Your Book Review: Cities And The Wealth Of Nations/The Question Of Separatism
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
00:00
The Disadvantages of Jane Jacobs' Ideas
Jane Jacobs is widely seen as a great intellectual, but her economic ideas don't quite seem mainstream. I'd never heard of import replacement before reading her book. Why not? The null hypothesis is that economists have examined her ideas and simply rejected them. There were some critical academic reviews of cities in the Wealth of Nations when it came out,. More recently Tyler Cohen expressed his own mild skepticism. Some of the criticism involves the lack of quantitative data in her work, and her failure to think about issues of scale. But maybe Jane Jacobs never asked this question because she knows it's irrelevant. We just can't help fighting for our big countries and supranational unions like the EU. This might
Transcript
Play full episode
