Seeing like a State
Apr. 1st, 2017 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliSeeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott
An analysis of certain attempts to make things better by being scientific and rational and planned. With results ranging form the ugly to mass murder.
Giving people last names and (despite orders) not preserving the record of what they were called before. Laying out collective farms without regard to features such as ravines. Building a perfect rectilinear city -- most of whose inhabitants live out of it, in the buildings that the workers constructed as squatters. Monocropping and polycropping in the tropics. Fun of fascinating stuff.
An analysis of certain attempts to make things better by being scientific and rational and planned. With results ranging form the ugly to mass murder.
Giving people last names and (despite orders) not preserving the record of what they were called before. Laying out collective farms without regard to features such as ravines. Building a perfect rectilinear city -- most of whose inhabitants live out of it, in the buildings that the workers constructed as squatters. Monocropping and polycropping in the tropics. Fun of fascinating stuff.