A year ago I speculated why Jane Jacobs didn’t like Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Now, rereading The Economy of Cities, I have a better idea. Here’s what Jacobs says on p. 118:
Once a society has developed its economy appreciably, any serious stagnation [of economic development] becomes appallingly destructive to the environment. Common sequels in the past have been deforestation, complete destruction of wild life, loss of soil fertility and lowering of water tables. In the United States, lack of progress in dealing with wastes, and overdependence on automobiles — both evidence of arrested development — are becoming very destructive of water, air, and land.
In other words, Jacobs says that the ecological disasters described in Collapse were due to economic stagnation. In a stagnant economy, problems pile up without being solved. A common problem is too much reliance on one thing. In a healthy economy, new goods and services are constantly produced, often to solve problems created by old goods and services. In a stagnant economy, this doesn’t happen. A rich economy can be just as stagnant as a poor one.
Diamond understood none of this. Not even close. Instead he proposed twelve reasons for the collapses he studied. They included “overhunting,” “overfishing,” and “population growth”; the complete list is here.
Jacobs’s point applies very broadly. Why do Americans pay so much for relatively poor health care? Because the healthcare industry has been stagnant. There is too much reliance on drugs but nothing is being done about it. Non-drug solutions are not being slowly developed. (Alternative medicine, with its religious and dogmatic overtones, is no solution.) The healthcare industry is too resistant to change. Why is the American car industry collapsing? It was stagnant — too resistant to new ways of doing things. The statistician W. Edwards Deming tried to interest American manufacturers in higher-quality ways of making cars, but failed. Then he went to Japan, where he succeeded. The newspaper industry is collapsing because it too has been stagnant. Its current problems started several years before the internet. Instead of trying to solve them, newspaper publishers continued to rake in high profits. Nothing lasts forever, Jacobs was fond of saying.
Economics stagnation appears to be a blanket explanation. It is the meta reason for every case of collapse, whereas Diamond seems to suggest final cause explanations, or the modus operandi of collapse. There might even be cases where any amount of economic activity cannot overcome a catastrophic problem like, say, climate change.
Jacobs argument may be debatable against Diamond theory of collapse but it goes head on against Joseph Tainter inferred cause for collapse:
Collapse comes from diminishing marginal returns on increase in complexity, i.e. the very “remedy” suggested by Jacobs.
See” The Collapse of Complex Societies”
https://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521386739
https://p2pfoundation.net/Collapse_of_Complex_Societies
The “stagnant economy” theory might better be labeled “entrenched interests.” As Jacobs points out in her own book, a once vibrant economy in the US produced street cars and trains that were the envy of the world. Now, the technology is even better and trains would solve many many problems, yet urban planning decisions are still made from the automotive paradigm. Why?
The Gramsci in me posits that entrenched interests will do their best to shape culture and society to their worldview. Perhaps in Greenland the men with social status refused to compromise that status for the sake of cultural adaptation and the society’s survival. It’s not too difficult to imagine. Diamond paints them as clinging to their Scandinavian value system, but who actually insisted on clinging?
thinkingofcheap, Jacobs sees entrenched interests as the basic problem in advanced economies, yes. People in power don’t want anything new to come along that will threaten their power. But anything that causes stagnation, not just entrenched interests, will cause problems to build up without being solved.
Have you read _Thinking in Systems_ by Donella H. Meadows?
It’s thought provoking, and talks about how we focus on events when talking about systems, and sometimes about flows, but often forget stocks. I think you’d like it.
Why assume either/or? Deforestation can happen in a vibrant economy, and can destroy a vibrant economy. Post-destruction, the deforestation may get worse. Diamond explains what happened in Japan: it wasn’t economic vibrancy that saved them, it was a totalitarian dictatorship that enforced commands throughout the society that were fundamentally, if temporarily, incompatible with economic activity. It was, and could not have been, in the immediate economic interest of anyone in that society to do what was needed.
Stagnancy isn’t a cause of anything. It’s a symptom. (“Oh, look how lazy all these patients are! If they’d just get busy, they’d be fine.”)