“Mother Jacobs” influences

The social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s famed small-world experiment was inspired by a game Jane Jacobs played with her sister when they first moved to NYC and felt isolated in the big city. The macroeconomist Robert Lucas who won the Nobel Prize in 1995 had long admired Jane Jacobs’s work.

In fact, each of her books challenged mainstream thinking, and there is so much we can say about Jane Jacobs and her ideas that I have to be “an impressionist.”

The Economy of Cities opens with a chapter titled Cities First – Rural Development Later. After describing in detail how an imagined city New Obsidian emerged as a trading center of importance, she wrote:

“The food of New Obsidian is derived in two ways. Part of it comes from the old hunting and gathering territory—which is still hunted, foraged and patrolled as diligently as it formerly was when the people were solely hunters and gatherers—and from the territories of the volcano-owning groups whose headquarters arc now also at New Obsidian. But a large proportion of the food is imported from foreign hunting territories. This is food that is traded at the barter square for obsidian and for other exports of the city. Food is the customary goods brought by customers who do not pay in copper, shells, pigments or other unusual treasures. Wild food of the right kind commands a good exchange. In effect, New Obsidian has thus enormously enlarged its hunting territory by drawing, through trade, upon the produce of scores of hunting territories. The right kind of wild food to bring to the barter square is nonperishable. Except in times of great shortage and unusual hunger when anything is welcome, only nonperishable food is accepted. There are two reasons for this. First, unless the customers are from territories very nearby, nonperishable food stands the trip to the city best. Second and more important, the people of New Obsidian like to store the food and mete it out rationally rather than gorge upon it and perhaps go hungry later Thus the imported food consists overwhelmingly of live animals and hard seeds. In this New Obsidian resembles all pre-agricultural settlements that import wild food. Because of New Obsidian’s unusually voluminous and extensive trade, large quantities of live animals and seeds flow into the city. The animals are trussed up or carried in pole cages if they are dangerous. They are hobbled with fiber rope and alternately carried and driven on their own feet if they are not dangerous. Nonperishable plant food is easier to handle than animals, and traders carrying it can travel more swiftly. Thus, especially from the greater distances, beans, nuts and edible grass seeds pour into New Obsidian. The imported food promptly enters New Obsidian’s local economy and there it comes under the custody of local workers who specialize in its protection, storage and distribution. They are, in effect, stewards: stewards of wild animals and stewards of edible seeds. Consider, first, the duties of the animal stewards. In principle, their work is the not very difficult task of keeping the animals alive until it is time to slaughter them. This does, however, require judgment. The first animals chosen for slaughter are those that are either the hardest to feed or the most troublesome to manage, or both. Most carnivores fall into one or both of these categories and they are eaten very soon after their arrival in New Obsidian. The craftsmen get the pelts and other by-products. Animals that can live on grass are removed last from the natural refrigerator of life. And among the grass-eating animals, the females, being the less rambunctious, are kept longest. Sometimes they give birth to young before their time of slaughter comes; and when this happens there is, of course, extra wild meat and extra pelts The animal stewards of New Obsidian, with their unusually large supplies of meat to pick and choose among, make it a practice to save these docile breeders whenever they can. They have no conception of animal domestication, nor of categories of animals that can or cannot be domesticated. The stewards are intelligent men, and are fully capable of solving problems and of catching insights from experience. But experience has not provided them yet with any idea that can be called “trying to domesticate animals.” They are simply trying to manage the city’s wild food imports to the best of their abilities. The only reason that second, third or fourth generation captives live long enough to breed yet another generation is that they happen to be the easiest to keep during times of plenty. Indeed, over and over, third and fourth generation captives are killed off without a qualm if the food is needed. But the stewards make an effort to keep fresh meat always on hand, and, in particular, always to have some for the happy and exciting occasion when a party of New Obsidian traders returns from afar, weary, hungry and eager for welcome. And eventually, the stewards manage to keep fresh meat on hand permanently. They come in this way to possess, and to protect most carefully, what we would call breeding stock. But such animals mingle with imported wild stock that will not harm them, including different varieties of their own species. And among the offspring those that stand captivity best are, by definition, the best survivors and best meat producers on the forage at hand. Among these, the most docile are always kept by preference. In New Obsidian, it so happens, the animal stewards concentrate especially upon saving and multiplying sheep—mainly because sheep meet the requirements of convenient maintenance and their meat is as well liked as any. Also, the craftsmen particularly value their pelts. In another little city with which New Obsidian trades, imported wild goats are being kept by preference because they thrive on poor provender. In still another, from which New Obsidian buys copper, wild cattle are being kept because the females are sufficiently docile and because the craftsmen regard the multiplication of horn to be especially desirable. Far in the western part of the trading belt, wild sows are being kept by preference because they can be pastured in forests and because they yield such splendidly large litters. The seed stewards of New Obsidian have no reason to prefer saving one kind of barter seed over another, and they do not do so. The dry seeds taken in trade are all mingled together in storage and are also eaten as mixtures. Seeds of many, many different kinds of wild grasses flow into the city from wet soils and dry, from sandy soils and loamy, from highlands and from valleys, from riverbanks and from forest glades. They come from the territories of scores of tribes who do not harvest in one another’s territories except during war and raids—when the raiders eat quickly what they have seized. But here in New Obsidian, the world’s best market for edible wild seeds, the seeds flow together for storage. Seeds that have never before been juxtaposed are tumbled into baskets and bins. Husked, pounded and cooked, they are often further jumbled with peas, lentils and nut meats. When seeds remain after the winter, they are used for wild patch sowing, a practice not productive of much food; it just makes gathering wild seeds more convenient In and around the barter space, around the storage bins within the city, and in the yards where women husk and pound and carry seed to and from the household bins, some seeds spill. Whether spill sown, patch sown, or sown by little predators—rats, mice and birds—these plants cross in unprecedented combinations. It is no problem to get grain crosses in New Obsidian, or crossed beans and peas either. Quite the contrary; crosses cannot be avoided. The crosses and hybrids do not go unobserved. They are seen, in fact, by people who are experts at recognizing the varieties and estimating the worth of barter seeds, and who are well aware that some of these city seeds are new. Mutations occur no more commonly than they would in the wild, but they are not unnoticed either, as they most likely would be in the wild; nor do occasional batches of mutant seeds brought in barter go unnoticed. But crosses, hybrids and the rare mutants are not deliberately put to use in selective breeding. Barter-seed stewards do not have custody of locally grown seeds, no more than the stewards of imported animals have custody of meat killed by the hunters of New Obsidian itself. It is not the seed stewards who make the first selections of new grain plants. Some of the householders of New Obsidian take this step, and they do it at first inadvertently. Selection happens because some patches of sown seeds yield much more heavily than other patches do. The particular household bins filled from the lucky patches are, more often than not, the bins with seed left for sowing, in years when seed is saved for that purpose at all. The unprecedented differentials in yields from New Obsidian’s best and poorest seed patches lead to an arrangement formerly unheard of: some people within the city trade seeds to others. That is, they make a business of handing out seeds in return for trinkets. Possibly this trade is confined to the women. It is not as radical an arrangement as their ancestors would probably have thought it, because the people inside the city who engage in this practice are modeling their transactions upon the barter that has long gone on in the city square. Owing to this local dealing in seeds from patches that yield most heavily, all the grain grown in New Obsidian eventually yields heavily in comparison with wild grains. The people of the city do not really know why their grain is “the best,” but they know that it is. And in the second stage of the process, selection becomes deliberate and conscious. The choices made now are purposeful, and they are made among various strains of already cultivated crosses, and their crosses, mutants and hybrids. It takes many generations—not just of wheat and barley but of people—to differentiate the New Obsidian seeds into sophisticated cultivated grains. But it is only under the following conditions that the thing could have happened at all: 1. Seeds that normally do not grow together must come together nevertheless, frequently and consistently over considerable periods of time. 2. In that same place, variants must consistently be under the informed, close observation of people able to act relevantly in response to what they see. 3. That same place must be well secured against food shortages so that in time the seed grain can become sacrosanct; otherwise the whole process of selective breeding will be repeatedly aborted before it can amount to anything. In short, prosperity is a prerequisite. Although time is necessary, time by itself does not bestow cultivated grains on New Obsidian. Gradually, New Obsidian grows more and more of its own meat and grain but it does not, as a consequence, wallow in unwanted surpluses of imported food. First, the very practice of growing foods in new ways requires new tools and more industrial materials. The population of New Obsidian grows and so does the work to be done in New Obsidian. The city’s total food supply is made up of its own territorial yield of wild animals and plants, its imports of wild animals and seeds, and its new home-grown meats and grains. The total increases but the imports decrease as the new city-made food greatly increases. (The city’s own traditional hunting territory probably yields about the same amount as in the past.) The city, in short, is now supplying itself with some of the goods that it formerly had to import. In principle, this is not much different from importing baskets and then manufacturing them locally so they need no longer be imported. Since New Obsidian had formerly imported so much wild food—in comparison to baskets or boxes, say—the substituted local production makes a big difference in the city’s economy. In place of unneeded food imports, New Obsidian can import other things—a lot of other things. The effect is as if the city’s imports have increased enormously, although they have not. The city, instead, has shifted its imports from one kind of goods to other kinds. This change radically changes the economies of the people with whom New Obsidian trades. Now people from ordinary hunting tribes who come for obsidian find that ordinary industrial raw materials from their own territories—furs, hides, bundles of rushes, fibers and horn—are much welcomed in barter, while pouches of grass seeds and exhausted, scrawny live animals do not command the obsidian they once did. Now too the traders of the city itself go forth ever more frequently to points ever more distant in search of exotic materials for the city’s craftsmen. And the things that the craftsmen make of the new wealth of materials pouring in amount to an explosion of city wealth, an explosion of new kinds of work, an explosion of new exports, and an explosion in the very size of the city. The work to be done and the population both increase rapidly—so rapidly that some people from outlying tribes become permanent residents of the city too. Their hands are needed. New Obsidian has experienced a momentous economic change peculiar to cities: explosive growth owing to local production of goods that were formerly imported and to a consequent shift of imports. The traders of New Obsidian, when they go off on their trips, take along New Obsidian food to sustain themselves. Sometimes they bring back a strange animal, or a bit of promising foreign seed. And the traders of other little cities who come to New Obsidian sometimes take back food with them and tell what they have seen in the metropolis. Thus, the first spread of the new grains and animals is from city to city. The rural world is still a world in which wild food and other wild things are hunted and gathered. The cultivation of plants and animals is, as yet, only city work. It is duplicated, as yet, only by other city people, not by the hunters of ordinary settlements.”

I find this rich depiction of how crop cultivation and animal domestication started at and spread from a trading center immediately appealing and illuminating.

Was it indeed that cities were the origin of agriculture? It’s still under debate. Jane Jacobs modeled New Obsidian on the archeological site Çatalhöyük. New archeological studies based on isotopic analysis show that humans didn’t become sedentary agriculturalists within a short period – it was very gradual. The same was also true for cities. It’s utterly believable that some levels of human concentration were necessary for cultivation of plants and animals to begin in a place, and it could well be that cities and agriculture coevolved. It also depends on the definition of cities: how large a settlement is qualified to be a city.

What’s really important is her imagination and intense observation which allowed her to look into HOW things work at the micro level and led to fresh insight. Of course, we have been so used to linear thinking which conditioned our way of looking at the world as a linear progression: from hunter gather groups to agricultural society and then urban and industrial society. But this linear way of thinking and looking, often defined by disciplinary paradigms, leads to narrower paths and prevents us from making breakthroughs in some important subjects.

In spite of being a champion of cities, it’s Higgins, a small place in the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, that Jane spent 6 months in her youth that has stuck on her mind, driving a lifetime intellectual pursuit of economics. She was haunted not by the beauty of the mountains but the poverty and generational decline there: how could a tragedy like that happen?

Jane Jacobs, a high school poet and a self-described “outlaw,” took courses on a wide range of topics at Columbia University, though she didn’t receive degrees. Her professional career started as office secretaries who typed as dictated – typical of women’s work at that time. The mother of three biked through town from her home in Greenwich Village to work – cycling was not fashionable then as it is today. Her first book was Constitutional Chaff – Rejected Suggestions of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, published twenty years before Death and Life. The last book she contemplated writing was A Brief Biography of the Human Race. (For a fine picture of her life, look at Eyes on the Streets.)