The Quarterly

The Nature of Economies
Jane Jacobs
Random House Toronto/New York, 2000
$29.99 CDN,
hardcover

Two of the biggies have already been feted: Guns, Germs and Steel won the Pulitzer and Sen recently won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Jane Jacobs’ long-awaited new book has already been reviewed in the major North American dailies. It’s the slimmest entry by far, weighing in at less than 200 pages, but as one thoughtful reader suggested, its cover should bear this warning: “Beware: this is really an 800-page book.” The Nature of Economies is written in the same dialectic form as Systems of Survival, so if you that found that hard going, look out. But economies can’t be reduced to linear, causally traceable reactions–they’re much messier than that–and so goes the form of The Nature of Economies. Chats occur over tea and scotch. We read all sorts of little details about the sandwiches the conversands are served, but in the midst of the muddle of everyday life patterns emerge with sophisticated names like co-evolution, biomimicry, self re-fueling, and economic vicious circles (which are eventually de-scribed as “economic and political addictions”). I doubt I have to sell readers of Ideas That Matter on The Nature of Economies. One extra urge: don’t neglect the Notes section. You may even want to start there: fascinating explanations illustrate the eclectic curiosity and pattern identification skill that is Jane Jacobs.

Guns, Germs, and Steel:
The Fates of Human Societies
Jared Diamond
Norton and Co., New York/London, 1999
$19.99 CDN, softcover

From understanding economies to understanding 13,000 years of history or, as Paul Erlich says on the back cover, “A short history of everything about everybody.” Guns, Germs and Steel traces (history books always trace) the rises and falls of farming, poverty, population, food production, peace, literacy, health and invention. In other words, guns, germs and steel. This sweeping narrative is so readable I became suspicious of the case Dia-mond is making: can it really fit together this nicely? The analysis identifies the “broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.” It’s hard not to let the deluge of facts cloud one’s ability to digest this book, but Diamond’s descriptions of societies as complex adaptive systems jibe with Jacobs’ thinking on evolving econ-omies.

Development As Freedom
Amartya Sen
Knopf, New York, 2000
$41.50 CDN, hardcover

The third biggie with the ideologically irresistible (or suspicious) title Development as Freedom, reads most like a university textbook, full of eco-jargon, irritating to the lay reader. (You may find yourself wishing for a little Jacobsian conversational element or culinary detail.) These complaints are trivial; this book is a super serious examination of individual entitlement, social justice and the importance of personal choice as an indicator of societal evolution. Sen illustrates one of his points (the participation of women as crucial agents of economic development) by referring to the micro-lending success of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

New Rules for the New Economy:
10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World
Kevin Kelly
Viking, New York, 1998
$19.95 CDN, softcover

So does Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired, in his final chapter “A Thousand Points of Wealth.” His New Rules for the New Economy is an easy read. Some of his ideas are enchanting: “Because the nature of the network economy seeds disequilibrium, fragmentation, uncertainty, churn, and relativism, the anchors of meaning and value are in short supply.” I’m not sure I agree with his deduction, but that list of the fruits of the new economy mirrors many of Jacobs’ notions. Kelly’s rules–although irksome in their phrasing (“Follow the Free”)–provide some curious suggestions of patterns worth watching.

Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
softcover 1997
165 pages $17.95
Reviewer: John Arthur Harrison

This is a book I have treasured since first discovering it. I find myself lured back frequently to rethink and relive Calvino’s journey. This melancholy meditation engages all the senses and transposes the visual into a whole perceptual spectrum of experiential and reflective reconsideration; it’s a philosophical synaesthesia.

Calvino begins with a pattern similar to Marco Polo’s The Travels: that of rendering brief descriptions of unique and exotic places. Unlike Polo, Calvino wraps groupings of these lyric intensities with fragments of a dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The powerful result is similar to Boethius’ mix of poetry passages wrapped in a dialogue with the persona of Philosophy in The Consolations of Philosophy.

Calvino first has the Khan seek structural understanding, inventories and certainty from Polo’s constructive enumerations; his prose poems go well beyond the expectations of our western perspectives, our own imaginings or those of the Khan. With Kublai, we join Marco to take a phenomenological journey, weaving fragments of experience into a whole cloth of reintegrated consciousness. This is the central adventure of our postindustrial era and the evolving and coalescing fragments of our varied postmodern sensibilities.

Luminous and resonant, Marco’s fabulous memories and the Khan’s migratory imagination dance in a reverie amidst “a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers” until the meaning of it all settles in with the muse of morality at the heart of living. It’s a glorious September of a book.