Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Veritas Paperbacks) By James C. Scott

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“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University

At this time of writing, The Mobi Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Veritas Paperbacks) has garnered 10 customer reviews with rating of 5 out of 5 stars. Not a bad score at all as if you round it off, it’s actually a perfect TEN already. From the looks of that rating, we can say the Mobi is Good TO READ!

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Scott begins with a history of the tension between the desire for legibility versus the desire for local control. E.g. central governments wanted to know how much they could tax peasants without causing famine or revolt. Yet even in the optimistic case where they got an honest tax collector to report how many bushels of grain John produced, they had problems due to John's village having an idiosyncratic meaning of "bushel" that the tax collector couldn't easily translate to something the central government knew. And it was hard to keep track of whether John had paid the tax, since the central government didn't understand how the villagers distinguished that John from the John who lived a mile away.So governments that wanted to grow imposed lots of standards on people. That sometimes helped peasants by making their taxes fairer and more predictable, but often trampled over local arrangements that had worked well (especially complex land use agreements).I found that part of the book to be a fairly nice explanation of why an important set of conflicts was nearly inevitable. Scott gives a relatively balanced view of how increased legibility had both good and bad effects (more efficient taxation, diseases tracked better, Nazis found more Jews, etc.).Then Scott becomes more repetitive and one-sided when describing high modernism, which carried the desire for legibility to a revolutionary, authoritarian extreme (especially between 1920 and 1960). I didn't want 250 pages of evidence that Soviet style central planning was often destructive. Maybe that conclusion wasn't obvious to enough people when Scott started writing the book, but it was painfully obvious by the time the book was published.Scott's complaints resemble the Hayekian side of the socialist calculation debate, except that Scott frames in terms that minimize associations with socialism and capitalism. E.g. he manages to include Taylorist factory management in his cluster of bad ideas.It's interesting to compare Fukuyama's description of Tanzania (in Political Order and Political Decay) with Scott's description. They both agree that villagization (Scott's focus) was a disaster. Scott leaves readers with the impression that villagization was the most important policy, whereas Fukuyama only devotes one paragraph to it, and gives the impression that the overall effects of Tanzania's legibility-increasing moves were beneficial (mainly via a common language causing more cooperation). Neither author provides a balanced view (but then they were both drawing attention to neglected aspects of history, not trying to provide a complete picture).My advice: read the SlateStarCodex book review, don't read the whole book.

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