"Seeing Like a State" mini review.

Chapter 8 of Seeing Like a State is where James Scott's blind spot and bias against markets shines through and damages his analysis. The chapter is a paean to traditional farming methods and a critique of modern western agriculture. Some of the critiques are legitimate, such as increased risk of crop failures from blights and the negative externality of pollution.

But he gives no attention to the demands of feeding a world of growing populations. Norman Borlaug gets no mention, and the book was written too soon to take account of the creation of Golden Rice, which could prevent many thousands of cases of blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency . . . and which is being blocked from the market by technophobes.

And that oversight is significant, because for Scott, market agriculture is all about money, maximising profits. There are no other motivations in his model. And so he assumes that modern agriculture will wipe away all variety. Here is the chapter that hearkens back to his comment in the intro that "a market necessarily . . . promotes standardisation."

Yes, it does, but it does not only do that. Markets also provide variety unheard of in ages past, for the consumers who are interested in that (Tyler Cowen's "Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures" brilliantly explains this). In the introduction he also says that "in markets, money talks, not people," but he does not consider who money speaks for. This book was written a quarter-century after Hirschman's "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty," which is directly relevant to that question, but it also does not get a mention.

This is, overall, a great book, but it's one critical error is that it conflates markets and government as similar high-modernist standardising processes, overlooking the critical differences, that markets are more able to experiment and quickly adapt than governments, and that with governments most often there is a single "product" offering to the whole polity, while in markets there are most often multiple offerings for people to choose among, with new ones frequently being offered, and surviving not based on the will of those in power or the preference of a majority, but simply on being able to satisfy a sufficient number of people to make it pay off for the offerer, which sometimes requires only a very tiny minority.