Seth’s blog

Why did Chinese immigrants to America start so many restaurants? Because Chinese cuisine is glorious, right? Well, no. Chinese immigrants started a lot of laundries, too, and there is nothing wonderful about Chinese ways of washing clothes. As Jennifer Lee explains in this excellent talk, the first Chinese immigrants were laborers. They were taking jobs away from American men, and this caused problems. Restaurants and laundries were much safer immigrant jobs because cooking and cleaning were women’s work.

A character in Jane Jacobs’s The Nature of Economies says this:

This is why societies that are oppressive to women and contemptuous of their work are so backward economically. Half of their population, doing economically important kinds of work, such cooking and food processing, cleaning and laundering, making garments, and concocting home remedies, are excluded from taking initiatives to develop all that work [that is, start businesses] — and nobody else does it, either.

My grandparents, Jewish immigrants, were in the garment industry. Now I can guess why.

Soon after it was published, I listened to an audiobook (abridged) version of Collapse (2005) by Jared Diamond. It is about how several societies destroyed their ecosystem and died. One example was Easter Island; the islanders cut down all the trees, and disappeared. The whole book was meant as a warning, of course: This can happen to us. At first I liked it — interesting stories. Then I heard that Jane Jacobs didn’t like it. I was unable to find out why. I began to wonder what I’d missed.

Now I can guess what she’d say: “Collapse doesn’t make clear that overexploitation has been avoided countless times. That is the usual outcome. Even before cities, humans were constantly creating new ways to make a living, which decreased reliance on the old ways.”

I could make a video that shows Michael Jordan missing 20 free throws in a row. Every moment would be true but the whole thing would be false. That’s not far from what Collapse does — at least the audiobook version.

1. Gary Taubes on sleep deprivation and the obesity epidemic.

2. Jane Jacobs on nature and economics (quotes).

3. Long excellent post on entrepreneurial mismanagement.

4. Coronary calcification predicts heart attacks.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Moses is referring to Jacobs’ first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. A nice talk-like introduction to her city-planning ideas by Julia Lupton, a professor of English at UC Irvine. Many pictures from the recent exhibition “Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York”.

More introductions.

In answer to a question about what Pittsburgh should do to revive itself, Richard Florida answered:

I asked Jane Jacobs once, “What would you do — as a person who lived in New York in the Village — to rebuild the World Trade Center site? She said, “Well, Richard, you asked the wrong question. What would the people who used that site do? What would the people who used to work there do? What would the people who owned shops there do?”

The people who used the site know the most about the site. And they care the most about it.

This is one big reason self-experimentation is a good idea: The people with a problem know the most about the problem and care the most about it. People with acne know more and care more about acne than people without it. People with insomnia know more and care more about it. And so on. It’s a huge resource that conventional research almost completely ignores.