Over the past week the world has learnt of the death of two luminaries: Harvard’s J.K. Galbraith, born in Canada, and Jane Jacobs, who ended her life there. Canada did rather well out of the exchange. Galbraith was, indeed, a brilliant writer and polemicist, but Jacobs was a self-educated intellectual of astonishing originality.

Such was the success of her The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) that most people view Jacobs as a writer on urban planning. But she was much more than just that. She went on to apply the same mixture of close inquiry, imagination and intelligence to broader questions. What I consider her best book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), was nothing short of a direct challenge to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.