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[[File:North Korea.jpg|450px|thumb|center|A weekly [[stakeholder]] work-stream check-in call, yesterday.]] | [[File:North Korea.jpg|450px|thumb|center|A weekly [[stakeholder]] work-stream check-in call, yesterday.]] | ||
}}{{br|Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed}} — {{author|James C. Scott}}<br> | }}{{br|Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed}} — {{author|James C. Scott}}<br> | ||
Seeing Like a State | This one goes to the top of JC’s 2020 lockdown re-reads. Okay, it was published in 1998, so we’re cottoning on a bit late — and while it addresses only the “high modernism” of modern government, the read-across to the capitalist market economy, and beyond that into the modern large corporate — are you reasding, boss?<ref>Boss: “Yes. Now, [[get your coat]].”<r/ef>shrieks from every page. These are profound ideas we should all stop and recognise, but — being, well, citizens of a “prostrate civil society” — either we can’t or we won’t. | ||
{{br|Seeing Like a State}} is a ''tour de force'' — I can’t believe I actually said that in a book review, but there it is — against the will to bureaucracy, and takes as its thesis how well-intended patrician governorship can, in specific circumstances, lead to utter disaster. The examples Scott cites in his book are legion including many that are familiar (the Soviet Five Year Plan for example). One could, and some have, criticised Scott for being anecdotal in his approach: there is no question he has selected the best examples to illustrate its thesis, and it must therefore suffer from confirmation bias. | |||
But that said, Scott’s thesis, when set out, is so ''familiar'', so plausible and its exhortations so wise, that it is hard to be bothered by his lack of empirical rigour. Scott is providing a counter-narrative, and it is useful in itself. | But that said, Scott’s thesis, when set out, is so ''familiar'', so plausible and its exhortations so wise, that it is hard to be bothered by his lack of empirical rigour. Scott is providing a counter-narrative, and it is useful in itself. | ||