The Uses of Diversity. David Ellerman

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СКАЧАТЬ is a “diversitarian” in contrast to the “uniformitarian” tendencies of high modernism (e.g., Jacobs’s bête noire in matters of “city planning,” Le Corbusier) and often expressed in the idea “Why not do everything in the One Best Way?”²⁶

      Lenin’s design for the construction of the revolution was in many ways comparable to Le Corbusier’s design for the construction of the modern city. Both were complex endeavors that had to be entrusted to the professionalism and scientific insight of a trained cadre with full power to see the plan through. And just as Le Corbusier and Lenin shared a broadly comparable high modernism, so Jane Jacobs’s perspective was shared by Rosa Luxemburg and Aleksandra Kollontay, who opposed Lenin’s politics. Jacobs doubted both the possibility and the desirability of the centrally planned city, and Luxemburg and Kollontay doubted the possibility and desirability of a revolution planned from above by the vanguard party. (Scott 1998, 147)

      On the negative side, the Jacobs’ Ladder theory provides a critique of the South’s science fiction imports from the North that serve mainly to titillate the local elites and to forestall the slower development of those industrial capabilities in the South. Domestically, the Jacobs’ Ladder theory shows the very minimal development impact (“sterility”) of the one-way traffic of products and investments (“political factories”) imported into poor regions, company towns, military bases, and other “mono-crop” enclaves that cannot “answer the challenge” by replacing and reexporting the imports in a self-sustaining process.

      Finally, at the micro-level of the firm, her analysis of old work spawning new work revives an older theme of Pigou that each firm embodies a positive externality in the firm’s “second product”—its organizational capacity to train people in technological and business capabilities. In the conventional firm where power comes from above, this potential for new job and enterprise creation goes largely untapped. What “king” ever voluntarily gave up his grip on part of the “kingdom” in the interests of diversified niche-filling development? The legal form of production serves as a constraint or fetter on economic development. There are two policy implications. One is that there may be policies that would help conventional firms to internalize the positive externality and thus to be less of a fetter on development (e.g., the examples of 3M and the Thermo Group). The other implication is that if firms are organized more with power coming from below, then the organizations will be more able to spawn new and diverse economic life. Rather than just specialize and expand old life with its attendant diseconomies of scale and scope, economic life would then better approximate the biological principle of plenitude that works to increase the mass and complexity of life primarily by spawning new life.

      NOTES

      1. In a book-length celebration of her ideas (Allen 1997), the appropriate chapter is labeled “Economies.”

      2. In retrospect, one might call attention to her last and unfortunately prophetic book, Dark Age Ahead (2004).

      3. See Ellerman (2003) for Jacobs’s treatment of migration issues.

      4. See Sen (1999) for a recent capabilities-based notion of development and see List 1885 for an older productivist viewpoint.

      5. “In economic life the amoebas do not always divide into more amoebas. Sometimes the people who manage to split off new organizations from an old one do not duplicate the older company where they got their start; instead, they combine their experience with a new idea. An example would be a purchasing agent for a restaurant chain who becomes dissatisfied with the scales he buys, has a better idea for their design and teams up with a machinist from a tool-and-die company and a designer of microprocessor controls to start a new enterprise manufacturing food wholesalers’ scales. The new enterprise would be not a reproduction of the parent enterprise, but a mutant” (Jacobs 1980, 68).

      6. See Arthur (2009) and Koppl et al. (2018).

      7. See Peters and Waterman (1982) as well as Collins and Porras (1994) to update the story of 3M as the “Mutation Machine from Minnesota.”

      8. See Chapter 10 “Why Backward Cities Need One Another” in Jacobs (1984).

      9. Even imported “factories” such as the BMW and Mercedes assembly plants in South Africa will largely serve only the purpose of gratifying the elites. Moreover, by soaking up much of the local demand for cars by those who can afford them, such plants will crowd out and foreclose on the possibility of there being a genuinely African car with all the technological ramifications that would follow from it.

      10. Like Darwin, Wright thought it relevant to carefully observe artificial selection. Wright found that breeders do not keep all their animals together in one large interbreeding herd. They deliberately break the herd up into subherds, subpopulations, “races,” or “demes” (as in demography). It is a question of balance. The subherds should be small enough so that the variety found in the subherd (through sampling error) or created through mutation, sexual reproduction, and genetic drift will be emphasized through inbreeding. But the subherd should not be so small that inbreeding leads to the quick fixation of ill-adapted genes and the deterioration or demise of the subherd. When a clearly superior example is produced in a subherd, then the seed is crossbred into the other subherds to give them the benefit of the innovation. But seeds could not be constantly crossbred between the subherds as that would defeat the benefits of their semi-isolation. Shifting balances were involved.

      11. See Provine (1986) for more on Wright’s work. On parallel experimentation schemes, see the chapter in this volume and the work of Charles Sabel and colleagues (such as, William H. Simon and Michael Dorf), for example, Dorf and Sabel (1998), in what might be called the Columbia school of legal pragmatism—itself the fruit of the joining across sectors of a politico-economic sociologist (Sabel) and legal scholars.

      12. The problem of using new knowledge (either an innovation or new imported knowledge) to produce other products off the main line of business is related to what Norbert Wiener called the “inverse process of invention.” Ordinarily we think of starting with a problem and then making an innovation or invention to solve the problem. But with the new “solution” in hand, we might then search for what other problems it might be able to solve. “It is just as truly a work of invention or discovery to find out what we are able to accomplish by the use of these new tools as it is to search for the tools which will make possible a specific new device or method” (Wiener 1993, 91).

      13. Or as Marx would put it, the mode of production puts fetters on the forces of production. And as recent history has confirmed, real-existing socialism put even greater fetters on the forces of production.

      14. Jacobs gives an example from a service sector. “For one thing, restaurant chains keep splitting off new restaurants. Indeed, that is how they become chains in the first place—not by merely trying to add more tables, customers, cooks and cashiers into an ever bigger and bigger restaurant, but by multiplying into more restaurants. Besides that, restaurants give birth to independent progeny which are not branches or subsidiaries, but genuinely new enterprises” (Jacobs 1980, 67).

      15. See http://www.thermo.com/; Peters (1992), and Bailey and Syre (1996).

      16. There is no intrinsic reason why spin-offs should be restricted to new products. Even routine parts of the operation, such as copying (and printing), trucking, food preparation, secretarial services, cleaning services, and the like, could be spun out with long-term contracts to keep the original business with the mother firm (so the jobs are not “put to competition” for the old business). Then the spin-outs could fill many niches for similar work in the business environment which would expand the old work and perhaps diversify into new work—all of which would not happen while it remained a sterile captive of the internal division of labor in the mother firm.

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