Book Review and Analysis: “Seeing Like a State”

David Zetland, “The one-handed economist

“Sometimes you just want the answer”

Review: “Seeing Like a State,” The one-handed economist

I read this 1998 book by James C. Scott (1936-2024) while I was in graduate school (maybe 20 years ago). I loved it then and — after re-reading it recently — I love it now. This is one of my top 10 books of all time.

I’ve also enjoyed his Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Two Cheers for Anarchism (2012).

Now I typically paste excerpts of books that I review, as a means of showing you the author’s insights, but my highlights run to 50 pages (!), so I’m not going to do that.

What the book is about: It complements the insights of Hayek, van Mises, Douglass North and the Ostroms, i.e., that no one person can possess all information, which means that it’s impossible to summarize information in a useful (actionable) way. This “Knowledge Problem” is why markets work better than centralized planners, but also why democracy works better than authoritarianism. It explains why institutions (“the rules of the game”) differ across time and space. Those institutions reflect the interactions of local conditions and culture, outside forces, and a long history of learning by doing (read The Secret of Our Success). Scott contributes a series of examples, wonderfully annotated, of how the State’s top-down (“high modernist”) perspective is not just inefficient but anti-human. NB: He is not an uncritical fan of free markets as Hayek and Friedman are.

Scott: High-modernist faith was no respecter of traditional political boundaries; it could be found across the political spectrum from left to right but particularly among those who wanted to use state power to bring about huge, utopian changes in people’s work habits, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview… In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for largescale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build.

What is high modernism, then? It is best conceived as a strong (one might even say muscle-bound) version of the beliefs in scientific and technical progress that were associated with industrialization in Western Europe and in North America from roughly 1830 until World War I. At its center was a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws. High modernism is thus a particularly sweeping vision of how the benefits of technical and scientific progress might be applied — usually through the state — in every field of human activity.

High modernism implies a truly radical break with history and tradition. Insofar as rational thought and scientific laws could provide a single answer to every empirical question, nothing ought to be taken for granted. All human habits and practices that were inherited and hence not based on scientific reasoning — from the structure of the family and patterns of residence to moral values and forms of production-would have to be reexamined and redesigned. The structures of the past were typically the products of myth, superstition, and religious prejudice. It followed that scientifically designed schemes for production and social life would be superior to received tradition. The sources of this view are deeply authoritarian. If a planned social order is better than the accidental, irrational deposit of historical practice, two conclusions follow. Only those who have the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order are fit to rule in the new age. Further, those who through retrograde ignorance refuse to yield to the scientific plan need to be educated to its benefits or else swept aside.

The idea of a root-and-branch, rational engineering of entire social orders in creating realizable utopias is a largely twentieth-century phenomenon. And a range of historical soils have seemed particularly favorable for the flourishing of high-modernist ideology. Those soils include crises of state power, such as wars and economic depressions, and circumstances in which a state’s capacity for relatively unimpeded planning is greatly enhanced, such as the revolutionary conquest of power and colonial rule.

Some examples: Street names so the government can find you (military service) and tax your property. Last names so the government can tell people apart. “Scientific” forests that are easy to conceive but fail in the face of natural pressures (read Priests and Programmers). City after city that’s been ruined for people as it’s been rebuilt for cars. Standard units of measure that made it easier to tax crops.

Context: The goal, always, was to allow the center to rule the periphery. The tragedy, often, was harmful misrule. The poor got poorer and the rich (relatively) richer, but net prosperity and resiliency declined. We need to keep this wasteful dynamic in mind as the rich and powerful try to protect themselves from climate chaos. They are likely to “defend” in ways that harm us while failing to help themselves — just as in the end of “Don’t Look Up” and Musk’s idea of letting Earth burn while he and his many children colonize Mars.

Some interesting (not?) surprises: Lenin and Courbusier, respectively, tried to reshape political and urban life to their will. Rosa Luxembourg and Jane Jacobs opposed them. Gender is relevant here, in the sense of men sometimes taking a more abstract view and women taking a more grounded view.

This “Seeing” (rather, blindness) is everywhere: The vocabulary used to organize nature typically betrays the overriding interests of its human users. In fact, utilitarian discourse replaces the term “nature” with the term “natural resources,” focusing on those aspects of nature that can be appropriated for human use… Highly valued animals become “game” or “livestock,” while those animals that compete with or prey upon them become “predators” or “varmints.

What does it overlook? Metis — the local unique knowledge that is more experienced than explained (read Shop Craft as Soul Class) — which throws away our wisdom (see Secrets of Our Success, above).

Scott: The skills of metis may well involve rules of thumb, but such rules are largely acquired through practice (often in formal apprenticeship) and a developed feel or knack for strategy. Metis resists simplification into deductive principles which can successfully be transmitted through book learning, because the environments in which it is exercised are so complex and nonrepeatable that formal procedures of rational decision making are impossible to apply. In a sense, metis lies in that large space between the realm of genius, to which no formula can apply, and the realm of codified knowledge, which can be learned by rote

Knowing how and when to apply the rules of thumb in a concrete situation is the essence of metis. The subtleties of application are important precisely because metis is most valuable in settings that are mutable, indeterminant (some facts are unknown), and particular.  Although we shall return to the question of indeterminacy and change, here I want to explore further the localness and particularity of metis. In seamanship, the difference between the more general knowledge of navigation and the more particular knowledge of piloting is instructive.

A mechanical application of generic rules that ignores these particularities is an invitation to practical failure, social disillusionment, or most likely both. The generic formula does not and cannot supply the local knowledge that will allow a successful translation of the necessarily crude general understandings to successful, nuanced, local applications. The more general the rules, the more they require in the way of translation if they are to be locally successful. Nor is it simply a matter of the captain or navigator realizing at what point his rules of thumb are inferior to the intimate local knowledge of the pilot. Rather, it is a matter of recognizing that the rules of thumb themselves are largely a codification derived from the actual practices of sailing and piloting.

Like language, the metis or local knowledge necessary to the successful practice of farming or pastoralism is probably best learned by daily practice and experience. Like serving a long apprenticeship, growing up in a household where that craft is continually practiced often represents the most satisfactory preparation for its exercise. This kind of socialization to a trade may favor the conservation of skills rather than daring innovation. But any formula that excludes or suppresses the experience, knowledge, and adaptability of metis risks incoherence and failure; learning to speak coherent sentences involves far more than merely learning the rules of grammar.

[Some] economists are also guilty: Risk, providing it could be assigned a known probability, became a fact like any other, whereas uncertainty (where the underlying probabilities are not known) still lay outside techne’s reach [techne, the opposite of metis, is logical codification]. The intellectual “career” of risk and uncertainty is indicative of many fields of inquiry in which the realm of analysis was reformulated and narrowed to exclude elements that could not be quantified and measured but could only be judged. [I talk about this all the time.] Better put, techniques were devised to isolate and domesticate those aspects of key variables that might be expressed in numbers (a nation’s wealth by gross national product, public opinion by poll numbers, values by psychological inventories). Neoclassical economics, for example, has undergone a transformation along these lines. Consumer preferences are first taken as a given and then counted, in order to bracket taste as a major source of uncertainty. Invention and entrepreneurial activity are treated as exogenous and cast outside the perimeter of the discipline as too intractable to submit to measurement and prediction. The discipline has incorporated calculable risk while exiling those topics where genuine uncertainty prevails (ecological dangers, shifts in taste). As Stephen Marglin shows, “the emphasis on self-interest, calculation, and maximization in economics” are classical examples of “self-evident postulates” and reflect “more an ideological commitment to the superiority of episteme than a serious attempt to unravel the complexities and mysteries of human motivation and behavior.”

Borrowing the prestige of scientific language and methods from the biological sciences, many social scientists have envisioned and tried to effect an objective, precise, and strictly replicable set of techniques — a set of techniques that gives impartial and quantitative answers. Thus most forms of formal policy analysis and cost-benefit analysis manage, through heroic assumptions and an implausible metric for comparing incommensurate variables, to produce a quantitative answer to thorny questions. They achieve impartiality, precision, and replicability at the cost of accuracy. [These dynamics define the tension in “The Bet” between Simons and Ehrlich (more, more, more). Also see The Prophet and the Wizard.]

What to do in an over-centralized world? Stephen Marglin has put their problem succinctly: If “the only certainty about the future is that the future is uncertain, if the only sure thing is that we are in for surprises, then no amount of planning, no amount of prescription, can deal with the contingencies that the future will reveal.” Thus: 

1. Take small steps
2. Favor reversibility
3. Plan on surprises
4. Plan on human inventiveness

My one-handed conclusion: Everyone should read this book, to appreciate metis, worry about techne, and defend their local institutions against centralized “efficiency.” FIVE STARS.

Here are all my reviews.