In her year 2000 book “The Nature of Economies,” Jane Jacobs takes a higher level view of economies and links them to the science of ecology. “The aim…is to bring rarefied economic abstractions into contact with earthy realities, meaning universal natural processes of development, growth, and stability that govern economic life. The theme…, the basic premise…is that human beings exist wholly within nature as part of natural order in every respect.”
Biomimicry is the imitation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems (from Wikipedia) and in that sense biomimicry is a form of economic development in that economies are a subset of ecosystems. The objects of study are different (economics deals with artificial things) but the processes that generate both natural and artificial things are nearly identical. “[E]conomic life is ruled by processes and principles we didn’t invent and can’t transcend, whether we like that or not, and that the more we learn of these processes and the better we respect them, the better our economies will get along.”
A good definition of development in the broadest sense is: “significant qualitative change, usually building up incrementally.” By this definition everything can develop be it “an animal, a plant, a delta, a legal code, or an improved shoe sole – they all depend on the same underlying process for development.”
Three universal principles concerning all kinds of development in an open-ended web of processes at any scale, size, time, or place are: 1) differentiation emerges from generality; 2) differentiations become generalities from which more differentiations emerge; and 3) development depends on co-development. It is important to rid ourselves of the linear mind process (eg tree analogies). Development is not linear nor is it a collection of lines nor is it in anyway independent or isolated. Better to think of it as a web of interdependent co-developments or an arena or a habitat or a fractal where basic, interdependent and interconnected processes take place.
“Economic development is a version of natural development.” Economic development is not an imitation of nature. It merely follows and uses the same universal principles. In nature and economy things are interdependent and interconnected to where and when they were produced. The misplacement of things does not lead to their development. One cannot put a wooly mammoth in Siberia and expect it to succeed any more than you can put a microchip factory in the middle of the desert and expect it to succeed. Economic development is not a question of things (like money, dams, schools, airports, factories, etc.) rather all development is a process that produces things.
Considering both natural and economic expansion there are two principles, the first: “Expansion depends on capturing and using transient energy. The more different means a system possesses for recapturing, using, and passing around energy before its discharge from the system, the larger are the cumulative consequences of the energy it receives.” Compare a dessert with a rainforest: both capture energy from the sun. The desert tends to reflect it back and therefore has a small conduit with few means to recapture, use or pass around the energy it gets. A rainforest on the other hand captures similar amounts of energy but possess the greatest amount of ways to recapture, use, reuse and pass around the energy before it leaves. The result is the rainforest with a huge conduit for captured energy has a massive biomass, a huge variety of species, and a highly complex lengthy continual churning of energy compared to all other ecosystems.
A similar conduit exists in the economy. “beginning with the very start of a settlement and continuing for as long as the place maintains an economy, human effort is combined with imports. Also combined with imports is equipment … and the most important ingredient qualitatively…is human capital. That means skills, information, and experience – cultivated human potentialities – resulting from investments made by the public, by parents, by employers, and by individuals themselves. In the conduit, human labour and human capital transform imports – take them apart, recombine them, pass them around, recycle them, and by all these means stretch imports received into the conduit.” By the word “stretch” Jacobs means “adding value”.
To measure this stretching: “economists would do better to abandon export-multiplier ratios and turn their attention to import-stretching ratios.” To find this ratio divide the total value of a city’s production by the total value of imports. This would give total economic activity to imports.
The second principle of expansion links expansion with development: “Diverse ensembles expand in a rich environment, which is created by the diverse use and reuse of received energy.” Diversity is the key that catalyzes the energy for expansion and development. A single industry town like a desert is far less diverse than a multi-industry town or a rainforest. The latter will always out preform the former regardless of how much energy (or money) is supplied.
An ecosystem like an economy is an adaptive system that evades collapse through processes of dynamic stability. These processes continually self-correct (within limits) to maintain the system. First, is bifurcation: taking a new path or doing something different – most new development is bifurcation. A biological example would be a successful individual adaptation. Diversity fuels bifurcation likelihood and possibilities. Second is the positive-feedback loop: when a system responds to events by adding more of the same or the successful: biomass increases even as life grows and dies; diversity increases the more diverse something is; a successful adaptation leads to more of that species with the successful adaptation; development happens the more development happens. These are particularly dangerous when misdiagnosed because the response may be the exact wrong thing to do. The Grand Banks cod fishery utter collapse in 1992 is one example in that it seem that the more money was invested in fishing technology the more profitable it became (as the amount of fish caught was going down and supply and demand drove up the prince) – until it collapsed. This positive feedback loop is known as a vicious circle. They are always temporary because they end in their own self-destruction rather quickly. Third, is a negative feedback loop: when a system responds to events by decreasing an element in the system toward a balance. For example: supply and demand; the balance between hunter and prey species. Unfortunately, the correct response can be corrupted as in the case of road congestion: congestion should be a reason to get off the roads or fund public transit but rarely is that solution recommended. Jacobs gives the following list of things that are evidence of the wrong response to economic negative feedback loops: subsidies, some taxes, tariffs, speculative bubbles, kickbacks, bribes, eliminating completion, monopolies, cronyism, and any strong-arm tactics such as extortion, corruption, and racketeering. Fourth is an emergency temporary adaptation: a fever when one is sick or rationing during war. “Crisis behavior is damaging except in times of crisis.”
The last major point Jacobs makes is the unpredictable nature of both ecosystems and economies. Both are so complex no one can command or predict them except in a very general level. Both are like the weather: even for the most powerful computers it can’t be predicted exactly. Or like language use: it has a mind of its own such that all of us users cannot control it either.