|
BookMark
|
from NewsLink, Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring 2000
Early in Jane Jacobs's new book, one of her characters, a cantankerous sort named Armbruster, is engaged in a platonic dialogue with his four ecologically-minded friends in a coffee shop. He goads his fellow conversationalist, an equally insufferable self-described consultant, Hiram, with a critical question: “What do you mean about learning economics from nature? Economies are human, not natural; they're artificial.”And with that early comment a reader may expect a long, dull, treatise on misanthropic environmentalism and the evils of industrialism. But by posing this provocative question, Jacobs argues that economics and ecology have much in common. Humans may differ from animals in how they earn a living; but that doesn't make the former artificial. Brains, like brawn, are created by nature. Prairies manage to replenish themselves year after year. In an ecosystem, a failed organism becomes food for successful ones; in an economy, the assets of a failed business become resources for newer firms.
Although sympathetic to the green movement, Jacobs will have none of the cranky assumptions held by some environmentalists. Early on she banishes from her symposium the insufferable Ben who appeared in an earlier work and who “used to gloat over industrial disasters.” There is not much gloominess here. Global warming is hardly mentioned. The world is not going to end in part because of man's tinkering nature.
On the surface, Jacobs, playing off her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, grasps what market economists have long professed: If we are to protect the planet, we need strong, prosperous economies. She says that mankind is neither the “lord of nature” nor an unwelcome intruder. She writes, “Human beings exist wholly within nature as a part of natural order in every respect. To accept this unity seems to be difficult for those ecologists who assume ... that the human species is an interloper in the natural order of things.”
Both economics and ecology thrive on an unpredictable, unplanned, evolutionary process. “A system can be making itself up as it goes along. The weather is like that. Evolution is like that. Economies, if they aren't inert and stagnant, are like that.”
Economies and ecologies both depend on feedback loops. It was from Adam Smith, who put economics at the forefront of scientific inquiry in 1775, that the ecologists first explained their discoveries. Smith analyzed how prices automatically corrected maladjustments between supply and demand. He also noted the natural order of how these adjustments created self-organizing order out of diverse enterprises, each pursuing its own interest. And it was Darwin, who after reading Thomas Malthus, discovered the concept of natural selection.
With competition, founded on the biological idea of natural selection and survival of the fittest, Economic Man understands his restraints. He cannot destroy his habitat. He must plan for the future while recognizing he cannot predict future outcomes, and he must be able to adapt. Coming to the fork in the road he must form a judgment of where each path leads.
“In an ecosystem plants and animals pursue what amount to be plans for the future ... They construct nests, dig burrows, establish families, locate food sources, put down roots, germinate fruits,” says the glib Hiram. “Together they compose an ecosystem much as collections of enterprises, with their plans for the future, compose a settlement's economy. The ecosystem doesn't and can't impose hierarchical command over the ensemble, which is self-organized and is making itself up as it goes along. Nobody commands an economy that has vitality and potential; it springs surprise upon surprise instead of knuckling down and doing what's expected of it, or wished for it.”
Jacobs's characters bring to this intellectual foray all the tools of evolutionary biologists. But they do so without any elegance or verve. Furthermore, this is not a book for those unfamiliar with the fast moving world of biological evolution. For all its talk about diversity of life, the characters represent a rather eccentric, hermetic lot.
There's far too much talk about co-development, self-organization, and fractals. And the bridge from nature to economics is a bit overworked. How much hope we ought to invest in biomimicry, the notion that we can apply biological ideas of self-replication to the manufacturing process, is open to question. The prospects for green technologies are still dwarfed by the utility of fossil fuels. Considering the continued popularity of oil and automobiles, there seems to be little demand for green products.
But there is one aspect of the nature of economies that Jacobs tends to overlook. Central to any economy is the prescribed role of government. We arrive here somewhere between the Hobbesian anarchic state of nature and the false security of an all-encompassing sovereign. Whether it be limited or expansive government, Jacobs does not say, although she notes several glaring examples of government failure.
Government, unlike Jacobs's uncoordinated economies, is very much the artificial, but necessary, mechanism designed by an interloping human species that is driven by both the fear of death and the quest for power. These two impulses are centrifugal to economics and ecology.
The world of economics attends to the perpetual problem of scarcity in its wonderful, spontaneous way – much like nature. But Jacobs and her motley crew fail to tell us what nature has to say about government, its optimal size, and its own origins in the evolutionary food chain. Perhaps her next book should be titled, The Nature of Political Economies.
NewsLink is the quarterly newsletter of the Beacon Hill Institute for Public Policy Research at Suffolk University. © 1996-2003. All rights reserved.
HTML format revised on 7/3/03 14:17