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Systems of Survival : A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics

Systems of Survival : A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics

List Price: $13.00
Your Price: $9.75
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Why Regulators and Businessmen CAN'T Understand Each Other
Review: A very interesting dialog on paradigms which helped me understand better why "commercial" types and "government" types so often see each other as just plain evil and can't get past that emotional reaction.

The book explores two moral systems with very different ideas of honor, which is at the emotional root of how we perceive each other. Should be required reading in high school political science and social studies classes.

The reader needs to look past the cardboard cut-out "characters" which are there only to present the arguments, and focus on the insights produced from the arguments.

A quick, yet very informative read. I recommend also learning more about paradigms and how they limit what we CAN perceive... makes this book even more powerful in understanding limits to understanding.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Why Regulators and Businessmen CAN'T Understand Each Other
Review: A very interesting dialog on paradigms which helped me understand better why "commercial" types and "government" types so often see each other as just plain evil and can't get past that emotional reaction.

The book explores two moral systems with very different ideas of honor, which is at the emotional root of how we perceive each other. Should be required reading in high school political science and social studies classes.

The reader needs to look past the cardboard cut-out "characters" which are there only to present the arguments, and focus on the insights produced from the arguments.

A quick, yet very informative read. I recommend also learning more about paradigms and how they limit what we CAN perceive... makes this book even more powerful in understanding limits to understanding.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent about the 2 dominate strategies, misses others
Review: An excellent, thought provoking work, some examples from 1980's are interesting as we see the same patterns unwinding in Enron's and similar catastrophys.
I have to disagree with her that these are the "ONLY" systems, there is a mass of humans that unlike the written about, self chosen leadership of the world, would appear to operate with a philosophy of "don't risk on prowess or venture", try to avoid attention or be unnoticed, hourd and squirrel away... These are often the peasant/prol/workers that serve the groups described use, manipulate and even claim to own but from an eco/eco point of view, they have a functional syndrome for survival. The fact that they "take and trade" resources dosn't pull them fully into the ethical system of either Gardians or Merchant/Traders. They might also be be characterized by concerns over "reciprococity" which often plays out differently than Honor, or Negotiation.
A somewhat reality grounded book about ethics with an interesting Aristotolian concept.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Unusually thought-provoking
Review: I have seldom read a more thought-provoking, stimulating, and fascinating book than this.

The author uses two techniques that are particularly useful in conveying this rich material - Socratic dialog, and inductive reasoning. The wealth of examples and the detailed analysis are compelling, yet as a reader you feel free to disagree, to question, and to challenge the ideas being presented -- all good exercise for the mind.

The book's thesis is discussed elsewhere. Suffice it to say I find that thesis highly persuasive, and I plan to put it to the test in coming months. I recommend this book highly.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Life-changing
Review: I rate this as one of the ten best books I have read in the last decade. For years I could not understand how everyday people can commit moral transgressions. Some years back, I found myself on the receiving end of some seriously unethical behavior committed by people who were my friends and whom I had always held in high regard. How could these good people involve themselves in such unethical behavior? The dysjunction between their behavior and my assessment of their characters was the source of much grief. After reading Jacobs' book, I have come to understand just how tricky some of these problems can be, and just how easy it is for good people to fall into error at the junction between commericial life and guardian life. Her book doesn't solve any problems, but it certainly makes sense of much human perfidy.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Missing Something
Review: Jane Jacobs - Systems of Survival

We deserve better from the woman who brought us "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." Systems of Survival is, more or less, Jacobs' explanation of how the world works: a celebrated urban sociologist using all the insight she has gathered over the years to give us her interpretation of the foundations of commerce and politics. Sounds great, doesn't it? Except it isn't.

Turns out that Jacobs' vision of commerce and politics comes down to "how we get stuff", or, in other words, the titular systems of survival. There are only two systems and they are pretty simple, either we take stuff ("guardian" system) or we trade for it ("commercial" system). Each system also comes with its own dictates, such as "Shun force" and "Compete" (the trading system) and "Exert prowess" and "Be ostentatious" (the taking system). The problem is that these systems that Jacobs deals with are little more than the "traditional/modern" society dichotomy that has been around for years and years. Consequently these systems aren't all that groundbreaking.

This wouldn't be so much of a problem except that about one third of the way through Jacobs circles the wagons and refuses to add anything new to the mix. Instead of taking these systems to the limits and covering some new ground Jacobs simply keeps chasing the same ideas around and around. More specifically, once we learn that the guardian system is good for some things (like administration) and the commercial system is good for others (like distributing goods) but that a combination of the two systems never works out, the book more or less stops generating ideas. Of course this excludes several questions: why do some societies have systems performing the "wrong" tasks, how have and how will these systems change over time, how do these contradictory systems coexist, what regulates them. Also, what about ideas that aren't covered by the two systems? There are a lot of questions implicit in Jacobs' thesis, most of which go unanswered.

Perhaps as a footnote to all this is the oddity that Jacobs chose to write this as a "Socratic" dialog. The dialog is chunky, the characters one dimensional, the plot is completely absent; clearly the book would have made more sense as a work of non-fiction.

Systems of Survival is a decent read if you know next to nothing about sociology. If you don't fit that criterion but you still want to read it, I'd recommend getting this book from the library and skimming it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An amazing intellectual leap, and an easy read!
Review: Jane Jacobs is one of those amazing outsiders who can take a collection of clippings from the newspaper, historical texts, and conversations with friends, and identify patterns no one else has so clearly seen. Here she has pointed out an entire field for future study -- the social evolution of meme-complexes, patterns of self-reinforcing beliefs that have evolved over time in human populations. One can quibble about the undisciplined frame for the arguments, but it does make the book an exceptionally easy read (and no doubt was much easier to write than a more formal treatment would have been). I certainly recognized myself and my friends (and politcal opponents) in her syndromes, and have found the insight they provide invaluable in working with people who are "syndrome-inflexible" (cannot swing from one syndrome to the other as appropriate) -- especially on local development issues, where the clash of the syndromes is exceptionally obvious.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Morality in conflict but necessarily interdependent
Review: Our society has principles that forbid us to kill and yet our society also has principles that require it to prepare for and engage in war. Much has been made of this conflict in morality but very little light has been shed on it despite its ancient origin. Jacob's tackles this apparent contradiction and others in another of her books where her searching insight can discover ideas that have eluded others.

Jacobs resolves the apparent conflict by showing that it is no conflict at all but really the interworking of two disjoint moralities that must function interdependently to allow our society to flourish.

Our society functions to interfere with the liberty of its inhabitants as little as possible and yet it can restrict the freedom of malefactors and even sentence them to long terms of imprisonment. Jacob's identifies this as the interworking of the commercial and guardian syndromes of morality. These moralities are contradictory - what is a vice in one is a virtue in the other. And yet we need them both. The commercial syndrome abjures force and encourages voluntary agreement. This is the syndrome that characterises interpersonal interaction within our society. It is desirable and yet it is incomplete. Its success requires the confidence of all particpants that the principles of the syndrome. This is provided by the guardian syndrome which is based on coercion and strict adherence to fixed rules.

Jacobs shows how these sysndromes must be kept separate in society for just as initiayive and industry are virtues in the commercial syndrome they are vices in the guardian syndrome. Simliarly the guardian sysndrome requires largesse but the commercial requires invenstment and efficiency. A guardian cannot make laws on his own or use his offce to enrich himself without disabling the entire society. Similarly a commericial participant cannot use coercion on others since it destroys the flexibility that gives the commercial syndrome its societal benefits.

A clear example of this can be seen in present day Russia in which the machinery of government has been taken over by ogliarchs who run it for their own benefit. The commercial and guardian syndromes are intertwined and so both fail. The obvious crime here is the violation of trust by these official but another crime is that this makes the entire country poor. People can not have trust in voluntary agreements and so do not make them. The economy fails because the commercial sundrome is violated and poverty results not from the funds directly stolen by officials but from the wealth that they prevent creating.

I am only skimming the behaviors that Jacob's describes in her book and cannot do justice to her ideas in this brief review. It is book full of insight and wisdom. It is well worth reading.

The only flaw I see in the book is not in the content but the form in which it was written. The dialogue style is not Jacob's strength but this is only a samll flaw in an book that is excellent overall.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An amazing intellectual leap, and an easy read!
Review: This is one of my favorite books. I have read and re-read it again and again. Jane Jacobs explains why governments do good things -- and bad things. And why the free market does good things -- and bad things. Her exposition of the conflict between the "commercial syndrome" and the "guardian syndrome" is profound and original. An exceptionally brilliant philosophical dialog in the tradition of the Greeks.


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