Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  “Jane Jacobs has done a great service with her new book,” wrote Bernard Levin in an Economist review. “She has slain many dangerous myths, exposed many ruinous follies, demonstrated beyond argument that many eagerly-embraced remedies for our economic difficulties are certain to make those difficulties worse.” For Richard J. Barnet, in The New York Times, the book was a “learned, iconoclastic and exciting study of the causes of economic stagnation and decline [that challenges]…ideas, schemes and pieties all across the political spectrum.” One economist objected to Jane’s take on stagflation, saying it wasn’t high prices that typified it but rising prices, which was not the same thing. Generally, though, the book was lauded. In 1984, as we’ve noted, it received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. At the 1987 Boston College conference on Jane’s work, it was studied respectfully along with her two previous books. So long in the making, Cities and the Wealth of Nations largely lived up to its promise, passing into the Jane Jacobs canon.

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  But in the mind’s eye of almost everyone, Jane remained an urban visionary; she was still, primarily, the author of Death and Life—no matter that her last two books were about economics. Writing to a friend, Roberta Brandes Gratz, soon after publication, Jane reported that her book was “hated” by economists; “ignored” might be the better word. But that was in 1984. And in 1988 things began to change.

  It seems that professional economists, in their own ways and using their own methods, had come to take an interest in problems broadly similar to those so interesting to Jane: Why were some places more prosperous than others? Why were some able to break out from their subsistence past and grow wealthy while others remained economically backward?

  Malthus had grimly seen population growth, with its swelling tide of hungry bellies, always outpacing economic growth; to Malthus we owe economics’ epithet as “the dismal science.” Adam Smith, more optimistic, found clues in his pin factory for how economic wealth emerged from the factory floor. Karl Marx fretted less about the production of wealth than its distribution, gross inequities between worker and capitalist leading unavoidably to crisis. Among more recent economists, economic growth, as a distinct subject, had begun to work its way into their thinking. And as David Warsh writes in his captivating intellectual adventure story, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery, they were talking about something they’d not much talked about before, knowledge. And along the way they stumbled on Jane.

  Traditionally, when economists spoke of the “factors of production,” they meant capital, labor, and land; making automobiles might require a billion-dollar capital investment, put three thousand people to work, in a factory erected on a hundred acres wrested from former farmland. Of course, as any reasoning mind could see, other factors besides capital, labor, and land figured in industrial success or failure. One of them was the knowledge that led to the design of new machinery, or new materials, or new ways of putting them together. In 1890, Alfred Marshall, of Cambridge University in England, described as necessary for understanding economic growth “the general development of the industry.” By this he meant brain work. In an industry benefiting from it,

  the mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air, and children learn many of them unconsciously. Good work is rightly appreciated, inventions and improvements in machinery, in processes and the general organization of the business have their merits promptly discussed: if one man starts a new idea, it is taken up with others and combined with suggestions of their own; and thus it becomes the source of further new ideas.

  Knowledge spills over to the benefit of all.

  But, as Warsh writes, “Marshall didn’t inquire too deeply into exactly how this spillover process might work.” Nor, for a long time, did anyone else. Somehow, knowledge and its workings seemed to lie outside the realm of economic study: knowledge increased, principles were discovered, processes were improved, inventions were devised—all as simply the product of “noneconomic background forces” that you could pretty much take for granted, like the air you breathed. What, after all, was there to study?

  After World War II, however, the sources and diffusion of knowledge itself fell under the economist’s gaze. It was no longer something “out there” that no one could influence or affect, but a key element of any economic system, amenable to study like anything else. Where did the new products and processes that fueled economic growth come from? What was the role of entrepreneurs and universities? Or of think tanks and private research labs? Or of trade secrets? Could government do anything to foster the growth of such knowledge, and should it?

  In 1985, the University of Chicago’s Robert Lucas, at forty-eight one of the most respected theoreticians of economics in the world, gave that year’s Marshall Lecture, named for Alfred Marshall, in Cambridge, England. His subject was economic growth, or, more specifically, “On the Mechanics of Economic Development.” Not far into his lecture, he directed his audience to some arresting statistics of wildly unequal growth. Japan had recently been growing at 7.1 percent a year, the United States at 2.3 percent, India 1.4 percent. These were numbers, but not just numbers: behind their cold face, they represented human happiness and human suffering. For they meant prosperity, possibility, and choice for some; demeaning poverty for others. And this brought Lucas to the next big question: “Is there some action a government of India could take that would lead the Indian economy to grow” as fast as countries then enjoying robust growth? And, “if so, what exactly?”

  That is, what could you do, in real life, to lead India’s desperately poor hundreds of millions to fuller, more prosperous lives? Or if, sadly, nothing, why not? “The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering. Once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else.”

  Lucas was trying to pin down why the rich get richer and the poor stay poor, why the split had widened rather than, as some had expected, shrunk, and how knowledge and ideas figured in the answers. And toward the end of his Marshall Lecture—which, wandering a bit, had not always followed the clearest of paths—he turned to the ideas of Jane Jacobs.

  Lucas, as he’d later tell the story, had long admired Jane’s work—if not, it seems, through the usual gateway: he was perhaps the only person in the world, he’d say, who’d read The Economy of Cities before Death and Life. Jane’s imagined city, New Obsidian, which some critics wrote off as fabulist fantasy, he saw as the work of a sound and sober intellect; here was a natural theorist at work, keeping her theoretical vision and her well of evidence scrupulously separate and distinct. “She’s crystal clear as to what she’s making up and what she’s getting from archaeological data.” And at some point while struggling to understand growth discrepancies around the world, Lucas said, he landed back in Jane’s second book.

  Ideas—knowledge, science, technology, innovation, invention—were responsible for much of the West’s growth since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution; that much was plain enough by now. “So,” Lucas would recount, “you might think that economists interested in growth theory would put ideas at the centre of their work. How do ideas get produced? Where do they get generated? How do they get diffused and passed on to other people?” Yet growth theory had largely neglected such questions. Ideas were simply in the air? That just wouldn’t do.

  “What I found exciting about Jacobs’s work was that this question is at the centre of everything. What are cities good for? They’re good for ideas. Ideas get put into use, they arise from different cultures and bodies of knowledge meeting each other.” In 1993, responding to a Columbia University economist interested in her ideas, Jane would wonder why most economists scanted the study of innovation. “Is it because innovations are so unpredictable?” True, specific innovations are unpredictable. But “the conditions that permit them are not.” The conditions that encouraged innovation, incited it, practically pulled it out of people, said Jane, bubbled up fro
m close-packed, diverse cities.

  To switch back now to the language of Lucas’s Marshall Lecture, Jane was seeing deeply into the “external” effects of human capital. Go to school, work beside an expert or inspiring mentor, develop intimate knowledge of an exciting new industrial process, and you gain “human capital.” Your productivity shoots up, your income likely climbs, maybe you start a new company and make a million bucks. These are “internal” effects; they benefit you, possessor of that human capital. But human capital also benefits your company, university, think tank, city, or country; your hard-won body of expertise, your new product, idea, or method, profits your employer, which hires workers, maybe soon stands at the nexus of a cluster of new companies; these are “external” effects, or—spillovers. Win-win, big-time.

  In pursuing how this powerful economic driver worked, Lucas said in Cambridge,

  I will be following very closely the lead of Jane Jacobs, whose remarkable book The Economy of Cities seems to me mainly and convincingly concerned (though she does not use this terminology) with the external effects of human capital…[As Jacobs had illustrated] with hundreds of concrete examples, much of economic life is “creative” in much the same way as is “art” and “science.” New York City’s garment district, financial district, diamond district, advertising district and many more are as much intellectual centers as is Columbia or New York University. The specific ideas exchanged in these centers differ, of course, from those exchanged in academic circles, but the process is much the same.

  And wasn’t there, Lucas added, an implicit “proof” of all this? Land was normally cheaper outside cities than within them. So why don’t companies invariably set up shop there for the cheaper rents? Many times they do, especially for their “back office,” or more routine functions. But often they do not, because they are getting something from it—a creative human environment that nurtures new ideas and practices. “What can people be paying Manhattan or downtown Chicago rents for,” asked Lucas, “if not for being near other people?”

  Jane, her son Ned reports, was “gratified” by the acceptance Lucas’s talk brought her, which was only underlined when Lucas won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1995. In succeeding years the attention grew. People started talking about “Jacobs singularities,” economist-speak for innovative leaps occurring not within, but across, industries in close physical proximity. One research group compared Jane’s predictions about growth and innovation to those of two other, more mainstream lines of economic thinking and found hers more predictive. Another went looking for “Jacobs Spillovers” among Canadian inventors. As a newspaper headline put it in the 1990s, Jane was now something of an “economic guru.”

  But not really an economist, not in the narrow, professional sense, anyway. Lucas himself would say how you could never turn to Jane’s work and pull out an equation. Her work was astonishingly fertile and fruitful. But that didn’t make her an economist, either. When, in 1997, the University of Toronto economist David Nowlan reviewed Jane’s contribution, he titled his essay “Jane Jacobs Among the Economists,” which gets it about right—Jane usefully among them but not of their particular species.

  Jane at her ease, age eighty-one, in a photo taken for an article in The Globe and Mail, headed, “Jacobs Embraced as Economic Guru” Credit 26

  This, of course, wouldn’t have troubled Jane one bit.

  A few years after winning the Nobel, Robert Lucas came out with a volume of essays devoted to economic growth. In one of them he made much of a 1961 novel, set in Trinidad, A House for Mr. Biswas, terming it V. S. Naipaul’s “great novel of economic development.”

  Mr. Biswas is the grandson of indentured servants come to Trinidad from India. His ambition as a child is nothing more than to become a cattle herder. But by novel’s end he’s managed to carve out—painfully, insecurely, tentatively—a middle-class existence for himself and his family in Trinidad’s capital city, Port-of-Spain. “His talents are modest,” writes Lucas, “but his unwillingness to accept the limits of each current situation as permanent, to make the best of it, turns out to be his strength.” Crucially, Mr. Biswas lives in a place and time that offers him options, where

  a man with a little literacy could move from rural to small town to Port-of-Spain jobs, jobs where he could interact with people who could teach him a little more. Somehow Biswas survives, marries, supports a family after a fashion, and succeeds in passing on to some of his children this sense of living in a world with possibilities.

  Reading Cities and the Wealth of Nations, I was struck by similarities between Higgins, North Carolina, and a small island of my acquaintance off the west coast of Ireland, the Great Blasket. The book I wrote before this one, On an Irish Island, told the story of this island and the tiny, Gaelic-speaking community inhabiting it. The island lived off fishing and a few fields of potatoes and oats. For several hundred years it changed little. But beginning before World War I, its reputation as a haven for the Irish language, and as a culturally vibrant community, rich with speech and song, began to draw linguists and writers from London, Dublin, Oslo, Paris. These urban intellectuals instilled in the islanders a sense of their own cultural worth and encouraged them to record their stories, which emerged in a group of books known as “the Blasket Library.”

  Around the same time, however, the island, never home to more than about two hundred, began losing its young people. Increasingly, they left for the mainland or, more often, for America, where they settled in Massachusetts. The islanders heard regularly from their brothers and sisters of the economic opportunities in America; the island offered them none, nothing but the rude, constrained existence they and their forebears had lived for centuries. The coming of commercial fishing trawlers to their traditional fishing grounds only made things worse. “We have determined at last to leave this lovely Island,” one native islander wrote in 1942. Visitors “would never believe the misfortune on this Island no school nor comfort, no road to success…everything so dear and so far away.” By 1953, the last islander was gone and the tiny village of stone houses on the slope of hill facing the mainland was on its way to ruin.

  The Great Blasket was cut off by a narrow, navigationally tricky strait from the mainland, by three hundred miles from Dublin, and by three thousand miles from America. Higgins, North Carolina, was cut off by mountains, bad roads, and poverty even from nearby Asheville, much less larger cities. Both inhabited astonishingly beautiful natural settings. Both had their interesting folkways, their unique charms. But in the end, both were places that people left, wanted to leave, or had to leave.

  From the ruins of the Great Blasket one might pause a moment and, as I wrote in my earlier book, contemplate pleasures the villagers enjoyed and that modern lives—too fevered, insubstantial, or inauthentic—deny us. But if clear-eyed Jane told the Blasket story, I suspect, she’d lay quite different emphasis—on the island’s want of opportunity, on how it failed so cruelly to offer “a world with possibilities.”

  CHAPTER 23

  WEBS OF TRUST

  I. JANE AND COMPANY

  It might be natural to imagine Jane as wholly independent, a woman all her own, off in her study by herself, reading, thinking, and writing. And yet, she was no recluse. She had plenty of friends. People were always in and out of the house—which, for all Mary Malfara’s efforts to keep it tidy, was never overbearingly immaculate. Family meant a great deal to her. She was not oblivious to what people thought of her. She’d achieved much, in New York and Toronto, working with and through others. Intellectually, she was similarly stitched in. The notes and acknowledgments in her books are thick with names. She could be reached, she could be influenced, in person and in print. She was a social animal. Sipping a cocktail, sharing her thoughts, enjoying the attention of her friends, she could be very happy.

  Alan Littlewood, the architect whom Jane befriended in the 1970s and who played so key a role in the St. Lawrence project, tells of parties at Albany Avenue in the 1980s and 19
90s: arrive at seven, Gibson’s gin and onion martinis soon flowing, son Jim the bartender. The drinkware was what Littlewood, who was partial to crystal, calls “odds and ends,” nothing elegant, maybe picked up at Honest Ed’s, the local discount emporium; “she took pride in being unaffected.” There’d be cheese and pâté, small talk over drinks, Jane sometimes reminiscing about New York. “Then Jane would disappear to finish off dinner,” which Littlewood recalls as (too) often pork.

  By the time everyone sat down to eat, it might be 8:30 or 9, an air of expectancy in the room: “People would be waiting for Jane to start.” Who would draw her into conversation? Or else, “What is Jane going to say next?” Some provocative question might get her going, or some story. And then she’d be off. “You can’t deny being in the presence of a great personality,” Littlewood says today, shaking his head. “You can’t deny your own awe.”

  She could talk about anything, and did. Only religion seemed to stymie her or leave her cold. “Jane was visibly agitated by references to the Bible…I never found a way to talk about it” with her. “I never found a way to penetrate her defenses.” Any other subject, though, was fair game. She’d never retreat. About all you might exact from her was the admission that, yes, she might “need to consider that point of view.” Jane could seem egoless—but never, says Littlewood, when it came to debate. “She certainly had an ego, a pride, when it came to her point.”

  For a time in the late 1980s, Lucia Jacobs, daughter of Bob’s cousin John Jacobs and his wife, Katia, lived with Jane and Bob. Doing a postdoc at the University of Toronto, she shared the top floor with Burgin, who was in from British Columbia just then, helping brother Jim with the high-tech battery business he was starting up. For Jane, says Lucia, argument was “pure blood sport”; the culture of the family revolved around it. The idea was “to come up with something original and then argue for it.” One time she and Jane got into a dandy fight over, of all things, the word “sibling,” which Jane viewed as hopeless jargon. “That word should be expunged from the dictionary,” Jane said; you’re better off using “brother” and “sister.” For five hours, in Lucia’s recollection, it went on like that. “It was a great fight. We both wanted to get to the bottom of it. It was fun.”