Reading Cities and the Wealth of Nations III
Chapters Four and Five of Cities and the Wealth of Nations deal with complementary phenomena - regions that farmworkers leave, and regions that farmworkers get kicked out of - and show how the health of cities predicts which phenomenon will occur.
In "Regions Workers Abandon," Jacobs visits several regions where life hasn't changed much, except with regard to population. She gets right to the point.
The difference between stagnant regions that lose populations and stagnant regions where people stay put is simply that people from places like Scranton, Wales, and the deserted parts of Ontario can have realistic hopes of doing better somewhere else and have the means to get there, while people in such stagnant places as Haiti, where most people stay put, lack a way of getting out or a place to go.
Ingeniously, Jacobs hits on a perverse way of proving her point. She focuses on Napizaro, a town in Mexico, that (at the time of writing, at least) looks as though its economy is improving because so many houses are in good shape, and the public infrastructure has been greatly improved. But the economy of Napizaro must be subsumed within the economy of North Hollywood, California, because that is where Napizaro's men go to work, usually in clothing factories. Their abandonment of Napizaro is qualified. They themselves have left, but their families remain behind. living on remittances.
Like the men of Napizaro, you will be asking why, given such industriousness, they could not do the same work...
Continue reading about Cities and the Wealth of Nations at Portico.
