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.

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First published:
May 17th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iiDzt5qhesmQZiNAj/james-c-scott-seeing-like-a-state

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Edgar Anderson’s drawing of an orchard garden in Santa Lucia, Guatemala. ( from Seeing Like a State)

$Psychedelic fractal pattern with symmetrical swirls in red, green, and blue.$

Pine plantation. (Source: Soil-Science.info CC BY 2.0)

Book cover showing an eye inside a wireframe cube with title

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