Astral Codex Ten

Jacobs

4 min read

Jacobs

Article

Jacobs is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 19, 2023 and June 23, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “writes Jacobs, “it seemed that the wild, intractable, dismal science of economics had yielded up something we all want”; “Jacobs believes, only made things worse”; “Jacobs derives from this a pretty damning view of macroeconomics”. It most often appears alongside Jane Jacobs, Tennessee Valley Authority, 1965.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: May 19, 2023
  • Last seen: June 23, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
If you know Jane Jacobs at all, you know her for her work on cities. Her most famous book, published in 1961, is called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It criticizes large-scale, top-down “urban renewal” policies, which destroy organic communities. Today almost everyone agrees with her on that, and she is considered one of the most influential thinkers on urban theory.
This is not a review of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Perhaps it would be, if I had become interested in Jane Jacobs’s ideas on cities like a normal person. But I didn’t: I started with two books that came to me by random chance, or fate, if you want to call it that.
The first book is Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, first published in 1984. I found it, as it happens, in a city, more specifically in one of those public bookshelves where people give books away. A lucky find: my copy is somehow signed by Jane Jacobs herself. A friend said that although this book is read less often than The Death and Life etc., it actually contains the real gems from Jane Jacobs’s thought. So I was quite excited to read it, by which I mean that I kept the book on my bookshelf for more than a year before finally digging into it.
Your Book Review: Public Citizens
June 23, 2023 · Original source
But by the 1960s, the cracks in this model were starting to show. A report prepared for President-elect Kennedy outlined the problem of regulatory capture, the process by which agencies intended to regulate private businesses got too close to their subjects and end up serving them instead4. And a new class of liberal intellectuals rose to prominence by pointing out the ways in which the political establishment’s plans sometimes rode roughshod over the citizens they were supposed to serve. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring criticized the USDA’s indiscriminate use of pesticides, and Jane Jacobs’ grassroots movement successfully blocked Robert Moses—the ultimate agency man—from ramming a highway through the West Village.
Inline links: 4
For all their accomplishments, though, Carson, Jacobs, and other activists in their mold tended to stay in one lane. Their objections were to specific government plans, not to the entire structure of the plan-making apparatus. It would take someone who thought a little bigger to uproot the New Deal agency model entirely.