Reviews for Timescapes of modernity

The average rating for Timescapes of modernity based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-29 00:00:00 Emily Hamner Jacobs is obviously best remembered as the godmother of the contemporary Urbanist movement thanks to her The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But to ONLY remember her for that would be to sell her short. She was an interdisciplinary scholar who was actively interested in developmental economics, sociology, ethics, evolutionary biology, and complex systems theory. She wrote several interesting books and articles on those broader topics. These deserve to be read just as much as her Urbanist work! The Nature of Economies, in fact, is a forgotten classic of evolutionary economics. In it, Jacobs presents an idiosyncratic ecological model of economics that jives with contemporary advances in "complex adaptive system theory" and cybernetics. The substance of the book is really interesting. She takes up some ideas from ecology and evolutionary biology and applies them to various issues around economic development. Her work engages with some past and contemporary biological literature, such as Karl von Baer, Charles Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Lynn Margulis, and James Lovelock. Nonetheless, it would be fair to say that her theories are often idosyncratic and speculative. This probably explains why a lot of her work has not been taken up by mainstream scholarship. Nor did she present her theories to the academic community but to the general public. Her use of ecological and biological concepts is rather metaphorical and unconstrained by the conventions of the academia. For example, like Herbert Spencer before her (in the 19th century), Jacobs takes up the rather old-fashioned language of Karl von Baer as the foundation stone of her thesis. She therefore speaks about evolution as the development from "generality" to "speciality" - terminology that was popular in the 19th C. but has been largely neglected (in my opinion unfairly) in the 20th C. Stylistically, each chapter is structured around a theme and each theme is discussed in a dialogue format. However, the dialogue style of the book hampers its substance. Jacobs uses the dialogue format with the good intention of imitating classic Platonic dialogues. But she has not mastered the format. She introduces way too many characters and fails to establish their distinctive personalities. The overarching meta-narrative that brings these characters together feels slapped on. At their best, the exchanges of dialogue serve to help expose and develop her ideas, but this is rare. For the most part, the dialogue mode is a missed opportunity that only detracts from the central ideas. What is so wonderful about Jacobs's book is her ability to explain the intimate links between ecological thinking in biology and ecological thinking in developmental economics. She explains, for example, how positive feedback loops lead to a) virtuous circles that sustain life and wealth, but also to b) vicious circles that deplete life and wealth. And she explains how negative feedback can be used to dampen out-of-control processes and to further sustainability in life and economics. She ties the central movements of goods and services to the movement of energy in nature. She explains how the vigorous hustle and bustle of the great city, or the great economy, is akin to to a "life force" or "energy dissipation" that sustains its organic growth. She explains how environmental degradation threatens economic collapse. Most importantly, similar to her approach in The Death and Life, Jacobs celebrates bottom-up experimental tinkering and free action by the people themselves - as entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens - as the key to healthy and sustainable development whose spontaneous trajectory lies beyond the control of any central planner. Although Jacobs is a marginal thinker outside of the mainstream, and although her insights are often her own, she emphasizes how ecological thinking is not new to economics but has been with it since the beginning. She reminds us that the word "ecology" was modeled after "economics." She shows how Adam Smith's model of the invisible hand of the market anticipated contemporary information feedback loops. And she shows how Keynes's theory of counter-cyclical interventionism was an example of negative feedback design applied to fiscal and monetary policy whose intention was to increase economic sustainability by dampening the business cycle. But Jacobs also brilliantly explains how the evident failure of Keynes's followers to keep deficit financing in the limits of the intended business cycle has lead to out-of-control feedback loops that actually undermine sustainability! This is just one example of how Jacobs brilliantly applies the insights of cybernetic systems theory into economics. The whole book is full of original insights, most of which are worth considering, even though not all of them are equally plausible. Overall, the two biggest obstacles to the long-lasting legacy of her work are the awkward dialogue format and the idiosyncratic and "amateurish" nature of her evolutionary speculation. The dialogue format is not AWFUL but it nonetheless presents a modest obstacle on the path of the reader. The idiosyncratic style leads to some slippery evolutionary speculation (as with her weird theory that animal laziness serves the ecological fitness function of preventing ecological collapse) and some unwarranted use of biological metaphors (as with her heavy use of Karl von Baer's conceptual apparatus). However, these are rather minor problems in an otherwise brilliant work. It is an insightful, almost poetic, work that anticipates many of the insights of contemporary complexity theory. It forces us to rethink our approach to economics and to humble ourselves before its spontaneity. As Jacobs has one of her characters to say: "I don't know what economies are for, ultimately, other than to enable us to partake, in our own fashion, in a great universal flow."

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-20 00:00:00 David Harmon In her forward, Jacobs writes "Readers unwilling or unable to breach a barrier that they imagine separates humankind and its works from the rest of nature will be unable to hear what this book is saying." This is, in my experience, profoundly true, and much of what passes for economic intelligence and reason is little more than ideology propped up by delimited reason and thinking. I was pleasantly surprised at how Jacobs' ideas confirmed my own observation of the paucity of true rationality and reason within 'official' economic ideology. A few have commented on how much they disliked the dialogue approach Jacobs has taken in this book, but I found, after my initial surprise, that allowing it to move is a stimulating and enjoyable way of exploring ideas. I think that this book is a very important critique of economic practices, thinking and ideology. I was tempted to write powerful, but as this was written more than 20 years ago, and just about every manner of economic fallacy Jacobs discusses have become even more pervasive is a true measure of how unreasonable are those who in high places practice economic arcana that are bankrupting societies and people while enriching corporations and their owners.