High Modernism is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between March 23, 2021 and May 19, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as "Scott's complaints about High Modernism"; "one of the most egregious failures of High Modernism"; "This was the age of High Modernism, with all of its planned cities and collective farms and so on". It most often appears alongside Britain, Jane Jacobs, Trump.
- Article page
- High Modernism
- Mention count
- 6
- Issue count
- 6
- First seen
- March 23, 2021
- Last seen
- May 19, 2023
Outbound links
- https://beverlypress.com/2024/05/uptick-in-graffiti-paints-a-bleak-picture/
- https://biblehub.com/greek/3646.htm
- https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs
- https://what3words.com/guitars.record.caps
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
- https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election
- https://x.com/AppSpartacus
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Some sections seemed straight out of Scott. There's the mandatory section on Le Corbusier, Robert Moses, and Jane Jacobs. Taleb's picture of the fragilista prediction-loving intellectual-yet-idiot with his formal system and no willingness to think outside of it matches Scott's complaints about High Modernism. Taleb's ode to tinkering and skin-in-the-game matches Scott's conception of metis. Taleb is much more ambitious (some would say less careful and scholarly) than Scott, so instead of focusing on a few studies of historical farmers, he relates this to almost every part of today's society. But it's the same argument.
This is a shame, since the mass destruction of books and newspapers by libraries in the post-war era deserves to be better known as one of the most egregious failures of High Modernism, comparable with the wackiest plans of Le Corbusier. The story combines an excessive reliance on simplistic mathematical models, wilful ignorance to the desires of actual library-users and scholars, embracement of miniaturization and modernization as terminal values, and an almost complete disregard of 19th century books as historical artefacts. Unlike industrial farms, which can be broken up, and Brasília-style skyscrapers, which can be torn down and replaced with something else, the losses caused by the mass deaccessioning of books and newspapers from libraries were often irreplaceable.
Our story begins (says Gurri) in the early 20th century, when governments, drunk on the power of industrialization, sought to remake Society in their own image. This was the age of High Modernism, with all of its planned cities and collective farms and so on. Philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist-dictator-manager-kings would lead the way to a new era of gleaming steel towers, where society was managed with the same ease as a gardener pruning a hedgerow.
In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public. Starting in the early 2000s, that axis broke down. People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!
First, cultivate your garden. We got into this mess by believing the government could solve every problem. We're learning it can''t. We're not going to get legitimate institutions again until we unwind the overly high expectations produced by High Modernism, and the best way to do that is to stop expecting government to solve all your problems. So cultivate your garden. If you're concerned about obesity, go on a diet, or volunteer at a local urban vegetable garden, or organize a Fun Run in your community, do anything other than start a protest telling the government to end obesity. This is an interesting contrast to eg Just Giving, which I interpret as having the opposite model - if you want to fight obesity, you should work through the democratic system by petitioning the government to do something; trying to figure out a way to fight it on your own would be an undemocratic exercise of raw power. Gurri is recommending that we tear that way of thinking up at the root.
Inline links: Just Giving
Seeing Like A State and high modernism. Brooks namedrops Seeing Like A State as the quintessential meritocrat book and high modernism as the quintessential meritocrat bogeyman. High Modernism was something like the legitimizing ideology of the WASP aristocracy: we are great because we have raised shining skyscrapers, blasted railways through mountains, and built giant eternally-churning factories. As part of their cultural revolt, the meritocrats had to ritually humiliate all of this, which made them adopt as their legitimizing ideology a James Scott / Jane Jacobs - esque perspective of “skyscrapers disrupt the social fabric and blasting tunnels sounds environmentally unfriendly, how about some nice locally-sourced organic food?” He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Inline links: Seeing Like A State, He who has ears to hear, let him hear
* Postmodernism is closer to the correct timeframe, but it started in Europe. Furthermore, the concept of a meritocracy determined by standardized testing is *much* closer to High Modernism than premodern elites, and some serious explanation would be needed for this meritocratic elite to be the ones that turned against meritocracy.
This book is Jacobs’s least read. It was published in 1980, right after the first referendum where Quebecers voted to remain a part of Canada. It is based on lectures that Jacobs (who was an American but had moved to Canada in 1968) gave in Toronto right before the referendum. It’s not hard to guess why the book didn’t have a huge (read: any) impact. First, most people outside Quebec or Canada don’t have any reason to care. Second, the essay — which was written in English — argues in favor of the secession of Quebec, which virtually no one among the English-speaking population of Canada agreed with. The natural reaction from Canada’s intelligentsia was to ignore the book altogether. Meanwhile, few people in Quebec itself read it, since the referendum was over; it wasn’t even translated into French until decades later. As a result, The Question of Separatism sits awkwardly in Jane Jacobs’s bibliography, as if it were “a mistake in an otherwise brilliant career,” like I read somewhere. In a 2005 interview, one year before her death, Jacobs said that no journalist ever asked her about it. But the book was not a mistake. I don’t claim any special insight here: Jane Jacobs herself said so in that same interview. She said that she would have written the same book in 2005, “because that’s the way it is in the world, and it still holds.” Besides, The Question of Separatism is in fact not that much about the specifics of Quebec’s political situation, but rather about interesting generalities: what size means for countries and organizations, and why the fate of nations depends primarily on what happens in their cities. Taken together with Cities and the Wealth of Nations, which Jacobs wrote a few years later to expand on those ideas, we get a coherent and deeply interesting philosophy of economics: one that favors the local scale, cities and small countries, antifragility long before Nassim Taleb coined the term, and avoiding grandstanding theories that always fail to take into account the real complexity of the world. I. A Fake Mystery Cities and the Wealth of Nations opens on an economic mystery. “For a little while in the middle of this century,” writes Jacobs, “it seemed that the wild, intractable, dismal science of economics had yielded up something we all want: instructions for getting or keeping prosperity.” This was the 1940s to 1960s, and economists thought they had it all figured out. It was the golden age of high modernism and scientific technocracy. Everywhere from China to the Soviet Union to the United States and Britain and the nascent European Economic Community, leaders were coming up with elaborate plans, rooted in macroeconomic theories, that were supposed to guarantee future wealth and avoid economic crises. The theories had been developed by many thinkers over the previous two hundred years: Richard Cantillon, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes. Jacobs explains how they each had their own ideas of how the economy worked, disagreeing over things like whether supply or demand was the main driving mechanism, but they all agreed on a fundamental fact: inflation and unemployment have an inverse relationship to each other, like a seesaw. High inflation comes with low unemployment; high unemployment comes with low inflation, or even deflation when prices drop. The Great Depression, a time of deflation, had provided proof of the seesaw. Big government projects, as prescribed by Keynesians, were a way for states to reduce unemployment and bring the seesaw back in a balanced state. Economists developed fancy models, based on historical data, to predict the behavior of the economy. The Phillips curve in particular became popular. It was the golden age of technocracy; it was the triumph of high modernism. From now on wealth was assured, because we weren’t blind anymore: we had the curves. And yet — by the 1970s and 1980s, when Jane Jacobs was writing, the theories all stopped working. There was high inflation and high unemployment. People called it stagflation. Keynesian advisers in various governments were devastated: either their ideas were wrong, or they were applying them wrong. Economists such as Milton Friedman, from a rival school of economists called the monetarists or the Chicago school, came to the rescue — but their remedy, Jacobs believes, only made things worse. Whatever governments did to increase employment made inflation worse; whatever they did to attenuate inflation killed employment. The seesaw from the theories was working in application, even though it didn’t explain reality anymore. Stagflation was not supposed to exist, so stagflation could not be fought. At this point we’re near the end of Chapter 1, the densest part of the book. Jacobs has artfully guided us along economic history and laid out the mystery for us. What’s going on? we wonder. How are we supposed to deal with the two-headed monster of stagflation, if all economists are stumped? Then Jacobs, in a masterstroke, flips the whole thing over. I was impressed enough that I would have inserted a spoiler alert here, if it didn’t feel so silly putting a spoiler alert in an essay on economics. Stagflation is not a strange monster from legend. It is, Jacobs says, just the normal state of everything. Backward economies are in fact constantly in a state of stagflation. The prices in a poor country like Portugal or India (her two examples) feel low for an American or Canadian, but they’re high for most Portuguese or Indian people. At the same time, Portugal and India provide too few jobs to their residents. Inflation and unemployment are both perennially high, and none of that feels surprising whatsoever. Stagflation, in short, is just good ol’ poverty. All these fancy economists, from Cantillon in 1700s France to Keynes and Friedman in the 20th century Anglosphere, were thinking and writing about unusual places: rich countries that were undergoing fast economic development. They were making the classic mistake of treating poverty as a mystery and wealth as a given, when in fact poverty is the normal order of things and wealth, when it does occur, is what warrants an explanation. The result is that we don’t really know how to fix the economy of poor countries, nor do we know how to deal with decline in rich countries, whether we call it stagflation or something else. Jacobs derives from this a pretty damning view of macroeconomics. It is to her a science that has failed again and again, each time engulfing the equivalent of billions of dollars in wasted wealth. “We must,” she writes at the close of Chapter 1, “find more realistic and fruitful lines of observation and thought than we have tried to use so far. It is bootless to choose among existing schools of thought. We are on our own.” Fortunately, she has some ideas. II. Nations and the Wealth of Cities The original sin of macroeconomics, Jacobs believe, is to treat sovereign countries, or nations, as the main unit of economic analysis. This error, she claims, goes back to mercantilism, one of the first formal economic policies. Oversimplified, mercantilism states that wealth is synonymous with the amount of gold and silver in a nation’s treasury. This makes nations the main unit of economic analysis by definition. It’s a tautology — and one that was somehow embedded so deep in economic thinking that even the non-mercantilist Adam Smith would eventually choose, for his masterpiece of economic theory, the title An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Today, even though mercantilism has long been obsolete, we perpetuate the same tautology whenever we talk of the Gross Domestic Product or look at the very nice charts from Our World in Data, which for the most part allow only one level of resolution: sovereign countries. Of course, nations are an economically important concept because of that one property: they are sovereign, and therefore they write laws and implement policies that affect the economy. These policies can be productively compared. But that’s about it — for everything else, nations aren’t the right way to think about wealth. One reason is simply that they’re very different from one another: “it affronts common sense,” Jacobs writes, “to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.” I would add that countries are arbitrary and changing: when the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 sovereign countries, the economic reality didn’t suddenly reshape itself to match the new borders. Lastly, nations contain, under the hood, many sub-economies that are also highly different from one another. None of that is secret or forbidden knowledge. Everyone has always been aware that New York City, or Milan, are economically very different from rural Mississippi or Sicily. But I find that it’s far easier to think in terms of “the United States” or “Italy,” especially when you’re not from there. Nations are an abstraction of real-life complexity, and are accordingly very tempting to use. Also, they’re often the entities that collect statistics, which is another difficult-to-resist temptation for anyone who likes quantitative data. Cities as Radiators of Economic Forces If nations aren’t the best unit to analyze the economy, what is? This is a Jane Jacobs book, so the answer is obviously going to be cities. Jacobs doesn’t actually give a clear argument why. Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities. So far as I can see, her reasoning is, ironically, a bit tautological: “all developing economic life depends on city economies; it depends on them by definition because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities and has probably always done so.” But so far as I can see, this reasoning is correct. Cities concentrate people, and therefore economic life, and therefore economic power. The driving force for all this is a phenomenon that, from what I gather, was discovered by Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities: import replacement. Consider, say, Boston back when it was a tiny settlement, not yet a city, in colonial times. At first, Boston didn’t produce much, especially not much that would be of interest to its main trading partner, London. It exported some natural resources: timber, fish. Whatever else the Bostonians needed, they needed to import it from other cities, again mostly London. (Remember to think of imports and exports in terms of cities, not nations.) For instance, at first, all metal tools in Boston came from European cities, and were paid for by the revenue from selling the timber and fish. Then, one day, some Bostonians decided to build an ironworks and make metal tools themselves. (Pictured: a reconstruction of the Saugus Iron Works, established 1646.) This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.
Inline links: Phillips curve, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9wEn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F850ce64a-4367-4a7a-a9ec-e8eb1af3ed08_399x292.png, Our World in Data, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zS15!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d533e64-f407-4b05-aea5-5b5a9dbdc7bc_1600x1130.png, import replacement, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5j2T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f2675d9-ce56-4ac5-9b78-a16720269dea_1600x1159.png, import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png
It was the golden age of technocracy; it was the triumph of high modernism. From now on wealth was assured, because we weren’t blind anymore: we had the curves. And yet — by the 1970s and 1980s, when Jane Jacobs was writing, the theories all stopped working. There was high inflation and high unemployment. People called it stagflation. Keynesian advisers in various governments were devastated: either their ideas were wrong, or they were applying them wrong. Economists such as Milton Friedman, from a rival school of economists called the monetarists or the Chicago school, came to the rescue — but their remedy, Jacobs believes, only made things worse. Whatever governments did to increase employment made inflation worse; whatever they did to attenuate inflation killed employment. The seesaw from the theories was working in application, even though it didn’t explain reality anymore. Stagflation was not supposed to exist, so stagflation could not be fought. At this point we’re near the end of Chapter 1, the densest part of the book. Jacobs has artfully guided us along economic history and laid out the mystery for us. What’s going on? we wonder. How are we supposed to deal with the two-headed monster of stagflation, if all economists are stumped? Then Jacobs, in a masterstroke, flips the whole thing over. I was impressed enough that I would have inserted a spoiler alert here, if it didn’t feel so silly putting a spoiler alert in an essay on economics. Stagflation is not a strange monster from legend. It is, Jacobs says, just the normal state of everything. Backward economies are in fact constantly in a state of stagflation. The prices in a poor country like Portugal or India (her two examples) feel low for an American or Canadian, but they’re high for most Portuguese or Indian people. At the same time, Portugal and India provide too few jobs to their residents. Inflation and unemployment are both perennially high, and none of that feels surprising whatsoever. Stagflation, in short, is just good ol’ poverty. All these fancy economists, from Cantillon in 1700s France to Keynes and Friedman in the 20th century Anglosphere, were thinking and writing about unusual places: rich countries that were undergoing fast economic development. They were making the classic mistake of treating poverty as a mystery and wealth as a given, when in fact poverty is the normal order of things and wealth, when it does occur, is what warrants an explanation. The result is that we don’t really know how to fix the economy of poor countries, nor do we know how to deal with decline in rich countries, whether we call it stagflation or something else. Jacobs derives from this a pretty damning view of macroeconomics. It is to her a science that has failed again and again, each time engulfing the equivalent of billions of dollars in wasted wealth. “We must,” she writes at the close of Chapter 1, “find more realistic and fruitful lines of observation and thought than we have tried to use so far. It is bootless to choose among existing schools of thought. We are on our own.” Fortunately, she has some ideas. II. Nations and the Wealth of Cities The original sin of macroeconomics, Jacobs believe, is to treat sovereign countries, or nations, as the main unit of economic analysis. This error, she claims, goes back to mercantilism, one of the first formal economic policies. Oversimplified, mercantilism states that wealth is synonymous with the amount of gold and silver in a nation’s treasury. This makes nations the main unit of economic analysis by definition. It’s a tautology — and one that was somehow embedded so deep in economic thinking that even the non-mercantilist Adam Smith would eventually choose, for his masterpiece of economic theory, the title An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Today, even though mercantilism has long been obsolete, we perpetuate the same tautology whenever we talk of the Gross Domestic Product or look at the very nice charts from Our World in Data, which for the most part allow only one level of resolution: sovereign countries. Of course, nations are an economically important concept because of that one property: they are sovereign, and therefore they write laws and implement policies that affect the economy. These policies can be productively compared. But that’s about it — for everything else, nations aren’t the right way to think about wealth. One reason is simply that they’re very different from one another: “it affronts common sense,” Jacobs writes, “to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.” I would add that countries are arbitrary and changing: when the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 sovereign countries, the economic reality didn’t suddenly reshape itself to match the new borders. Lastly, nations contain, under the hood, many sub-economies that are also highly different from one another. None of that is secret or forbidden knowledge. Everyone has always been aware that New York City, or Milan, are economically very different from rural Mississippi or Sicily. But I find that it’s far easier to think in terms of “the United States” or “Italy,” especially when you’re not from there. Nations are an abstraction of real-life complexity, and are accordingly very tempting to use. Also, they’re often the entities that collect statistics, which is another difficult-to-resist temptation for anyone who likes quantitative data. Cities as Radiators of Economic Forces If nations aren’t the best unit to analyze the economy, what is? This is a Jane Jacobs book, so the answer is obviously going to be cities. Jacobs doesn’t actually give a clear argument why. Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities. So far as I can see, her reasoning is, ironically, a bit tautological: “all developing economic life depends on city economies; it depends on them by definition because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities and has probably always done so.” But so far as I can see, this reasoning is correct. Cities concentrate people, and therefore economic life, and therefore economic power. The driving force for all this is a phenomenon that, from what I gather, was discovered by Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities: import replacement. Consider, say, Boston back when it was a tiny settlement, not yet a city, in colonial times. At first, Boston didn’t produce much, especially not much that would be of interest to its main trading partner, London. It exported some natural resources: timber, fish. Whatever else the Bostonians needed, they needed to import it from other cities, again mostly London. (Remember to think of imports and exports in terms of cities, not nations.) For instance, at first, all metal tools in Boston came from European cities, and were paid for by the revenue from selling the timber and fish. Then, one day, some Bostonians decided to build an ironworks and make metal tools themselves. (Pictured: a reconstruction of the Saugus Iron Works, established 1646.) This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.
Inline links: Our World in Data, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zS15!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d533e64-f407-4b05-aea5-5b5a9dbdc7bc_1600x1130.png, import replacement, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5j2T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f2675d9-ce56-4ac5-9b78-a16720269dea_1600x1159.png, import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png