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.

Comments

[wiredferret.livejournal.com]

I had to read this twice before I could get my head out of British history.

Language is like that

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Many/most of the rocks in the Flora Trust aren't members of the Flora family of asteroids, too.

If I have to put up with people mangling the definition of "third world"[1], I am going to mangle words like "Jacobite".

1: I am aware of The Quotation's applicablity to this, yes.

[dawn-guy.livejournal.com]

Separationism (Jacobs argued that Toronto should become a province separate from the rest of Ontario), suburban sprawl and the death of the city core come to mind as likely failures in a mindless Jacobite approach. Real estate developers and natural resource speculators could play the part of the villain quite easily.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Off the top of my head, the failure mode for city currencies would be the informational cost of verification that you've got real currency and keeping track of the floating exchange rates. This isn't exactly a failure mode, but it's an ongoing pain in the ass which makes a more centralized currency look tempting. On the other hand, if counterfeiting gets too easy (what's your tech level?), a slew of currencies may be unmanagable.

Did Jacobs address the possibility of a city getting large enough that it should split into several cities, each with their own currency?

I can't quite get it formed, but you could get pseudo-Jacobism which tries to keep people trapped in their neighborhoods. Maybe people are even drafted to spend time wandering around the streets to make the place more like a city. This actually looks more possible if most shopping and work are done online. Not that it would be a good idea, but you could end up with a reasonable future where if people are left to their own choices, even high-density cities have relatively empty streets.

[rosefox]

You should come down and see Boozy. It's got a fantastic characterization of Jacobs plus a lot of entertaining commentary on the successes and failures of both her models and Moses's, plus dictators and bunnies and a thoroughly shattered fourth wall. Great fun.

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wish I lived near you. I can't comment on failure modes or anything of the sort, but that sounds like a really neat campaign.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

This campaign has the telling flaw that I am actually a fairly crappy GM.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Tragically misunderstanding import replacement. If I have Jacobs right, the idea of replacing imports is so you can export what you make, and use the money to import cool new stuff, which you replace in turn, and so proceed ad infinitum: it never stops.

Critics of import replacement sometimes wrongly characterize it as having the goal of ending importation, and rightly call that a mistake. An admirer of import replacing who swallowed this idea for some reason would soon be in trouble, so you could have a group who interpret the word of the Blessed Jacobs as an exhortation to isolationism and self-sufficiency.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Ah, and space colonizationism already _has_ a glorious hermit kingdom faction.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Tragically misunderstanding import replacement. If I have Jacobs right, the idea of replacing imports is so you can export what you make, and use the money to import cool new stuff, which you replace in turn, and so proceed ad infinitum: it never stops.

They're in a somewhat sucky location as far as the technologies people in the high population regions use to get around. That should affect their import/export strategies for material goods [1]. I think that material goods can pretty consistantly get to them either faster or cheaper than they can ship goods elsewhere. I am not sure if that matters.

1: Non-physical goods are a different story. The publisher in New York really doesn't care if their new author comes from lower Manhattan or Kuiper Belt Research Station 14.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And given the tech background, they _could_ export surplus power as photons. They are actually pretty adept at making cheap optical grade equipment for power transmission.