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.
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.