Economy
Did Jane Jacobs Predict the Rise of Trump?
Ever prescient, her final book outlined a coming dark age—and how to get through it.
Jane Jacobs was one of the most prescient writers of the 20th century. In the 1960s, when suburbanization and heavy-handed urban renewal programs threatened urban neighborhoods, she published her classic Death and Life of Great American Cities. During the 1970s and 1980s, when policy-makers and economists focused on industrial competitiveness and national economic strategy, she drew attention to the role of cities and clustering in powering innovation and economic growth in her books The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.
But she may well have saved her best for last.