The story economies tell about themselves is almost always a story about speed. Gross domestic product grew at four percent. The company doubled revenue in eighteen months. The startup went from founding to billion-dollar valuation in three years. Speed is the metric; acceleration is the goal. Jacobs told a different story. The healthiest economies are not the ones that grow fastest. They are the ones that grow most diversely. And diverse growth is almost always gradual, because diversity is the product of accumulation — the slow accretion of new enterprises, new capabilities, new connections, each building on the ones that came before, each adding a small increment of resilience and possibility to the local ecosystem.
The distinction is not between fast and slow. It is between two kinds of growth. One kind — the kind catastrophic money produces — is rapid, concentrated, and fragile. It produces dramatic metrics.