Astral Codex Ten

James Scott

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James Scott

Article

James Scott is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between March 09, 2021 and December 01, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “thread that runs from Edmund Burke to James Scott”; “especially James Scott’s Seeing Like A State”; “if this is starting to remind you of James Scott”. It most often appears alongside Seeing Like A State, Britain, Germany.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: March 09, 2021
  • Last seen: December 01, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Consequences Of Radical Reform
March 09, 2021 · Original source
The thread that runs from Edmund Burke to James Scott and Seeing Like A State goes: systems that evolve organically are well-adapted to their purpose. Cultures, ancient traditions, and long-lasting institutions contain irreplaceable wisdom. If some reformer or technocrat who thinks he's the smartest guy in the room sweeps them aside and replaces them with some clever theory he just came up with, he'll make everything much worse. That's why collective farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses worked worse than ordinary people doing ordinary things.
Inline links: Seeing Like A State
Book Review: Antifragile
March 23, 2021 · Original source
I've previously written about a cluster/strain/school of books including those by G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Heinrich, and especially James Scott's Seeing Like A State. Taleb's Antifragile belongs in the same space.
Inline links: previously written about
Book Review: How Asia Works
June 28, 2021 · Original source
(China messed up by later switching to large-scale collective farming, which is the opposite of what you want at this developmental stage. And if this is starting to remind you of James Scott, remember that his day job is studying Asian peasant farmers.)
Inline links: James Scott
Highlights From The Comments On "How Asia Works"
July 01, 2021 · Original source
Pre-reform land tenures in most places probably resembled the utterly illegible traditional land tenure systems James Scott described in "Seeing Like a State", where the landlord might "own" the property, but the tenants had a complex mix of vested rights to the land and obligations to the landlord. These systems probably worked decently well within the context of the societies in which they developed, but they tend lock those involved into the social and economic structure whose assumptions are baked into the land tenure system, and their illegibility means nobody has the power or the incentives to improve or restructure them for the better.
Freehold tenure, on the other hand, gives whoever the freeholder is both the power and the incentives to maximize the economic value of the land. It also makes the land title much, much more legible. Contra James Scott, legibility doesn't just benefit the State: it also benefits the owner by allowing them to engage in transactions with distant strangers, i.e. to buy, sell, or mortgage land rather than just making static traditional use of it or at most handing it off to a relative or neighbor.
Book Review: First Sixth Of Bobos In Paradise
December 01, 2022 · Original source
Seeing Like A State and high modernism. Brooks namedrops Seeing Like A State as the quintessential meritocrat book and high modernism as the quintessential meritocrat bogeyman. High Modernism was something like the legitimizing ideology of the WASP aristocracy: we are great because we have raised shining skyscrapers, blasted railways through mountains, and built giant eternally-churning factories. As part of their cultural revolt, the meritocrats had to ritually humiliate all of this, which made them adopt as their legitimizing ideology a James Scott / Jane Jacobs - esque perspective of “skyscrapers disrupt the social fabric and blasting tunnels sounds environmentally unfriendly, how about some nice locally-sourced organic food?” He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Inline links: Seeing Like A State, He who has ears to hear, let him hear