the sixteenth century, landless peasants from the valley below began building stone houses in Bardou. “They scratched out little garden plots among the rocks, gathered chestnuts,” caught local game, “and on their poor and rocky soil pursued as well as they could the subsistence arts they had inherited from economies of the distant past more creative than their own.” For centuries, nothing much changed. Then, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, a few venturesome souls from Bardou began leaving for Paris and richer lives. By 1940, only three families remained. In the 1960s, vacationers from the city transformed some of the old stone houses into summer rentals. A hint of prosperity returned to the old village.

  Jane’s history of Bardou made for a charming little story, but it was not for its local color that she told it. “Bardou is an example, in microcosm, of what I am going to call passive economies,” which, initiating nothing themselves, merely respond “to forces unloosed in distant cities.” In Bardou’s case, it was Rome, Nîmes, Lyon, and Paris that, over the years, had shaped and reshaped it.

  We could beat our brains out trying to explain Bardou’s economic history in terms of its own attributes, right down to compiling statistics on the probable average yield of chestnuts, the tools used there, the amount and quality of iron taken out and that remaining, the man-hours required to build a house, the nature of the soil, the annual rainfall, and so on—and none of this would enlighten us at all as to why and how Bardou’s economy took the twists and turns it actually did.

  For that, the clues would all be found in distant cities, with their technologies, expertise, money, jobs, and markets.

  Cities, wrote Jane, “shape stunted and bizarre economies in distant regions,” such as “supply regions” like her hometown of Scranton, or, for that matter, the whole country of Uruguay. Scranton produced coal; Uruguay, meat, wool, and leather. They had done this year in and year out, attaining notable prosperity. Until, that is, the coal was gone and the markets for meat, wool, and leather were undercut by events on the other side of the world. Then their economies crashed.

  Midway through the book appeared a ghost from Jane’s youth, from half a century before: it was most of a lifetime since Jane’s six months in Higgins, North Carolina, the hills rising around that tiny enclave into which Aunt Martha had tried to breathe hope and progress. Stunning scenery and warm appreciation for the folkways of the mountain men and women she met there may, possibly, have figured in Jane’s memories. But figuring more was the economic desolation of the place. And now, in a chapter called “Bypassed Places,” she took her readers there. To preserve its anonymity, she called it “Henry”—as in My Fair Lady’s Henry Higgins—but Higgins it was.

  When local economies lost their links to cities, Jane wrote, “their people sink into lives of rural subsistence,” often losing know-how they once possessed. By the time of the Roman Empire, Egypt had lost its papyrus industry and with it the skills of making paper. So it was in Higgins: “Crafts that had been their heritage were decaying, and some were being lost…People had long since stopped making looms,” and no one any longer knew how to make them. Weaving had become a lost art. These were the memories that left their imprint on Jane. Over the course of a century and a half, “Henry had been retrogressing economically in perfect peace and tranquility.”

  Chapter by chapter, Jane chomped away at widely held notions of economic truth. Like, for example, that it made sense, as a development tool, to bring new factories or military bases to barren rural tracts in return for tax credits or other perks. No, Jane said, not if you wanted to breathe real life into an economy that would survive the next swings in the market. Yes, you might get a few jobs for a while. But such strategies didn’t create new work, and so contributed nothing to long-term prosperity. Only real cities did that.

  Jane punctuated her arguments with audacious assertions and aphoristic take-home lessons: the subsistence life of Higgins “was not a demonstration, as romantics like to think, of how economic life begins, but rather of how
it decays and peters out.”

  Or, again referring to Uruguay and its superficially prosperous economy: “The difference between a rich backward economy and a poor backward economy is not all that great.”

  Like all of her books, Cities and the Wealth of Nations was thickly stocked with ideas, insights, anecdotes, and argument— and also with a flavor of science. “I am going to argue,” Jane wrote in a long chapter called “Faulty Feedback to Cities,” that national currencies “give faulty and destructive feedback to city economies and that this in turn leads to profound structural economic flaws.” Feedback: You’re keeping to the 60 mph speed limit, you look to the speedometer, which tells you you’re doing 65, so you take your foot off the gas; the speedometer supplies feedback that lets you correct the error of your ways. Likewise the thermostat in your air-conditioning or heating system, which senses the actual temperature, compares it to the desired and turns the system on or off to make things right. Similarly, Jane pointed out now, economies. The rise and fall of a nation’s currency in international markets supplies essential feedback, the information that helps “correct” or reset the economy: the dollar weakens, American goods are cheaper in world markets, spurring production here at home.

  In principle, very pretty. But, said Jane, much too coarse. A nation is an “economic grab bag,” with different parts of its economy—Illinois farms and big-city Chicago—needing precisely tailored feedback corrections of their own. But, since all are tied to the same national currency, swinging back and forth in response to broad geopolitical and economic forces, they don’t get the fine-tuned signals they need to slow down or speed up. They get feedback not useful and pertinent but “faulty.”