Seeing Like A State In 2025

In his book, Seeing Like A State (1998), James C. Scott gives ample historical evidence and philosophical insight into specific examples of nation states inappropriately planning and reconfiguring (even destroying) natural resources and local human populations and their cultures. Scott finds that what underlies it all is a need for legibility. The failed forestation techniques of Germany in the 1800s, the creation of totally planned cities like Brasilia, and the general transformation of rural populations to further the states' ends are all important examples. In each case, the state reconfigured things in such a way as to make it more convenient and conducive to state administration. That is, to make their domain more legible for administration. Hence, the title "seeing like a state".

Also in each case, plans went awry and significant unforeseen consequences ensued. In all cases there was a lack of foresight and knowledge, and plenty of hubris. In some cases, such as those involving acculturation and tearing apart of rural populations, there was lack of care or even outright racism. Scott elucidates much. The book is a compendium of important historical lessons and I highly recommend reading it.

The challenge I see with Seeing Like A State is that it frequently compares planned, scientific, and centrally organized state efforts to so-called "natural" developments. While the examples he provides seem like stark comparisons, Scott elides an appeal to nature fallacy that is quite a bit murkier than his black and white examples would suggest.

The appeal to nature fallacy is an informal logical fallacy that appears frequently today. It shows up in simplistic ways, such as when an anti-vaccination advocate proclaims that leaving measles infections to chance will produce natural immunity in a population, therefore vaccines are unnecessary. The implication is that so-called natural immunity is superior to vaccinated immunity.

On the other hand, scientists who study vaccination and immunity would quickly point out the harms and risks associated with the different approaches. Namely that "natural immunity" would increase the likelihood of epidemic and cause many deaths (approximately one in a thousand cases on average lead to death, although the rate is higher in certain populations such as small children and the elderly). So-called natural immunity being essentially just "survival of the fittest". Compared to the vanishingly small chance of an adverse reaction to the vaccine (the MMR vaccine is actually one of the safest vaccines with no deaths known to be directly caused by it in non-immune compromised individuals), vaccination is the clear winner. It literally saves lives.

Vaccination also costs significantly less than allowing the disease to spread. Natural immunity proponents often ignore the costs of doctor visits, hospitalization, and outbreak response efforts. There can be long term effects of measles infection as well, such as mental disability caused by brain swelling. Whether natural immunity is more "natural" than vaccination is besides the point when the facts are considered.

Now that we see how it's easy to be led astray with an appeal to nature, let's look at how Scott makes this same fallacy. Take planned cities for example. Scott brings up high modernist visions for rational city planning and compares them with Jacobs' critiques, all from the early 20th century. In Scott's telling, the failure in high modernist visions is that they simplify a city's functioning without regard to the multifaceted lives of its population. The implication is that if the city were instead allowed to develop naturally, without centralized planning and reconfiguration, as in Jacobs' street-level critique, then it would function not only more harmoniously for residents, but would also be more productive.

However, this account offers little more than positive evidence for what Political Scientists have long referred to as incremental policy change. Whether a city is more or less centrally planned has important implications and trade offs, as Scott makes abundantly clear, but such planning in general can hardly be critiqued on that basis alone. For example, how much central planning constitutes a "natural" amount? By setting up the false dichotomy of central planning versus natural growth, Scott takes our attention away from the fact that he honestly just doesn't have much more to say on the topic. His historical analysis is excellent, but applying it directly to the present day doesn't always make sense. Unless we are to believe that we haven't learned at all from the past failures of central planning. I don't think that's true.

New York City's wide streets allow large ambulances and fire trucks to pass unimpeded. This is a lot different than some of Seoul's narrow alley ways that have long histories dating back before the advent of cars. This is a trade off and also relates to historical contingency, but it's not even clear that one is better than the other without more data and the context of how people live in each city. Indeed, New York City is known as one of the most walkable cities in the world and boasts a public transit system that far exceeds that of any other US city. The fact that it also has many wide streets doesn't tell us much. Seoul also has an extensive public transit system that rivals New York City's, if not surpasses it by some measures, but how much central planning has either city had? Can we easily say that central planning in one city makes it better or worse than the other?

Consider that early in Scott's book he repeatedly refers to the idea that a map that contained every detail of a city would be as large as the city itself. Or that he insists that large scale government plans must diverge from reality through simplification, which then leads government to try to make reality fit its simplifications. In his conclusion, on page 347 James C. Scott quotes Theodore M. Porter's Trust in Numbers: "The quantitative technologies used to investigate social and economic life work best if the world they aim to describe can be remade in their image." However, these statements are only true in certain contexts. A two dimensional map written by hand would likely have to be very large indeed in order to "contain every detail of a city". Google maps, on the other hand, shows us that it is possible to represent a city in very great detail on very small devices, our phones!

At the end of his book he pays lip service to incremental policy change and the importance of practical knowledge, which is a kind of knowledge that is difficult or impossible to communicate to others. However, we no longer live in the 1990s. Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" has come and gone and we now live in a truly different reality both politically and technologically. More specifically, a state may no longer need to remake a population and landscape to fits its image.

For example, what if a city weren't planned at all, but allowed to grow and change with only the most minimal state reconfiguration. The only caveat: tiny, cheap, nearly invisible sensors must be embedded into all buildings and products and public spaces built from now on. As buildings are replaced and repairs include the new sensors, the state can track it all using machine learning and big data techniques. This would be the early 21st century version of legibility analogous to high modernism's visual simplicity and large scale centralized planning. It's a vision of a virtual sort of centralization, that could be accommodated with little disruption to residents and fewer costs.

Scott's focus on high modernism and the past leads him to look at a single comparison for the present: the centrally planned city versus the unplanned "natural" city. His conclusion: we can't control something as complex as a city. No planning expert can know all the things residents of the city could know about how to live in it (again, this is what Scott refers to as practical knowledge). From that perspective, a city should be allowed to grow and change naturally, not through large scale planning.

A similarly narrow-minded focus can be found in Muthukrishna's Theory of Everyone, except his focus is on the future rather than the past. In fact, he is so focused on the future that he actually makes the case for creating economic innovation centers that are planned, advanced "smart" cities, run like tech startups and based on decentralized autonomous organizations, a kind of blockchain technology. Unlike Scott, who is advocating against planning by using an appeal to nature, Muthukrishna is advocating for centralized planning by making a similar appeal: to Muthukrishna, we do know enough about human intelligence and economic innovation that we can plan an entire city to maximize productivity. Interestingly, in Muthukrishna's vision some aspects of the surveillance and control technologies are not centralized, but decentralized. Although in this context such distinctions become superfluous, because when code is law and your city is a company you work for, it's not clear to me whether residents will be left with more freedom or less.

I think it says something about our current times that just twenty seven years ago Scott could be so focused on the perils of centralized planning and a mere twenty five years later Muthukrishna could be so open to an all encompassing surveillance state where programming code is law. It remains to be seen if information technology and all the current associated buzz words will translate into a revolution in government administration. Instead, they may merely represent new incremental policy changes or perhaps some new ways to digitally leverage hitherto purely practical knowledge. Still, that could make new things legible to the state, or to tech companies, or to individuals, or all of the above.

If Scott is correct about the importance of practical knowledge, then fine-tuned language models, or some similar future advancement in machine learning, really could revolutionize how a future state sees its domain. And we should be highly skeptical of any such plans derived therefrom. Just like with vaccination, we should demand significant evidence weighed against possible outcomes. What Scott's appeal to nature does is create a false dichotomy between central planning and nature. This false dichotomy is an easy target for techno/crypto libertarians like Muthukrishna. However, his startup cities also present a false dichotomy: either we maximally decentralize regulation and law or we fail to innovate. In the end, we find that both approaches sound more utopian, or even dystopian, than realistic ways to govern.

You can find my review of Muthukrishna's book A Theory of Everyone at AIPT Science here: https://aiptcomics.com/2025/01/10/theory-of-everyone-muthukrishna-econ/ or my longer version of the review on my blog here: https://world.hey.com/cipher/theory-of-everyone-by-michael-muthukrishna-a-book-review-f34a3e18