The nature of economies

What Hacker News says

1. tobyjsullivanSep 2026
   The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacobs

   People complain about how it's written, but it's nevertheless an interesting exploration of the parallels between natural ecosystems and human economies. As someone with no particular interest or background in economics (and who hasn't read anything else by Jane Jacobs), I find it a fascinating and easy read.

   thread
2. freenSep 2025
   Jane Jacobs: The Nature of Economies.
   thread
3. nkorenJan 2018
   18 years ago Jane Jacobs published The Nature of Economies, which explicitly applies principles of biomimicry to economic philosophy. It's absolutely brilliant and has been the cornerstone of my economic thinking ever since. Also, it's been a somewhat sardonic pleasure to watch the mainstream economics world haltingly get the memo. They've come a long way since 2000, but still have a long ways to go.

   If you want to see what economic understanding will eventually look like, just cut to the chase and read The Nature of Economies today.

   Show morethread
4. nkorenNov 2017
   Okay, finally got a moment of downtime to answer this.

   The first thing I'd do differently is to prioritise the development of economic diversity.

   One of the most important aspects of cities is the way they create wealth, by facilitating the mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services. The possibility of mutually beneficial exchange depends on having a great diversity of actors doing a great diversity of things; if everybody is doing the same thing, there will be no differences that can be exploited for mutual benefit, and everybody will fundamentally be poor. Company towns based can sometimes appear superficially rich based on exports -- eg., everyone is a silver miner, which brings a lot of cash to town -- but this masks the fact that the city lacks an internal engine for wealth generation, and is thus fundamentally unsustainable.

   (My foundation for thinking about urban economics, BTW is Jane Jacobs -- highly recommend "The Nature of Economies" for a quick primer on her philosophy.)

   Arcosanti was developed in the absence of a robust economic theory -- in fact I'd say there was a general distain / distrust of economics, as was often found amongst countercultural 1960s types. Economics was regarded as an artificial human construct, the foundation of capitalist/consumerist greed, etc. In place of a meaningful economic theory, Arcosanti was initially developed on the basis of "sweat equity" -- you help volunteer to build it, and then you can live in what you built. But each unit of habitation takes roughly 3-5 person-years to construct, so to make sweat-equity work (in the absence of specialisation, finance, etc), you need to both be an expert in construction and be willing to live in a tent in the desert for 3-5 years.

   That was the sort of vision that could inspire people in the early 1970s, but by the late 1970s had thoroughly burned itself out. So Arcosanti morphed into being a company town, whose primary exports were workshops, tours, and ceramic/bronze crafts. Not only does the company-town dynamic strangle actual wealth-generation, but this was a damn thin seam to be mining, and Arcosanti has been struggling to get into first gear ever since.

   To avoid this, I'd engage in fairly conventional finance: take out loans, and offer properties for long-term-lease. Sell this to anybody who wanted to live there, whether they were explicitly in the arcology-building business or not. Re-invest the profits in more construction, and try to foster the generation of a complex urban economy full of independent actors from the earliest possible moment.

   So that's the first, and most important, thing which I'd do differently.

   The second thing I'd do differently -- although somewhat later in its development -- is that I'd try to focus less on design and more on planning. This is critical for the lessons of Arcosanti to be exportable elsewhere. You can't have a single architecture firm designing your whole city: just as you need to be able to accommodate a diversity of economic actors, you also need to be able to accommodate a diversity of infrastructural actors.

   In other words, the question that needs to be answered is not "how should the arcology be designed?", but rather "what systems need to be in place to facilitate the emergence of an arcological design?".

   Conventional urban planning is based on a 2D grid, with standards for property boundaries, zoning, design standards, interfaces to utility systems, mechanisms for resolving disputes between neighbours, etc. These are grounded in political, legal, and technological systems, which are loose enough to allow for a lot of creativity amongst architects, property developers, etc., but strict enough to ensure relatively harmonious interfaces between them. A physical megastructure -- the city itself -- ultimately emerges out of these systems, but the systems themselves are non-physical.

   So, how do these systems need to be changed to facilitate arcological emergence? I don't have an a-priori answer to this: I think a lot of experimentation is needed. But that's where the emphasis needs to be.

   Show morethread
5. RyanMcGrealSep 2009
   >Socratic dialogue requires you to write dialogue, which only some people have the ear for.

   A great negative case study for this is Jane Jacobs' second-last book, The Nature of Economies, which was written as a socratic dialogue among, regrettably, a bunch of insufferable hip urban New Yorkers. The ideas she expresses are first-rate (as usual), but the presentation borders on the unreadable.

   thread