Excerpts from Seeing Like a State

Below are some passages I highlighted in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. Don't look to me for a full book review. Scott Alexander and samzdat did the definitive book reviews. I consider that well-trodden grounds. So I'll just share some excerpts that I found interesting. It's hard to summarize, but Scott's overall thesis is that life is messy, interesting, and un-"legible". Governments attempt to shoehorn their citizens into neat categories and standardized methods of production to make taxation and conscription easier.

Strewn throughout the book are statements of incredibly naive vaguely-leftist anti-market sentiment, such as this:

A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardization ; in markets , money talks , not people.

It's offputting. If I make a big deal out of this, it's because these are so jarring and distracting from the flow of the book. It's like how David Friedman describes the book: there is a lot of great anarchist philosophy, but once in a while the author goes out of his way to remind the reader that he isn't one of those icky pro-market libertarians. Moving on.

A couple of passages on how units of measurement might not agree in different regions:

The pinte in eighteenth - century Paris , for example , was equivalent to . 93 liters , whereas in Seine - Montagne it was 1.99 liters and in Precy - sous - Thil , an astounding 3.33 liters .
Even when the unit of measurement — say , the bushel — was apparently agreed upon by all , the fun had just begun . Virtually everywhere in early modern Europe were endless micropolitics about how baskets might be adjusted through wear , bulging , tricks of weaving , moisture , the thickness of the rim , and so on . In some areas the local standards for the bushel and other units of measurement were kept in metallic form and placed in the care of a trusted official or else literally carved into the stone of a church or the town hall. Nor did it end there . How the grain was to be poured ( from shoulder height , which packed it somewhat , or from waist height ? ) , how damp it could be , whether the container could be shaken down , and , finally , if and how it was to be leveled off when full were subjects of long and bitter controversy .

The following reminded me of how producers will respond to price controls, by varying (usually lowering) the quality of their goods if they can't make a profit or break even at the dictated price:

Kula shows in remarkable detail how bakers , afraid to provoke a riot by directly violating the “ just price , ” managed nevertheless to manipulate the size and weight of the loaf to compensate to some degree for changes in the price of wheat and rye flour . 

Maybe this is something libertarians should be more attuned to. We might be stuck with some of the nasty consequences of bad economic policy even in the absence of government. Social norms can potentially be as oppressive and misguided as populist economic policy.

Some interesting details of property rights in medieval villages:

Trees that have been planted and any fruit they may bear are the property of the family who planted them , no matter where they are now growing . Fruit fallen from such trees , however , is the property of anyone who gathers it . When a family fells one of its trees or a tree is felled by a storm , the trunk belongs to the family , the branches to the immediate neighbors , and the “ tops ” ( leaves and twigs ) to any poorer villager who carries them off . Land is set aside for use or leasing out by widows with children and dependents of conscripted males . Usufruct rights to land and trees may be let to anyone in the village ; the only time they may be let to someone outside the village is if no one in the community wishes to claim them .

A comparison of state-crafted law versus village common law:

Modern freehold tenure is tenure that is mediated through the state and therefore readily decipherable only to those who have sufficient training and a grasp of the state statutes. Its relative simplicity is lost on those who cannot break the code , just as the relative clarity of customary tenure is lost on those who live outside the village.

On the difficulty of valuing a parcel of land:

Surely many things about a parcel of land are far more important than its surface area and the location of its boundaries . What kind of soil it has , what crops can be grown on it , how hard it is to work , and how close it is to a market are the first questions a potential buyer might ask . These are questions a tax assessor would also want to ask. From a capitalist perspective , the physical dimensions of land are beside the point.

On the unintended consequences of government attempts to "efficiently" measure and monitor taxable properties:

The door - and - window tax established in France under the Directory and abolished only in 1917 is a striking case in point . 91 Its originator must have reasoned that the number of windows and doors in a dwelling was proportional to the dwelling’s size . Thus a tax assessor need not enter the house or measure it but merely count the doors and windows . As a simple , workable formula , it was a brilliant stroke , but it was not without consequences . Peasant dwellings were subsequently designed or renovated with the formula in mind so as to have as few openings as possible . While the fiscal losses could be recouped by raising the tax per opening , the long - term effects on the health of the rural population lasted for more than a century.

Fewer windows means less ventilation, pretty awful when your main source of heat is a smokey fire and everything smells like horse poop.

On the central planner's obsession with carving all of reality into neat squares with perfect right triangles:

With a T - square and a triangle , finally , the municipal engineer could , without the slightest training as either an architect or a sociologist , ‘ plan ’ a metropolis , with its standard lots , its standard blocks , its standard width streets . . . . The very absence of more specific adaptation to landscape or to human purpose only increased , by its very indefiniteness , its general usefulness for exchange ”.

Scott does occasionally permit that some of these government-sponsored simplifications and categorizations might be useful:

The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta is a striking case in point . Its network of sample hospitals allowed it to first “ discover ” — in the epidemiological sense — such hitherto unknown diseases as toxic shock syndrome , Legionnaire’s disease , and AIDS . Stylized facts of this kind are a powerful form of state knowledge , making it possible for officials to intervene early in epidemics , to understand economic trends that greatly affect public welfare , to gauge whether their policies are having the desired effect , and to make policy with many of the crucial facts at hand. These facts permit discriminating interventions , some of which are literally lifesaving .

The description of statecraft as "internal colonization" rings true to me:

This caricature of society as a military parade ground is overdrawn , but the grain of truth that it embodies may help us understand the grandiose plans we will examine later. The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization , often glossed , as it is in imperial rhetoric , as a “ civilizing mission . ” The builders of the modern nation - state do not merely describe , observe , and map ; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation .

On the obvious utility of simplification:

To complain that a map lacks nuance and detail makes no sense unless it omits information necessary to its function . A city map that aspired to represent every traffic light , every pothole , every building , and every bush and tree in every park would threaten to become as large and as complex as the city that it depicted. And it certainly would defeat the purpose of mapping , which is to abstract and summarize . A map is an instrument designed for a purpose . We may judge that purpose noble or morally offensive , but the map itself either serves or fails to serve its intended use .

On Taylorism:

An American contribution came from the influential work of Frederick Taylor , whose minute decomposition of factory labor into isolable , precise , repetitive motions had begun to revolutionize the organization of factory work .

Something I learned from a The Great Courses series by Timothy Taylor (no relation, I'm sure), specifically the History of the U.S. Economy in the 20th Century. Lenin was obsessed with Taylorism. Just as communist regimes were generally obsessed with "efficiency" and economies of scale (even though they were unable to achieve said efficiencies or economies):

Lenin was not slow to appreciate how Taylorism on the factory floor offered advantages for the socialist control of production . Although he had earlier denounced such techniques , calling them the “ scientific extortion of sweat , ” by the time of the revolution he had become an enthusiastic advocate of systematic control as practiced in Germany .

On zoning:

The logic of this rigid segregation of functions is perfectly clear . It is far easier to plan an urban zone if it has just one purpose . It is far easier to plan the circulation of pedestrians if they do not have to compete with automobiles and trains . It is far easier to plan a forest if its sole purpose is to maximize the yield of furniture - grade timber . When two purposes must be served by a single facility or plan , the trade - offs become nettlesome .

It's hard to explain without the context of the book (or at least one of the two excellent reviews linked above), but central planning really killed the natural "street life" that grows organically in non-planned cities. 

A large part of the answer can be inferred from Le Corbusier’s second principle of the new urbanism : “ the death of the street . ” Brasília was designed to eliminate the street and the square as places for public life . Although the elimination of local barrio loyalties and rivalries may not have been planned , they were also a casualty of the new city .
There is a square . But what a square ! The vast , monumental Plaza of the Three Powers , flanked by the Esplanade of the Ministries , is of such a scale as to dwarf even a military parade. In comparison , Tiananmen Square and the Red Square are positively cozy and intimate . The plaza is best seen , as are many of Le Corbusier’s plans , from the air . If one were to arrange to meet a friend there , it would be rather like trying to meet someone in the middle of the Gobi desert . And if one did meet up with one’s friend , there would be nothing to do . Functional simplification demands that the rationale for the square as a public visiting room be designed out of Brasília . This plaza is a symbolic center for the state ; the only activity that goes on around it is the work of the ministries . Whereas the vitality of the older square depended on the mix of residence , commerce , and administration in its catchment area , those who work in the ministries must drive to their residences and then again to the separate commercial centers of each residential area .

So maybe it's not so bad to have an un-zoned city. You could have an apartment building, with a pub on the corner to serve all its residents, next to an office building where many of the residents work, and so on, and an interesting social dynamic can develop. All the elements of a normal person's life are all there in one place. People can bump into each other and interact spontaneously. Central planning potentially kills off this dynamic.

Most of those who have moved to Brasília from other cities are amazed to discover “ that it is a city without crowds . ” People complain that Brasília lacks the bustle of street life , that it has none of the busy street corners and long stretches of storefront facades that animate a sidewalk for pedestrians.

A description of a thriving "street-life":

Its streets were thronged with pedestrians throughout the day owing to the density of convenience and grocery stores , bars , restaurants , bakeries , and other shops . It was a place where people came to shop and stroll and to watch others shop and stroll . The shopkeepers had the most direct interest in watching the sidewalk : they knew many people by name , they were there all day , and their businesses depended on the neighborhood traffic . Those who came and went on errands or to eat or drink also provided eyes on the street , as did the elderly who watched the passing scene from their apartment windows .

I highlighted the following passage with the annotation "Private law enforcement!":

Jacobs recounts a revealing incident that occurred on her mixeduse street in Manhattan when an older man seemed to be trying to cajole an eight - or nine - year - old girl to go with him . As Jacobs watched this from her second - floor window , wondering if she should intervene , the butcher’s wife appeared on the sidewalk , as did the owner of the deli , two patrons of a bar , a fruit vendor , and a laundryman , and several other people watched openly from their tenement windows , ready to frustrate a possible abduction . No “ peace officer ” appeared or was necessary. 

More in the same vein:

Jacobs explains that when a friend used their apartment while she and her husband were away or when they didn’t want to wait up for a late - arriving visitor , they would leave the key to their apartment with the deli owner , who had a special drawer for such keys and who held them for the friends. She noted that every nearby mixeduse street had someone who played the same role : a grocer , candy - store owner , barber , butcher , dry cleaner , or bookshop owner . This is one of the many public functions of private business .

Is this what bad zoning is depriving us of? Geez, it's worse than I thought. I read an article or blog post every week or so about how bad zoning is "destroying property values." Maybe that's a very dry and dehumanized euphemism for "destroying bonds between human beings."

What’s more , Jacobs argues , the formal public institutions of order function successfully only when they are undergirded by this rich , informal public life . An urban space where the police are the sole agents of order is a very dangerous place .

Emphasis mine. Attaboy, Scott!

In addition , a high volume of foot traffic stimulated by an animated and colorful neighborhood has economic effects on commerce and property values , which are hardly trivial . The popularity of a district and its economic success go hand in hand . Once created , such places will attract activities that most planners would have specially sequestered elsewhere .

On a zoned restaurant versus a mixeduse district restaurant:

Such a restaurant must make virtually all its profit between 10 A.M . and 3 P.M . , the hours when office workers take their midmorning coffee breaks and lunch breaks before commuting home at the end of the day , leaving the street silent . The restaurant in a mixeduse district , on the other hand , has potential clients passing by throughout the day and into the night . It may therefore stay open for more hours , benefiting not only its own business...

Like monocropped forests , single - purpose districts , although they may initially catch a boom , are especially susceptible to stress . The diverse neighborhood is more sustainable. ...

As a scientific matter it reduced the number of unknowns for which the planner had to find a solution . Like simultaneous equations in algebra , too many unknowns in urban planning rendered any solution problematic or else required heroic assumptions .

Loved this:

Just as it saves a prison trouble and money if all prisoners wear uniforms of the same material , color , and size , every concession to diversity is likely to entail a corresponding increase in administrative time and budgetary cost .

Another intrusion of Scott's market-bashing, once again in the middle of celebrating the emergent order that comes with a little freedom:

[Jacobs] is no free - market libertarian , however ; she understands clearly that capitalists and speculators are , willy - nilly , transforming the city with their commercial muscle and political influence .

Scott doesn't seem to understand that "capitalism" is a series of consensual transactions. The capitalists can't do anything without the consent of the city dwellers.

Then he recites a brilliant quote on the folly of central planning:

To illustrate the diversity of urban life , Jacobs lists more than a dozen uses which have been served over the years by the center for the arts in Louisville : stable , school , theater , bar , athletic club , blacksmith’s forge , factory , warehouse , artists studio . She then asks , rhetorically , “ Who could anticipate or provide for such a succession of hopes and services ? ” Her answer is simple : “ Only an
unimaginative man would think he could ; only an arrogant man would want to . ”

But then he retreats again to naive anti-capitalism:

The analogy to the division of labor in modern capitalist production has implications roughly parallel to those of the military metaphor . Both , for example , require authoritarian methods and central control .

My annotation says "Scott really misses the mark here." He just doesn't seem to understand that these "capitalist power structures" are consensual. Sure, someone working at a big company is part of a hierarchy, and his bosses and his bosses bosses have "power" over him in a vague sense. But his continued employment is voluntary. Almost every organization we join entails a surrender of rights and an agreement to abide by certain norms of behavior, be it an employer, church, social club, gym, or what have you. What makes these institutions useful is that everyone else also agrees to those restrictions. That is fundamentally what makes them so attractive and why people end up joining them.

On revolution and the prospect of counter-revolution (emphasis mine):

After seizing state power , the victors have a powerful interest in moving the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and schoolbooks as quickly as possible , lest the people decide to repeat the experience.  A schematic account highlighting the decisiveness of a handful of leaders reinforces their legitimacy ; its emphasis on cohesion , uniformity , and central purpose makes it seem inevitable and therefore , it is to be hoped , permanent .

On the terrible incentives of communism:

Actually meeting a quota , they knew from bitter experience , only raised the ante for the next round of procurements . In this respect collective farmers were in a more precarious situation than industrial workers , who still received their wages and ration cards whether or not the factory met its quota . For the kolkhozniki , however , meeting the quota might mean starvation . Indeed , the great famine of 1933 - 34 can only be called a collectivization and procurement famine . Those who were tempted to make trouble risked running afoul of a more grisly quota : the one for kulaks and enemies of the state .

For all his capitalism-bashing, the man sees through communism. But then as he starts making sense again he says stuff like this:

The logic was not unlike the management scheme at McDonald’s : modular , similarly designed units producing similar products , according to a common formula and work routine . Units can easily be duplicated across the landscape , and the inspectors coming to assess their operations enter legible domains which they can evaluate with a single checklist .

The comparison totally misses the mark. If McDonald's fails to attract customers and make a decent rate of return for all its standardizing and organizing, it goes out of business. It dies a dignified death. Communism limped along for over half a century, after using brutal methods to force people into compliance. Maybe you can kind of squint and see a similarity between McDonald's and Soviet Russia's grand designs, but one is subject to a very strong selection pressure and the other is not. One requires the willing and continued participation of millions of human beings to persist, and the other does not.

This part reminded me of a recent article by Bryan Caplan:

The state managed to get its hands on enough grain to push rapid industrialization , even while contending with staggering inefficiencies , stagnant yields , and ecological devastation . 

See the graphs of "production frontiers" in the Caplan piece.

Finally Scott offers a few nice words about centralized planning:

And it is apparent that centralized high - modernist solutions can be the most efficient , equitable , and satisfactory for many tasks . Space exploration , the planning of transportation networks , flood control , airplane manufacturing , and other endeavors may require huge organizations minutely coordinated by a few experts . The control of epidemics or of pollution requires a center staffed by experts receiving and digesting standard information from hundreds of reporting units . On the other hand , these methods seem singularly maladroit at such tasks as putting a really good meal on the table or performing surgery .

He identifies true public goods in his list of things that might be well achieved by central planning, and private goods (food and medicine) in his list of things that aren't suited to central planning. Somewhere inside James Scott, there is a decent economist.

What happens when people object to having their lives centrally planned?

Force and brutality was used . The police were the ones empowered together with some government officials . For example at Katanazuza in Kalinzi , … the police had to take charge physically . In some areas where peasants refused to pack their belongings and board the Operation lorries and trucks , their houses were destroyed through burning or pulling them down . House destruction was witnessed in Nyange village . It became a routine order of the day .

Oh, yeah.

I thought this following passage was beautiful. Parisian taxi drivers have spontaneously learned "efficient rule-breaking." If one were to literally follow all the rules and regulations, nothing would be done. They can exploit this with a "work-to-rule" strike:

The premise behind what are tellingly called work - to - rule strikes is a case in point . When Parisian taxi drivers want to press a point on the municipal authorities about regulations or fees , they sometimes launch a work - to - rule strike . It consists merely in following meticulously all the regulations in the Code routier and thereby bringing traffic throughout central Paris.

Here is a case where Scott blames capitalism for something that is really the fault of bad public policy,  namely farm subsidies:

One of the basic sources of increasing uniformity in crops arises from the intense commercial pressures to maximize profits in a competitive mass market . Thus the effort to increase planting densities...

To his credit, Scott is very critical of government policy leading to the same uniformity throughout the book.

Throughout the long section on agriculture and the folly of large, industrialized "monocrops," I was left thinking, "Aren't these crops feeding the world? Didn't large megafarms with row-crops lead to massive labor savings? Didn't it allow us to feed a growing world population on a shrinking acreage?" He offers a rare concession:

This is not the place to attempt to demonstrate the superiority of polyculture over monoculture , nor am I qualified to do so .

My annotation reads "There's the hedge I was looking for." It's a simple one-liner, but in my opinion it undercuts an entire chapter that is far too critical of monoculture. 

A closely related question , which we will address in the next chapter , is why so many successful changes in agricultural practices and production have been pioneered , not by the state , but by the autonomous initiative of cultivators themselves .

I kind of wish he would acknowledge that large organizations can be innovative and efficient and pro-social, just as autonomous cultivators can. 

There are a few great excerpts on the hard-won knowledge gained through experience:

In the days when a case of diphtheria in town was still an occasion for quarantining the patient at home , a doctor was taking a young medical student along with him on his rounds . When they had been admitted to the front hall of a quarantined house but before they had seen the patient , the older man paused and said , “ Stop . Smell the odor ! Never forget this smell ; this is the smell of a house with diphtheria . ”

I laughed out loud at the following:

Chinese recipes , it has always amused me , often contain the following instruction : “ Heat the oil until it is almost smoking . ” The recipes assume that the cook has made enough mistakes to know what oil looks like just before it begins smoking . The rule of thumb for maple syrup and for oil are , by definition , the rules of experience .

The "almost smoking" thing amused me so much I re-read it several times. 

There is a wonderful section spanning two or three pages about an ant infesting a prized mango-tree, and the locals trying to introduce a rival ant species to kill off the infestation:

He then placed the egg - infested fronds against the mango tree and observed the ensuing week - long Armageddon . Several neighbors , many of them skeptical , and their children followed the fortunes of the ant war closely . Although smaller by half or more , the black ants finally had the weight of numbers to prevail against the red ants and gain possession of the ground at the base of the mango tree . As the black ants were not interested in the mango leaves or fruits while the fruits were still on the tree , the crop was saved .
Mat Isa [a village elder] made it clear that such skill in practical entomology was quite widespread , at least among his older neighbors , and that people remembered something like this strategy having worked once or twice in the past .

So we have an improvised solution to a rare problem, requiring knowledge from several different disciplines. Not necessarily the kind of thing you can "centrally plan" for.

Another atrocious case of conflating capitalist profit-making with government taxation:

The reduction or , more utopian still , the elimination of mētis and the local control it entails are preconditions , in the case of the state , of administrative order and fiscal appropriation and , in the case of the large capitalist firm , of worker discipline and profit. 

Really, the capitalism-bashing doesn't ruin the otherwise excellent book, but passages like this one were kind of jarring and out-of-place.

I think in this passage he is trying to paint the picture of an anarchosocialist utopia. Independent artisans perfecting their craft and selling their wares.

To the degree that efficient production could still be organized on an artisanal basis ( such as early woolen manufacturing and silk ribbon weaving , according to Marglin ) , to that degree was it difficult for the capitalist to appropriate the profits of a dispersed craft population .

It's funny. I had just written this post, where I said:

Suppose we started out in a socialist utopia. Independent, self-employed artisans selling their wares to willing customers, who are themselves all self-employed artisans. This wouldn't last long. Some of them would realize they'd be more prosperous if they banded together and realized the efficiencies of division of labor. Before long, they'd realize they could hire some highly skilled managers to organize this division of labor. A highly skilled boss with a grand vision for enhanced productivity, plus a track record of delivering on his promises, would make them all much richer. They'd have to pay him a cut of their sales, but with the added revenue gained through organizational efficiency it would be easy to finance this payment.

 At the time I thought some readers might scoff thinking my description of socialist utopia is a straw-man. Then a few days later I saw the above line in Seeing Like a State. Maybe I pass an Ideological Turing Test on this one?

So that's a taste. Read the book! It's worth you're time, if you're into this kind of thing. Even if you've already read Scott Alexander's lengthy review, there are themes and details you will have missed without the actual book.