Seeing Like a State
Even as it grows more powerful and entangled with everyday life, the grand bargain of the nation-state, therefore, is that not only can centralized power enable peace and prosperity, but this power can be contained using a series of checks, balances, redistributions, and institutional forms.
Mustafa Suleyman • The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma
central planning often misses important needs, invites totalitarian abuse of power, and fails to engage the creativity of individuals and grass-roots organizations.
Charles Eisenstein • Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
By focusing on only those parts of the forest that seemed instrumental to their uses, the planners failed to see the forest accurately. In trying to standardize and control the growth process, the planners murdered the trees.
David Brooks • How the Ivy League Broke America
No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed units of measurement.
James C. Scott • Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (The Institution for Social and Policy St)
A brief jaunt through the progression of state architecture is telling. When the bourgeoisie wrested control of the Western state away from the aristocracy, they financed the construction of gaudy yet beautiful buildings in the city centers—town halls, parliaments, train stations, opera houses, stock exchanges, and so forth—to demonstrate their... See more