Seeing Like A State

Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott explores the mishaps of statebuilding, and more precise ‘high modernism’. It takes multiple deep dives into examples with a focus on forestry, agriculture, city building, and social organisation. These include Tanzanian villages, Russia under Lenin, and Revolutionary France.

My main takeaway from the book is that overconfidence and bad incentives, lead to bad outcomes for the population. Most (if not all) of the high modernist ideas were done with the best intentions. Yet overconfidence in ‘science’, simplification, and the knowledge of experts led to disastrous results.

What is almost always overlooked is the knowledge of the population. Where an economic planner sees chaos (e.g. curvy streets, multiple crops growing in one plot), the locals see an optimal solution to a local problem.

In the end, Scott concludes that the ideas of high modernism are a mixed bag. They have often replaced other systems that were at least as bad as theirs (e.g. hierarchy in the family, child labour, no formal education). Yet they also led to huge famines (China, central Africa), displacement and separation of families, and lost knowledge for generations.

What he also highlights is the ingenuity of the local population. This is the only thing that got many through the bad schemes that were invented from top-down.

The book is long, but the later chapters really do bring together the ideas from earlier. For anyone interested in sociology, antropology, or just how states/governments think, go have a read.

These notes expand on Scott's argument (see other reviews here).

States simplify and abstract things, much as a map does, but the map can omit features that matter in the landscape itself. Scott's forestry example shows that maps can also shape the environment: in the Tanzanian villages he describes, even a house might be moved 10 metres to align with a plan. High modernism misses that people have many goals, often implicit ones, and that interpersonal relationships make a single planning objective inadequate.

Jacobs, in my reading, better understood the importance of social trust and networks that a map cannot readily show. I contrasted her with La Bourzier and the top-down thinking behind Brasilia. States seek legibility so they can ‘read’ a country, as in the French examples from 200 years ago and today's last names and cadastral maps. Valuable but less legible knowledge can get lost. I wonder whether new technology could help organisations recognise their implicit networks and put that knowledge to better use.

Scott calls another kind of practical, implicit knowledge ‘metis’, a concept he takes from Aristotle. His examples range from harbour pilots to local people who know how to save a tree from an ant attack. Capitalism and high modernism seek both efficiency and control: efficiency without control would not, for instance, make taxation easy. Such control worked well in some factory and weaving settings, but many other situations still need local knowledge. The Parisian taxi drivers' work-to-rule action illustrates the point: following every rule exactly brought traffic to a halt because ordinary work depended on informal adjustments.

Also see this review of Against The Grain (a prequel of sorts)