Astral Codex Ten

Brasilia

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Brasilia

Article

Brasilia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between January 29, 2021 and April 12, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “the failures of top-down planning: … Brasilia”; “Brasilia”; “scale the winner up into Brasilia”. It most often appears alongside Robert Moses, Scott, Seeing Like A State.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: January 29, 2021
  • Last seen: April 12, 2021

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.

Contra Weyl On Technocracy
January 29, 2021 · Original source
I like Seeing Like A State as much as anyone else (though see the caveats in Part VII of my review for some criticisms). But it worries me that everyone analyzes the exact same three examples of the failures of top-down planning: Soviet collective farms, Brasilia, and Robert Moses. I’d like to propose some other case studies:
Inline links: my review
But if you accept that "technocracy" describes things other than Soviet farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses, the trick stops working. You notice a lot of things you could describe using the same vocabulary were good decisions that went well. Then you have to ask yourself: is Seeing Like A State the definitive proof that technocratic schemes never work? Or is it a compendium of rare man-bites-dog style cases, interesting precisely because of how unusual they are?
I want to make it really clear that I'm not saying that technocracy is good and democracy is bad. I'm saying that this is actually a hard problem. It's not a morality play, where you tell ghost stories about scary High Modernists, point vaguely in the direction of Brasilia, say some platitudes about how no system can ever be truly unbiased, and then your work is done. There are actually a bunch of complicated reasons why formal expertise might be more useful in some situations, and local knowledge might be more useful in others.
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
Scott primarily wrote about peasant communities, with some of his better-known critiques (eg Brasilia) being extensions of what he learned about peasants. He condemned extractive institutions that tried to change peasant communities. So you could argue that "actualy, ending feudalism is Good" is very Scott-compatible, maybe the most Scott-compatible thing. But then you would lose the right to apply Scott to most modern political debates, where there are no peasants to be found, and everything is the weird mix of extractive and altruistic typical of modern states.
Links For April
April 12, 2021 · Original source
3: I’ve complained before about how everyone uses the same example - Brasilia - when they talk about how central planning can go bad. As a public service, I offer these people this article about a similar problem in South Korea’s planned city of Songdo.
Inline links: a similar problem in South Korea’s planned city of Songdo