In 1932-33, Soviet collectivization destroyed local farming knowledge and produced a famine that killed somewhere between five and nine million people. It was one of the twentieth century's great tragedies, and James Scott's Seeing Like a State draws a straight line from the ideology that caused it — High Modernism, the belief that society can be rationally reorganized from above — to the disaster that followed.

But here's a number that doesn’t appear in Scott's book. Eight billion. That's roughly how many people are alive today, most of them fed by the products of scientific agriculture. Synthetic fertilizers, high-yield crop varieties, mechanized farming. The Green Revolution, which saved millions from starvation in the second half of the twentieth century, was born from the same impulse as High Modernism: it is top-down, science-driven and generic, scaling standardized solutions across entire continents.

James Scott's Seeing Like a State is a brilliant book about the former kind of outcome. But it has little to say about the latter.1 This has allowed a generation of readers to walk away with a clean takeaway: Local knowledge good, central planning bad. But that is, at best, half of the story. The question that even Scott [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.