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"Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott I started my career in international development, and the book above provides a dozen case studies on states using scie

by cl42 5y ago

"Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott I started my career in international development, and the book above provides a dozen case studies on states using scientific management, stats, etc. to try and control their growth/populations/economies and failing miserably. It is a beautiful book in that it illustrates how difficult it is to actually manage a country and economy well, especially if you are trying to completely change it (i.e., "develop" it, solve poverty, etc.). It humbled me as a 22 year old "professional" wanting to fix the world. "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs is a close second to this theme of economic, technocratic development. EDIT: I notice 22 upvotes. WOW! If you are a fan of this book or curious to hear more, please comment. Happy to elaborate. If you want a third book, The Evolution of Civilizations[1] is another fun one here. It tries to apply scientific principles and hypothesis testing to historical analysis! [1] https://10millionsteps.com/review-evolution-of-civilizations https://10millionsteps.com/review-evolution-of-civilizations

ihodes 5y ago
This book is next on my reading list. One question that's come to mind before having read the book is if Singapore is an example of a highly-legible planned state's success?
- cl42 5y ago
  That's a beautiful question. I am not intimately familiar with Singapore's planning processes. The authors above (Jane Jacobs, James C. Scott) would argue that the best cities/countries are ones that have a centralized strategy that leaves enough leeway to enable each community to optimize their specific situation on their own. I don't know if Singapore does that or not. Do you have a POV? I've been meaning to read Lee Kuan Yew's "From Third World to First" to learn more but haven't found the time.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    Singapore does have the advantage of being compact and having the ability to set policy at all levels at once. The US can't do that, because cities and towns depend on the state and federal governments for funding, but those same cities and towns have some autonomy in how they run day-to-day governance.
- reese_john 5y ago
  I wouldn't say so. Scale matters. What worked for Singapore, may not work for China. There is this great article about the story of Singapore[0], it was also discussed on HN some time ago. I believe one of its main takes really resonates with "Seeing like a State" thesis. Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism. [0] https://palladiummag.com/2020/08/13/the-true-story-of-lee-kuan-yews-singapore/ https://palladiummag.com/2020/08/13/the-true-story-of-lee-ku... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382249
  - carlmr 5y ago
    >There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism. I find this quite interesting. As a programmer I find you can only get to the real requirements by experimenting and going back and forth with the customer. Applied to politics it would be really helpful if we could easily experiment "in the small" and then incrementally scale what works. However democratic processes, at least in my country, are so slow that most people go for the "go big or go home" approach. It would therefore be helfpul to have incremental laws where you say start the implementation at city level, maybe in a few test cities, if that seems favorable automatically scale to a few states, and if that still works scale to the whole country. In a complex economy you need these small "tests" to maybe patch issues before scaling it to the whole country. And you would avoid costly mistakes, trying things that sound good on paper but eventually don't work out well.
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  Singapore and Hong Kong are exceptions to general trends. Being a small city state/port city gives you the ability to do things that larger states aren’t able to do (similar to banking havens in Europe like Luxembourg and Lichtenstein).
cloudier 5y ago
“Seeing like a state” taught me what high modernism is and it’s pitfalls (since I - and I imagine many readers of HN - are already familiar with its strengths and achievements e.g. modern medicine). Poor Economics is a book in a similar vein that talks about how policies that sound like they would be effective can backfire. (I am a software engineer and found both of these books approachable and interesting.)
H8crilA 5y ago
One thing I've observed is population growth control - be it reducing the growth or encouraging growth - always fails miserably. For example many people have heard of the one child policy in China, but the facts are that both the introduction and the removal of the policy had no perceptible effect on fertility rates.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  I disagree I think the latter Chinese policy in particular wasn't too restrictive and 2 children were a large enough limit to not skew numbers too much. That policy didn't push people from stopping to want those 2 children. Their previous policy worked much better. If I wanted to stop people from having children I would promote hookup culture, feminism and economically reward unstable families. A touch of propaganda on how scary and life ruining it is to have a baby and in a couple of generations the birth rate should drop below replacement rate.
- nxmnxm99 5y ago
  This is definitely not true. There was a decade of population growth control mechanisms in the decade before the official, universal one child policy. Over that decade (the 70s) China experienced an incredibly sharp reduction in fertility. It’s likely that increasing socioeconomic wealth would have naturally followed that trajectory, but it’s unarguable that Chinas fertility policies accelerated the drop.
  - H8crilA 5y ago
    I mean, I still don't see anything out of trend here between the 60s and the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#/media/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#/media/File:B...
    - JuettnerDistrib 5y ago
      It's pretty obvious if you ignore the great leap backwards... I mean forward, coming down from ~40 births/1000 in the 1950s and 1960s to ~20 in the late 70s and after.
deltaonefour 5y ago
Jane Jacobs, "Systems of survival" is also a good one. Formulates a theory about corruption and the nature of it. Changed the way I think about it forever.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
starwind 5y ago
I'm a big fan of his most recent book Against the Grain
niyikiza 5y ago
I love the book. I was introduced to it by a brilliant review[0] by Scott Alexander. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...
downrightmike 5y ago
You might like SuperCrunchers https://www.amazon.com/Super-Crunchers-Thinking-Numbers-Smart/dp/0553384732 https://www.amazon.com/Super-Crunchers-Thinking-Numbers-Smar...
pyuser583 5y ago
I was really drawn to the topic by reading Origins of Political Order by F. Fukuyama.

by cl42 5y ago

ihodes 5y ago

This book is next on my reading list. One question that's come to mind before having read the book is if Singapore is an example of a highly-legible planned state's success?

cl42 5y ago
That's a beautiful question. I am not intimately familiar with Singapore's planning processes. The authors above (Jane Jacobs, James C. Scott) would argue that the best cities/countries are ones that have a centralized strategy that leaves enough leeway to enable each community to optimize their specific situation on their own. I don't know if Singapore does that or not. Do you have a POV? I've been meaning to read Lee Kuan Yew's "From Third World to First" to learn more but haven't found the time.
- mbg721 5y ago
  Singapore does have the advantage of being compact and having the ability to set policy at all levels at once. The US can't do that, because cities and towns depend on the state and federal governments for funding, but those same cities and towns have some autonomy in how they run day-to-day governance.
reese_john 5y ago
I wouldn't say so. Scale matters. What worked for Singapore, may not work for China. There is this great article about the story of Singapore[0], it was also discussed on HN some time ago. I believe one of its main takes really resonates with "Seeing like a State" thesis. Decision-makers must rely on simplified models to make their decisions. All schemata are by nature imperfect representations of reality. Indeed, a scheme that reflected reality perfectly would be cluttered and uninterpretable. The reality is always more complex than the plan. In large countries, the planner is further from ground reality than in tiny city-states. Abstractions and errors inevitably compound as the distance increases Ironically, Lee Kuan Yew himself had no patience for other people’s models. In his words, “I am not following any prescription given to me by any theoretician on democracy or whatever. I work from first principles: what will get me there?” If there is a lesson from Singapore’s development it is this: forget grand ideologies and others’ models. There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism. [0] https://palladiummag.com/2020/08/13/the-true-story-of-lee-kuan-yews-singapore/ https://palladiummag.com/2020/08/13/the-true-story-of-lee-ku... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382249 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24382249
- carlmr 5y ago
  >There is no replacement for experimentation, independent thought, and ruthless pragmatism. I find this quite interesting. As a programmer I find you can only get to the real requirements by experimenting and going back and forth with the customer. Applied to politics it would be really helpful if we could easily experiment "in the small" and then incrementally scale what works. However democratic processes, at least in my country, are so slow that most people go for the "go big or go home" approach. It would therefore be helfpul to have incremental laws where you say start the implementation at city level, maybe in a few test cities, if that seems favorable automatically scale to a few states, and if that still works scale to the whole country. In a complex economy you need these small "tests" to maybe patch issues before scaling it to the whole country. And you would avoid costly mistakes, trying things that sound good on paper but eventually don't work out well.
wbsss4412 5y ago
Singapore and Hong Kong are exceptions to general trends. Being a small city state/port city gives you the ability to do things that larger states aren’t able to do (similar to banking havens in Europe like Luxembourg and Lichtenstein).

cloudier 5y ago

“Seeing like a state” taught me what high modernism is and it’s pitfalls (since I - and I imagine many readers of HN - are already familiar with its strengths and achievements e.g. modern medicine). Poor Economics is a book in a similar vein that talks about how policies that sound like they would be effective can backfire. (I am a software engineer and found both of these books approachable and interesting.)

H8crilA 5y ago

One thing I've observed is population growth control - be it reducing the growth or encouraging growth - always fails miserably. For example many people have heard of the one child policy in China, but the facts are that both the introduction and the removal of the policy had no perceptible effect on fertility rates.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
I disagree I think the latter Chinese policy in particular wasn't too restrictive and 2 children were a large enough limit to not skew numbers too much. That policy didn't push people from stopping to want those 2 children. Their previous policy worked much better. If I wanted to stop people from having children I would promote hookup culture, feminism and economically reward unstable families. A touch of propaganda on how scary and life ruining it is to have a baby and in a couple of generations the birth rate should drop below replacement rate.
nxmnxm99 5y ago
This is definitely not true. There was a decade of population growth control mechanisms in the decade before the official, universal one child policy. Over that decade (the 70s) China experienced an incredibly sharp reduction in fertility. It’s likely that increasing socioeconomic wealth would have naturally followed that trajectory, but it’s unarguable that Chinas fertility policies accelerated the drop.
- H8crilA 5y ago
  I mean, I still don't see anything out of trend here between the 60s and the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#/media/File:Birth_rate_in_China.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#/media/File:B...
  - JuettnerDistrib 5y ago
    It's pretty obvious if you ignore the great leap backwards... I mean forward, coming down from ~40 births/1000 in the 1950s and 1960s to ~20 in the late 70s and after.

deltaonefour 5y ago

Jane Jacobs, "Systems of survival" is also a good one. Formulates a theory about corruption and the nature of it. Changed the way I think about it forever.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

starwind 5y ago

I'm a big fan of his most recent book Against the Grain

niyikiza 5y ago

I love the book. I was introduced to it by a brilliant review[0] by Scott Alexander. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...

downrightmike 5y ago

You might like SuperCrunchers https://www.amazon.com/Super-Crunchers-Thinking-Numbers-Smart/dp/0553384732 https://www.amazon.com/Super-Crunchers-Thinking-Numbers-Smar...

pyuser583 5y ago

I was really drawn to the topic by reading Origins of Political Order by F. Fukuyama.