Legibility

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Legibility /ˌlɛdʒɪˈbɪlɪti/ (n.)

I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft. The premodern.state was, in many crucial respects, par­tially blind; it knew precious little about its subjects, their wealth, their land-holdings and yields, their location, their very identity. It lacked anything like a detailed “map” of its terrain and its people. It lacked,for the most part, a measure, a metric, that would allow it to “trans­late” what it knew into a common standard necessary for a synoptic view. As a result, its interventions were often crude and self-defeating.

—James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State

See also

• Deep dive
• James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State