James C. Scott at Cato Unbound
James C. Scott is one of the great thinkers of our time. This month at Cato Unbound, we’re doing a retrospective on his book Seeing Like a State. It’s a monograph whose influence has been felt all across the political spectrum — particularly, perhaps surprisingly, in the Austrian School of economics and its daughter movement, Masonomics.
Though Scott has termed himself a “crude Marxist, with the emphasis on ‘crude,’” I’ve always seen his work as falling somewhere between Jane Jacobs and Michel Foucault. It’s got a lot to offer free-marketers, Marxists, anarchists, urbanists, ruralists, and just about everyone else. (His book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia is great too — possibly the best nonfiction I’ve read this year.)
Scott’s Cato Unbound lead essay, “The Trouble with the View from Above” reviews several of the key themes from Seeing Like a State. Economists Don Boudreaux and Brad DeLong will comment in the coming week, along with tech-writer-turned-urbanist Timothy Lee.
This is fantastic. I’m really glad to see that others are clued into the importance of Seeing Like A State. Where can I get a copy of the monograph?Report
@John Carney,
Amazon has it, among others.Report
Seeing Like a State is where it’s at. I’d note, perhaps unnecessarily, that the subtitle is “How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,” not “Why Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Fail.”Report
@Michael Drew,
I understand Prof. Scott to be an anarchist. Presumably “certain schemes” refers to “above all, the government ones.” Report
@Jason Kuznicki, Presumably, huh? Not, “Some of the the government ones, but not others, and some of the private ones, but not others”?Report
@Michael Drew,
No, that’s actually exactly what he’s saying. He makes it quite clear at the end of the essay. Corporations are by no means immune to the problems he cites. I agree wholeheartedly.
I’d suggest you read it.Report
@Jason Kuznicki, I’m more making the point about the “not others” part.Report
@Michael Drew, I agree the book is excellent. My interpretation was that its extremely hard for government schemes to improve the human condition to succeed, but I don’t think the critique is limited to government. Many private sector schemes are doomed due to the same problem – the extreme difficulty for high level actors to understand detailed, local conditions.Report
@Simon K, cue up, What have the Romans every done for us sketch.Report
@greginak, What, you mean apart from the roads, the sewers, irrigation, medicine, health, wine, public baths, law, and, of course, peace?Report
@Simon K,
Where I’d twist the libertarian knife — which I know Scott wouldn’t do — is to say that under a proper, non-corrupted system of laws, when a corporation gets so big that it starts seeing like a state, it will tend to be out-competed by smaller corporations.
Governments of course don’t have that sort of competition, which is why things are a lot more difficult for them.
And yes, I realize that “a proper, non-corrupted system of laws” is doing a lot of work here. It’s an enormous problem to keep the state from working to the advantage of one corporation or another.Report
@Jason Kuznicki,
I cannot imagine any set of laws which would lead to that scenario.
Which is to say, that no, under any system with corporations, some would get that large in the first place because they are fundamentally more efficient than dozens of smaller companies doing the same thing.Report
@JosephFM, like GM?Report
@Jaybird, Yeah, Jay,. I am seriously rolling my eyes at you right now.
No, obviously not like GM. Like, I dunno, Apple. Yes, they wouldn’t exist without state intervention either in the form of good colleges, but…Report
@JosephFM, I was just thinking of a counter-example.
That’s certainly a large company (that should have been out-competed by other, smaller companies!) that surfed a wave of laws to…
Well, I don’t want to call it “success”…Report
@Jaybird,
It seems clear to me there is a continuum from particular to general in government scale-tipping. Forking cash over to a single company directly is about as clear a case of favoritism as you can find. Establishing a copyright regime favorable to a wide class of corporations but not to others is somewhere in the middle. Establishing a public education system that subsidizes college education seems on the far end of generality to me, making favoritism a weak argument against such a system.Report
@Jaybird,
But that wasn’t the argument I was making. I was arguing that we’d still have at least some really big companies even absent specific government favoritism, not that there aren’t obvious cases of large companies that wouldn’t exist and couldn’t compete without it. Obviously there are. I’m just arguing that GMs are not the rule.
Though Jason’s point on copyright is well-taken. That’s a big distortion on the market too, obviously.Report
@JosephFM,
Companies routinely rotate out of the Fortune 500. Perhaps some of them are responding to difficulties of the type Scott identifies.
The theory of the firm and of firm size is complex, and Scott might just be offering a new twist on it. I’m not entirely sure. But it would be interesting to see what he makes of the literature in that area.Report
@Jason Kuznicki, “It’s an enormous problem to keep the state from working to the advantage of one corporation or another.”
Ya think?Report
@Jason Kuznicki,
It’s doing a lot of work, but it’s possible with diligence and the sense of urgency that freedom and economic survival demand — it’s not as if we have other choices — the system we have will destroy the country, or create one that the majority is not going to like, as it becomes more and more powerful and destructive.Report
With Scott’s discussion of local road-naming practices, I’m reminded of all my friend from Belfast has told me about Catholic place names and Protestant place names in his hometown, how naming acts as both shibboleth of the oppressed and tool of the oppressor.Report
Whoa. That essay blew my mind.Report