Jane Jacobs Gone Horribly Horribly Wrong

[james_davis_nicoll]

I'm going to run a campaign set in a future asteroid belt, where the cunning bureaucrats of the Flora Trust District struggle to help the regional economies grow. It seems to me that every newly semi-independent colonial regions needs a non-mainstream economic theory, badly applied, so the people of the Trust are all ardent Jacobites, although the details of how they interpret her divine words differs from place to place (1). Each rock is treated as a semi-independent city-state and each rock, of course, has its own currency.

I guess this means I need to go reread Jacobs.

A question for those of you more familiar with her work: how are the obvious failure modes?


1: Instant background: This was in contrast to the crony capitalism and mafiya-style company feudalism back home and just popular enough to make subsidizing the colonies out in the belt worthwhile. They were isolating what they saw as an infection, without the unfortunate effects on their outstanding loans that just diappearing the Jacobites would have had.