Category: Jane Jacobs

How the Truth Comes Out (continued)

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In a previous post I wrote about the need for independence — safety from retaliation — to tell the truth. Here is Jane Jacobs’s brush with this fact of life, from a 2006 interview in Urban Design magazine:

I got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation [to write her first book]; well, apparently, rumor quickly reached Harvard and MIT that I had this grant, and they had started something called the “joint urban design center,” something like that. So, I was invited up there to have lunch at Harvard by, I think it was Martin Meier at the time, and I forget who the MIT one was, but the three of us had lunch, so they had worked out what I had to spend my time on. (I had no connection with them, they just heard somebody had a grant, and they would try to recommend . . . ) What I was to do was to make out a question [a survey], and spend my time on questioning people who lived in middle income housing projects, to see what they liked about them and what they didn’t like, and that was to be my book on the city!

Well, I was so glad that I was not a graduate student there, I felt so sorry for anybody who was caught in that trap and had to do that kind of junk, and so I thanked them very much for their interest and left them. Oh my god! I was out of there, because I could hardly wait to leave this behind: disgusting, absolutely disgusting! And that’s what their interest in cities was, just junk like that….and different people trying to further their own career by roping in other people. And it was not to really find out things.

If the Harvard and MIT profs had said to Jacobs, “can we help you?” that would have been one thing. Under the guise of being helpful they said the opposite: Here’s how you can help us.

Jane Jacobs and Collapse (continued)

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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.

Yay for Dambisa Moyo!

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Many years ago I wrote to the editors of Spy suggesting they do an article about what happened to the money raised by Live Aid. Dambisa Moyo, an African-born economist/author of a book called Dead Aid, has followed up my suggestion. In an interview, she said this:

MOYO Forty years ago, China was poorer than many African countries. Yes, they have money today, but where did that money come from? They built that, they worked very hard to create a situation where they are not dependent on aid.

SOLOMON What do you think has held back Africans?

MOYO I believe it’s largely aid. You get the corruption — historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty — and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people.

Too bad she wasn’t asked what she thought of Jeffrey Sachs or Bill Gates. As Jane Jacobs once said, it’s a curious thing: you can’t help something unless you love it.

More In another interview, Moyo asks, relative to Bono and Africa, how would Americans feel “if Amy Winehouse started to give the US government advice about the credit crunch? And was listened to?”

Jane Jacobs’ Influence

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Here is good summary:

The urban planning revolution began even as the Astodia road was first being scrutinised. If one were to mention a single event that kick-started the movement, it would be the publication in 1961 of Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which took on the policies of Robert Moses, the man who transformed New York City. Town planners like Moses believed in making cities more liveable by executing big-ticket public works projects: expressways and bridges, parks and promenades, dams and waterworks, and massive public housing schemes. Whatever came in the way of these efforts was bulldozed without much consideration of value. The new way pioneered by Jacobs rejected this rationlist, top-down approach in favour of decentralisation, preserving and empowering communities, consulting locals rather than depending solely on appointed experts, and working on a small rather than gargantuan scale. This movement is now seen as a shift from modernist to post-modernist thinking. A modernist would view Astodia as a traffic bottleneck ghetto of mostly impoverished citizens, living in uncomfortably tiny habitations without good public utilities. A post-modernist would see it as a close-knit community dwelling in old structures, some of them finely crafted, practising a lifestyle that had developed organically down generations.

Beijing Shopping (stuff easy to get in Beijing but not Berkeley)

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Jane Jacobs said that one measure of a healthy economy is the choice it provides. A healthy economy provides abundantly at affordable prices; an unhealthy economy does not. Another sign of economic health, she said, is innovation: A healthy economy includes a constant stream of new products — nothing lasts forever. People in Norway are far richer than people in China right now, but what will Norwegians do when the oil runs out?

In contrast, my Beijing shopping revealed that Chinese entrepreneurs have been able to develop products that the rest of the world will want to buy.

1. Electric bikes. They’re everywhere in Beijing. They cost $200-$400 and a few cents per mile, far cheaper than gas. I would have brought one back to Berkeley but inability to fix it stopped me.

2. Keyboard covers for laptops. Transparent silicone plastic. Easy to clean. How did I live without one? These are a new product in Beijing, actually, but they are very cheap, about $1. I can find them for sale on the internet for about $15.

3. Cordless floor sweepers. They use a rotating brush to clean the floor instead of a air pump, as a vacuum cleaner does. That they are cordless makes them very easy to use. In Beijing they are obvious and attractive; I bought two and brought one back to Berkeley. In America I’d never seen them for sale but after I knew they existed I managed to find an unattractive one in Berkeley hidden deep in a hardware store. The price (about $50) was roughly the same in Beijing and Berkeley, except the Beijing models are much nicer.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three products are “environmental” broadly conceived. Beijing air is dirtier than Berkeley air; my keyboard cover and my floors get dirty a lot faster in Beijing than in Berkeley. I think they are a sign of hugely-important things to come — China inventing and selling the products we need for a cleaner world. It’s been called the next industrial revolution; a better name would be the second half of the industrial revolution in which we clean up the mess left by the first half. As Jane Jacobs often said, the problem is not too many people, the problem is the undone work.

Are You Having Trouble Getting Grants?

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A few weeks before I left Berkeley, I ran into one of my psych-department colleagues in a supermarket. He said — this was before the financial crisis — that the grant outlook was terrible. The success rate for NIH grants was about 7%. He had had two grants; now he expected to have none. “Self-experimentation is looking better and better,” he said.

Today I got an email that began like this:

If your department’s economic outlook is looking bleak, like the rest of our economy, then we have some help available for you! Regardless of the nation’s economic condition, the federal, state, local, corporate and private foundation grant system in the US is quite healthy and can provide substantial supplemental relief to your budget woes. Grant money for equipment, training, vehicles and other needs is still available in substantial amounts and remains unaffected by the current economic crisis. Competition for this available funding is becoming more intense with more agencies than ever applying. You need an edge to win; we offer that edge!

CHIEF and 5.11 Tactical have teamed up for 2009 to offer our nationally recognized grant consultant, Kurt Bradley and his national grant writing seminars, for the affordable price of $149.00. Kurt and 5.11 will be in Las Vegas, NV on January 6th and 7th to instruct public safety agencies how to capture their share of this money. Chief Grants has turned hundreds of departments into successful applicants and winners for these funds, assisting agencies, just like yours, in obtaining more than $100 million dollars.

I was on the 5.11 Tactical mailing list because I had bought some pants that police officers often buy.

In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs wrote that there were two systems of morality, corresponding to two different ways of making a living: taking and trading. The first values loyalty more than honesty, the other values honesty more than loyalty. Police are firmly in the taking morality system, which pervades government. Science should value honesty, of course; but you can see that a dependence on grants pushes everyone involved toward a loyalty-based morality: If we tell the truth we might lose our grant. Modern science is indeed almost completely dependent on grants, which means results don’t really matter. What really matters is getting the next grant. One reason my self-experimentation was effective was it didn’t depend on grants. No matter what I found, no matter how strange or upsetting or impossible or weird the results might be, I could publish them and continue to investigate them.

Jane Jacobs on Experts

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Her leitmotif was a swipe at the whole notion of expertise. She went to work for Architectural Forum, she told me, when the Office for War Information was consolidating its staff in Washington, and she didn’t want to leave New York. . . .

“I went to Architectural Forum, and they said well, you’re now our school and hospital expert,” she explained. “That was the first time I got suspicious of experts. I knew nothing, not even how to read plans.” She paused for a moment. “Anybody who would want to be an expert, I have some advice for you: apply at a magazine.”

From an article by Paul Goldberger.

The Neglected Importance of Diversity

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In The Black Swan (2006), Nassim Taleb wrote:

Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks — when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought.

To me, this sounds Jacobian. Jane Jacobs disliked calls for reduced family size (e.g., Bill McKibben) not merely because she was a third child but because she disliked reducing the diversity of family ecology. In public health, it’s called the dangers of monoculture. The Irish potato famine (which “dwells in my memory as one long night of sorrow” — William Butler) is a dietary example of Taleb’s point. When one (potato) crop failed, they all failed.

Self-experimentation is a more positive example of the broad point. Self-experimentation derives its power from two things: 1. Motivation. You are more motivated to solve your own problems than other people’s problems. 2. Diversity. The self-experimenter can do anything — change anything, measure anything. Other scientists cannot. For people with serious problems, such as depression, reduced diversity of the associated science (e.g., the science of what causes depression) is a long slow catastrophe when the associated science, because of its restricted nature, cannot find the best solutions (as I believe is the case with depression).

My animal-learning research also centers on this point. It is about what controls variation in behavior. Dave Stahlman (UCLA), Aaron Blaisdell (UCLA), and I will soon finish a paper about this. With too little variation, catastrophe is too likely, as Taleb says. So mechanisms to produce diversity have evolved. Just as the importance of diversity has been neglected by financiers, it has been neglected by research psychologists.