Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

"Seeing Like A State . He’s quite similar to Dewey in a way. He also sees the state as only a mechanism. But he thinks that the way that the state chooses to count, or the way it chooses to see, will inform how it behaves and what kind of animal it becomes. Scott explains, for example, how in France, in early modern times, the state decided to count two things. It decided to count how much salt there was and how many able-bodied men there were, because it wanted to tax the salt and send the able-bodied men off to war. Now perhaps the state decides to count other things, how many healthy people there are, how many well-educated people they are… So that what the state chooses to count determines the parameters of what the state chooses to do. And so the key challenge is how to make them accountable. The problem in many of the countries which the institute I co-founded works in is that many revolutionary leaders who spend a long time trying to get into power continue to believe, once they get into power, that they are ‘outlaws’ or above the law and not accountable to the rule of law. Exactly, so that they will not submit themselves to the rules being made by the people. Yes. But as James Scott describes, as you abstract information from people and aggregate it upwards and you move towards industrialisation and large, centrally planned cities, that information becomes abstracted from the lives of people. The state no longer understands the way in which people experience the structures that are imposed on them. Exactly. So one of the challenges is how to manage that kind of scale bureaucratically while permitting individuals to pursue their own lives. And that is why we created the national solidarity program in Afghanistan, which still has a national rule of law framework that gives money directly to all the villages and lets the villagers decided how to use that money. So it is possible, you see, to have the rule of law and also radical decentralisation."

"Seeing Like a State. This is a book that talks about the perils and limitations of policy wonk hubris – the idea that we are capable of large-scale top-down designs on society to have specific effects. It goes through a number of cases, such as urban planning, where the most well-intended thoughtful interventions don’t lead to the desired effect and sometimes have exactly the opposite effect. I would say an example would be global population policies, such as the Chinese one-child policy. It’s a good lesson for people thinking about climate change, whether to create a global policy for carbon dioxide emissions – we’ve seen that lead to corruption and mischievous accounting rather than emission reduction. No, not at all. We should be trying to reduce it, absolutely, but to think that we can do it comprehensively with a single treaty or a large-scale policy instrument may be fanciful thinking. He talks about urban planning and efforts to manage agriculture. I give a simple example in my own book, which is the introduction of cane toads into Australia. They had cane beetles that ate sugar cane and led to crop damage and loss of revenue, so someone had a bright idea that they would introduce these toads that like to eat cane beetles. The idea was that here’s a natural intervention. But it turned out that the toads didn’t prefer to eat the beetles but they found other delicious things to eat in Australia and they didn’t have any predators. So now if you go to Australia there are 300 million cane toads. Intervening in complex systems can lead to negative outcomes that are wholly unexpected. The Global Carbon Market sounds great on paper but may in fact be counterproductive. More direct, simple approaches focusing on cause and effect would be more effective. If we’re really worried about burning fuel that produces carbon dioxide, we should come up with energy sources that don’t produce carbon dioxide."

"Jim Scott is a comparative politics scholar in the classic ‘poke and soak’ school. This involves deep knowledge of the history and culture and mores of a place: you typically would live there for a couple of years. In the old days, he would have been called a political anthropologist, I suppose, although that subfield has gone out of existence now, as best I can tell. He was in the Department of Agrarian Studies, as well as the Department of Political Science, at Yale. To give you a flavour of what this sort of political science is all about, let me tell you about another of Scott’s books first. His first book was in response to a puzzle, something that really bugged agricultural economists. Agricultural researchers in the US had developed a strain of wonder rice, which had fantastically high average yield, but none of the peasants in Southeast Asia were planting it. The agricultural economists said, “What the hell? What’s wrong with them?” Scott went and lived among them for a while and came back with an easy answer. He said, “Look, they’re operating very close to the margin. They cannot afford a bad year – they’re like men standing in the river up to their neck, where one little ripple will drown them. Wonder rice is wonderful in the sense that its average yield is high, but the variance is also high: when it’s a bad year, it’s a really bad year. With traditional rice, you get less on average, but you can count on more or less the same every year. There’s your answer.” This is the sort of local knowledge puzzle solving that Scott enjoyed doing, and does so well in Seeing Like a State , which is his most general and most famous book. It’s a story about state simplification. States impose order on the places and people they’re trying to rule, with an aim of trying to control them more effectively. The extreme versions are the high modernism of the 1950s or the Soviet planning regime, but those are just the big obvious ones. More interesting, in a way, are earlier ways in which all modern states emerged and imposed themselves on messy traditional practices, mostly in order to be able to control and tax the people. Scott kicks off with a story about scientific forestry. This involved clearing the land and planting straight rows of evenly spaced trees, making sure there was no underbrush growing up in between them, to make it easier to harvest. You would have all these trees of the same size, very convenient, they thought… But it was less good than it seemed, because the undergrowth actually contributed to the quality of the trees. Getting rid of the undergrowth meant your timber wasn’t nearly as good as it would have otherwise been. That’s his opening example of states trying to impose order and legibility for purposes of their own. But there are all sorts of things like that. One example he gives is standardized weights and measures. He spent a lot of time in Malaysia, where if you ask somebody how far it is to the next village, they will tell you that it’s three rice cookings. Everybody knows how long it takes rice to cook, and how long it takes to walk there is more useful for you than knowing that it’s ten kilometers. Ten kilometers on the flat is very different from ten kilometers in the mountains. But the state’s not very satisfied with those sorts of weights and measures and distance indicators. They want some standard measures on the basis of which they can tax people. Another example, again tax-related, is land tenure. A lot of places would have been communal lands over which people had particular use rights, with very special arrangements. So maybe one family could graze their cow on the pasture for this month, but only this month, and another could harvest blueberries this year but not next year. How do you tax that sort of use? Much better from the state’s point of view if you take this common land, divide it up between individuals and give them personal property rights – then you know who to tax. A third example is permanent surnames. In a lot of places, until the middle of the last century, your surname was your father’s name, plus a suffix indicating son or daughter. And of course, that changed every generation – so you didn’t have any way of tracking genealogies across time. In the village, everybody knew, but if you’re trying to organize your population, you don’t really know who’s connected to whom. So at some point, the state put its foot down and said, “You pass on your surname to your heirs.” A continuous family name is the way that a state gets a better grip on the population that it’s trying to govern. A final example is urban design. If you look at a map of an ancient city, it’s just a hodgepodge of roads going every which way, with no major road cutting through. It’s all well and good for the locals who really know the place intimately, but if you’re an outsider, it’s just impenetrable. If you had a rebellion on your hands, the locals knew all the hidey-holes, and the troops had no idea how to get through this place. So, you need urban design to control the population. Two things happened: one was that new cities or rebuilt cities were built on a grid structure. Easy to find your way around, easy to control. And in older cities, you superimpose big roads, like the grands boulevards of Paris. The point of the grands boulevards was marching troops down them, and they put some of these grands boulevards right through the old mazes that were the nests of revolutionaries. So all these examples are ways that states simplify and impose order on their environment and the people, in order to better control them. It’s a story about mechanisms of domination. They probably have all gone into what would be called comparative politics these days. Some of comparative politics is big-data driven, and comparison operates at a much higher level of abstraction, but there are still the know-one-place-intimately sort of comparative politics people that would be more like Jim Scott. One of the reasons that political anthropology has fallen on hard times is that it was a branch of the foreign office during colonial times. Anthropologists would accompany and advise the colonial officers on how to deal with people, and as a byproduct of their day job advising the colonial officers, acquire information about the culture of the place which they would then write up in their academic books. We don’t have colonies much anymore, and the legacy of colonialism embodied in these political anthropology books is hard to handle. So people with a more anthropological interest in politics take refuge in comparative politics instead."

"James Scott, compared to Fukuyama, has a much narrower lens. He primarily looks at modernity, corresponding to Fukuyama’s second volume (1800-today). His basic analytical lens is the gap between grand intentions and political projects and grim realities. He is non-partisan in the sense that he looks at this phenomenon in both conservatives and liberals, in Europe, Russia and in the US. His basic thesis is that there is a certain sensibility with which powerful individuals look at the world. This sensibility is what he calls ‘authoritarian high modernism.’ It proceeds like this: Think of somebody, an urban planner, looking at an ancient large city that is heavily populated, polluted, with lots of slums. In the early 20th century, somebody like Le Corbusier would look at that situation and all of the chaos and tend to dismiss it as irrational and poorly organized, as an ineffective organization of human society. There is a very strong instinct to sweep it all away, and replace it with well-planned modernist functional designed cities, where everything has a purpose and place. What they do is sweep the slate clean and rebuild from scratch. But invariably, when high modernist planners do this, there are spectacular failures. There are huge amounts of unintended consequences. Things don’t work out as they planned. The people who are supposed to live in certain idealized ways, like rats in a maze, refuse to live in those idealized ways, and end up hacking and humanizing and recomplicating the city. You can see this pattern throughout history. You can see it in ancient Rome, for example. But you can see it most clearly in post-1800 engineering-driven modern societies. You see it in urban planning, in forestry, in the planning of big dams. Whether it’s done by a communist leader or a capitalist one, whether it’s done with religious motivations or economic ones, it doesn’t matter. When a powerful person looks at a complex and chaotic reality and goes through their own thought pattern, invariably you see the set up for this sort of failure. The reason it happens is that whatever seems chaotic, confusing, and irrational to the central birds-eye-view planner, with his god-like view of everything; whatever this person dismisses as noise, they are usually just projecting their own ignorance and lack of understanding onto what they are looking at. James Scott calls this phenomenon illegibility. It’s not like something like a slum is fundamentally chaotic or irrational, it’s just that the person looking at it doesn’t know how to parse it and figure out how it works. If we look at any large slum anywhere in the world, it actually turns out that they are thriving economic engines with complex social systems embedded within them; powerful growing industries with a lot of economic vitality, social and cultural vitality. There are definitely problems—like poor sanitation—but those are practical problems that can be solved. That’s not what triggers the instinct to clean and build something new and shiny. It tends to be a lack of understanding plus a sense of fear. Authoritarians are always suspicious of what’s lurking in the chaos. And that’s justified: Revolutions typically start in places like slums. Scott’s book is very important for anybody who wants to have an understanding of how complex modern societies work, why things seem to fail predictably, and what you can do about them, to a limited extent. He doesn’t have many solutions and prescriptions but his analysis and diagnosis is spot on."