I found the last non-fiction book I read to be so engaging and rewarding that I think I might make more of a habit of it, even though I already read so much online and from my ongoing subscription to The Economist. This particular book caught my attention from an online discussion of books that most revolutionized their respective fields. That’s a rather bold claim that I’m not sure this book is able to satisfy. But its topic of trying to address the question of why so many large-scale interventions to reengineer human society fail is one that intensely interests me. This is a rather heavy and substantial book so I took my time getting through it. In the end, I found that it marshals such numerous examples and case studies that its arguments are undeniable. Still it also seems to me that so many those interventions failed because the planners were dumb, not that there is some deep, systematic reason for the failures.

This book examines not just such horrendous failures as the famines caused by the Great Leap Forward in China and collectivization in Russia but also such planned cities as Brasilia and Chandigarh in India that end up being white elephants as well as the early efforts of scientific forestry originating in Germany that tried to maximize the harvesting of lumber but resulted in terrible ecological damage. Scott asserts that these are examples of an ideology he calls high modernism, faith in the unlimited power of science and reason to remake and reorder society to be more efficient and organized, combined with the coercive power of an authoritarian state to force change onto a skeptical and resistant population. He makes the case that the planners and thinkers behind these massive projects share a disdain of non-academic, informal and practical knowledge that he calls metis, after the Greek name. He argues that traditional small-scale farmers, low-level factory workers and even the real people who must live in cities naturally develop metis as a result of experience and this is absolutely indispensable to the functioning of any sufficiently large and complex system, yet this is ignored or even actively suppressed by central planners who view them only as cogs with no say of their own.

As a well-researched and carefully thought out book, this is so complete and exhaustive that Scott has even predicted and preempted the strongest possible objections to it in the introduction. Even so, as this is a non-fiction book on political science, it is important to read it knowing when it was published, in this case, 1998 and who it was written by, an American academic specializing in the peasantry of Southeast Asia. The date of publication is especially important here as subsequent developments may have since invalidated or superseded some of its conclusions. Notably Malaysia’s own Putrajaya would have made for a fine example of the planned capital cities that Scott would probably have loved to discuss but obviously came later. He cites Chandigarh as an example of a top-down, architect-centered city built in accordance with architect Le Corbusier’s grand aesthetic visions and ignores the needs of the people who must actually live in it. Yet today it is one of the most successful cities in India and seems well liked by the people who live there.

Le Corbusier, a controversial French architect, is one of the great villains of the book. He believed that the ideal city consists of grand plazas and straight avenues, all laid out symmetrically without much regard to the specific geography of the location or the culture and the history of the people who would live there. Scott asserts that the few such cities that were actually built were so hostile to the real needs of its inhabitants that they could only become tolerable due to the ad hoc building of unsanctioned supporting slum areas. The same sort of high-minded arrogance can be seen in such different schemes as the forced villagization plan in post-colonial Tanzania, the simplification and intensification of agriculture in the Soviet Union and the United States, and even the FELDA planned settlements of Malaysia. Scott claims that these all failed one way or another, either because the people took matters into own hands to work around the official schemes, or because they resulted in serious ecological damage and a fragile monocrop or because past a certain point, it was necessarily to use force to compel people to follow the plans. But as Scott also states, even if the plans failed in achieving the stated production or wealth generation targets, it may be argued that they still succeeded in helping the government in power to gain control over the population and that might well be the higher priority goal all along.

Even if the intentions of these projects were benign, they were often doomed when they were based on a kind of aesthetics of science and rationality approach rather than actual science. Instead of being based on experiments on the ground and collected data, they were based on preconceived notions that straight, neat lines of monoculture crops were better than the messy but more productive mixed crops of traditional farmers or that a clear delineation of zones in a city intended for a single purpose is better than putting houses and workplaces together and so on. I think it’s fair to say that those working in science have since learned better and good practice now actively solicits domain specific knowledge from local experts. While the institutions of science are no more immune as those of any other to problems with politics, corruption, poorly thought out incentives and so on that cause many projects to fail, it doesn’t seem like these are systematic ones specific to these institutions. As Scott himself realizes, the book reads sometimes like an archaeology of development traps of the past that the world has already moved beyond.

I’d note that the book is a very valuable resource for the sheer amount of information in it. It’s packed full of insights, observations and facts and while some of it seems obvious in hindsight, such as how standardizing measures and assigning last names to citizens are all ways that a modern state is formed and able to exert control over its territory, reading it set down formally like this is instructive. It seems like a bit of a derail but there’s a lot in it about how Lenin’s revolution was about centralization of power right from the start and elevating the lives of rural peasants despite themselves. I was fascinated how those cited in the book as being prominent objectors to these grandiose plans are often women. For example there is Rosa Luxemburg, a Polish socialist who criticized the lack of democracy in the Russian Revolution, and Jane Jacobs who observed cities on the street-level and saw how the grand urban renewal plans would destroy their complex ecosystems. I of course also enjoyed reading the many anecdotes about Malaysia from the author’s time in Kedah, including how the British-instituted Kampung Baru were a kind of concentration camp and the extensive knowledge of local farmers including how to nurture colonies of black ants to deal with an infestation of red ants.

Scott takes pains to note that his critiques of central planners and authoritarian regimes shouldn’t be taken as being an endorsement of free markets as capitalist forces too can force the standardization and erasure of diversity that he so abhors. The book doesn’t really cite much in the way of examples though and as its conclusion points out, liberal democracies are probably best at fostering the kinds of institutions that Scott admires, and that sort of goes hand in hand with capital markets. Finally, other critics have pointed out that Scott’s examples are selective and skips cases which don’t support his chosen line of argument. Just last week, I read an account of why Haiti is so much poorer than the Dominican Republic even though both share the island of Hispaniola. At least part of the explanation is that following the success of the slave revolt, land was redistributed to the people, resulting in breaking up plantations into many, many small-scale farms. According to Scott, small scale farmers should be more efficient and productive than large plantations, but this wasn’t the case in Haiti. Admittedly this was also because the new landowners probably didn’t have much experience in farming and never had a chance to develop metis. Still, it makes for an instructive counter-example to remind us that coming up with grand theories that cover so much intellectual ground is always very dicey.

As I’ve mentioned, I don’t usually read much in the way of non-fiction and I certainly don’t usually read one that is so academically oriented. While this hasn’t been too difficult for me, it did end up feeling somewhat tiresome as Scott keeps citing more and more examples to support his point while I’m just eager to move on to the next one. At the same time, it feels like the book lacks a little punchiness. Partly because this is a 20-year-old book and I believe the lessons it teaches have long percolated into how current planners think. Partly because as a rather very rigorous book and in trying to stay on topic, it shies away from elaborating on some of the longer term consequences of what happened in each of the cases under examination. I suppose I’m just more interested in a deep dive of particular scenarios rather than an attempt to generalize a broader theory of what went wrong across a large number of interventions. I’m skeptical that this broader generalization succeeds anyway. Overall I learned a lot from reading this but it’s wasn’t much fun and I doubt I’ll want to do this too often.