You Know What They Say About the Road to Hell

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 106
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

We could probably have a broad bipartisan agreement that society today is plagued with systemic problems. Though we’d disagree what those problems are, we’d agree that they represent, not failures among individuals, but structural flaws with society itself. Why, then, do we have such difficulty actually fixing the situation? Why do grassroots attempts to repair these problems almost inevitably create more crises than they solve?

Yale educator James C. Scott didn’t intend to become a broad-ranging political scientist. He simply wanted to research why post-colonial governments in southeast Asia had such difficulty getting traditional nomadic peoples to settle in permanent, geographically rooted communities. But in conducting that research, he began discovering important resonances throughout history. He uncovered important structural patterns more or less by accident.

Political science maintains the illusion of “science” by quoting statistics and measuring improvements for general populations. But Scott finds that this science conceals a sweeping network of unquestioned prior assumptions, which even the scientists often cannot see. Which statistics, Scott asks, actually merit consideration? How can we separate meaningful measurements from background noise? Put another way, Scott admits, the scientific veneer of politics conceals a morass of unexamined value judgements.

Ancient European city centers, Scott writes, have subtle internal logic which reflects the people who first paved the streets. But that logic is based on what Scott calls “local knowledge,” and therefore is often impenetrable to governments and tax collectors. That’s why powerful autocrats like Napoleon III flattened and rebuilt their capitals along straight lines which are easily mapped, and centrally designed American cities, like Chicago, follow strict grid layouts.

Central governments disdain “local knowledge,” not because they consider it dangerous or unhelpful, but because it excludes the values they consider most important for ruling. Therefore they replace, say, measurement systems created by local gentry, with a Metric System which means something reliable everywhere in the realm. This makes levying taxes quick and easy. It also concentrates power in the hands of kings, or their successors, the bureaucracy.

Because Scott’s research background deals heavily with agriculture and agrarian societies, many of his lengthy, exhaustively researched examples draw from farming. Soviet attempts to collectivize agriculture, Scott shows, actually derive from “scientific” models devised in America, and the model Soviet farm was actually designed in a Chicago hotel room. The Soviet Union then exported their agricultural model, even as it became clear it was failing at home.

James C. Scott

Tanzanian ujamaa villages, an attempt to modernize farming and join East Africa to the booming global export market, looked perfect on paper. They also reflected both post-colonial capitalism, and Julius Nyerere’s Catholic values. Why, then, did traditional peoples leave the farms and resume their less-efficient ancestral practices so eagerly? The answer, Scott reveals, lies in “local knowledge”: the people understood the soil, plants, and water better than the government could.

Early on, Scott’s conclusions seemingly support Libertarian economics and a distrust of central government. He pointedly avoids implicating America directly for nearly 200 pages. (In the introduction, he admits excising an entire chapter about the TVA, claiming the book was overlong.) This possibly reflects the political milieu in which Scott writes, directly in the aftermath of the Cold War. Decentralized capitalism, with its distrust of state bureaucracy, appeared ascendent everywhere.

Late in the book, however, Scott’s focus takes a remarkable shift. He begins investigating how disastrous corporations have been for local communities, taking decision-making authority from local producers and concentrating it according to the disposition of money. Here, he still mainly, but not exclusively, focuses on agriculture. This results in denuded forests, strip-mined mountains, land sapped of nutrients and reduced to silt—and no one available to accept the blame.

Scott isn’t entirely averse to central planning and cooperative authority. He acknowledges that trade has made wealth and opportunities available to populations previously limited by geography. Planning has its perquisites. But it also eliminates incentives to respect the land and preserve communities, robbing future productivity for near-term balance sheet rewards. What central planners consider worth measuring reflects their values, and excludes factors which often prove priceless further down the line.

The situation is, of course, considerably more complex than that. Scott spills copious ink demonstrating the important trends of how powerful people, often motivated by benevolent goals, strip control from families, communities, and other sources of “local knowledge.” Importantly, Scott acknowledges, the result is not inevitable. Some central planners have done great good. But the seeds of abuse are always present, he shows, and somebody always seems to find them.