In an interview on Failed States

OK this takes us to our second book, James C Scott, and he’s also talking about the state and his book is called…

Seeing Like A State. He’s quite similar to Dewey in a way. He also sees the state as only a mechanism. But he thinks that the way that the state chooses to count, or the way it chooses to see, will inform how it behaves and what kind of animal it becomes. Scott explains, for example, how in France, in early modern times, the state decided to count two things. It decided to count how much salt there was and how many able-bodied men there were, because it wanted to tax the salt and send the able-bodied men off to war. Now perhaps the state decides to count other things, how many healthy people there are, how many well-educated people they are… So that what the state chooses to count determines the parameters of what the state chooses to do.

The fact is that there are always people running the state. People inhabiting and running that apparatus...

And so the key challenge is how to make them accountable. The problem in many of the countries which the institute I co-founded works in is that many revolutionary leaders who spend a long time trying to get into power continue to believe, once they get into power, that they are ‘outlaws’ or above the law and not accountable to the rule of law.

They still feel that they are the underdogs? That some injustice is being perpetrated on them?

Exactly, so that they will not submit themselves to the rules being made by the people.

So one of the problems of the state is that, should it fail, it relies on the fact that those who adjust for that failure have read and agreed with John Dewey?

Yes. But as James Scott describes, as you abstract information from people and aggregate it upwards and you move towards industrialisation and large, centrally planned cities, that information becomes abstracted from the lives of people. The state no longer understands the way in which people experience the structures that are imposed on them.

As during the Great Leap Forward in China, when in order to meet government targets, farmers invented phantom bumper harvests on which they paid tax in corn and starved.

Exactly. So one of the challenges is how to manage that kind of scale bureaucratically while permitting individuals to pursue their own lives. And that is why we created the national solidarity program in Afghanistan, which still has a national rule of law framework that gives money directly to all the villages and lets the villagers decided how to use that money. So it is possible, you see, to have the rule of law and also radical decentralisation.

In an interview on Climate Change Innovation

Seeing Like a State.

This is a book that talks about the perils and limitations of policy wonk hubris – the idea that we are capable of large-scale top-down designs on society to have specific effects. It goes through a number of cases, such as urban planning, where the most well-intended thoughtful interventions don’t lead to the desired effect and sometimes have exactly the opposite effect. I would say an example would be global population policies, such as the Chinese one-child policy. It’s a good lesson for people thinking about climate change, whether to create a global policy for carbon dioxide emissions – we’ve seen that lead to corruption and mischievous accounting rather than emission reduction.

Sorry, do you mean people shouldn’t try to reduce global warming because it will do it by itself?

No, not at all. We should be trying to reduce it, absolutely, but to think that we can do it comprehensively with a single treaty or a large-scale policy instrument may be fanciful thinking. He talks about urban planning and efforts to manage agriculture. I give a simple example in my own book, which is the introduction of cane toads into Australia. They had cane beetles that ate sugar cane and led to crop damage and loss of revenue, so someone had a bright idea that they would introduce these toads that like to eat cane beetles. The idea was that here’s a natural intervention. But it turned out that the toads didn’t prefer to eat the beetles but they found other delicious things to eat in Australia and they didn’t have any predators. So now if you go to Australia there are 300 million cane toads. Intervening in complex systems can lead to negative outcomes that are wholly unexpected. The Global Carbon Market sounds great on paper but may in fact be counterproductive. More direct, simple approaches focusing on cause and effect would be more effective. If we’re really worried about burning fuel that produces carbon dioxide, we should come up with energy sources that don’t produce carbon dioxide.