--- begin forwarded text Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 01:37:43 EST Reply-To: Hayek Related Research <HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> Sender: Hayek Related Research <HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU> From: Hayek-L List Host <HayekList@AOL.COM> Subject: H-WEB: De Long on Scott, Planning & Hayek To: HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU Status: U
Hayek On The Web << -- Modernism / Government Planning
J. Bradford De Long, "Not Seeing One's Intellectual Parents" On the Web at: http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/Reviews/Seeing_Like_a_State.html
From the review:
"There is a lot that is excellent in James Scott's _Seeing Like a State_. It begins with a romp through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German forestry--and the failure of the foresters to understand the ecology of the forests that they were trying to manage. It continues with a brief digression on how states tried to gain control of their populations through maps, boulevards, and names. These are prequels to a vicious and effective critique of what Scott calls "high modernism": the belief that the planner--whether Le Corbusier designing a city, Vladimir Lenin designing a planned economy, or Julius Nyerere "villagizing" the people of Tanzania--knows best, and can move humans and their lives around on as if on a chessboard to create utopia. Then the focus appears to waiver. There is a chapter on agriculture in developing economies that characterizes agricultural extension efforts from the first to the third world as analogous to Lenin's nationalization of industry, or Nyerere's forced resettlement of Tanzanians. But the targets -- the agricultural extenders who dismiss established practices -- lose solidity and become shadows. They are no longer living, breathing, powerful rulers,; instead they are the "credo of American agriculture," the "catechism of high- modernist agriculture," the "high-modernist aesthetic and ideology of most colonial trained agronomists and their Western-trained successors" -- truly straw men. The conclusion is a call for social systems that recognize the importance of what Scott calls "metis": a Greek word for the practical knowledge that a skilled and experienced worker has of his craft. Most such practical knowledge cannot be easily summarized and simple rules, and much of it remains implicit: the devil is in the details. T he key fault of "high modernism," as Scott understands it, is its belief that details don't matter -- that planners can decree from on high, people obey, and utopia result. Well before the end of the book an economist is struck by a strong sense of deja vu. Scott's declarations of the importance of the detailed practical knowledge possessed by the person-on-the-spot -- of how such knowledge cannot be transmitted up any hierarchy to those-in-charge in a way to do any good--of how the locus of decision-making must remain with those who have the craft to understand the situation--of how any system that functions at all must create and maintain a space in which there is sufficient flexibility for craftsmen to exercise their metis (even if the hierarchs of the system pretend not to notice this flexibility)--all of these strike an economist as very, very familiar. All of these seem familiar to economists because they are the points made by Ludwig von Mises (1920) and Friedrich Hayek (1937) and the other Austrian economists in their pre-World War II debate with socialists over the possibility of central planning. Hayek's adversaries--Oskar Lange and company--argued that a market system had to be inferior to a centrally-planned system: at the very least, a centrally-planned economy could set up internal decision-making procedures that would mimic the market, and the central planners could also adjust things to increase social welfare and account for external effects in a way that a market system could never do. Hayek, in response, argued that the functionaries of a central-planning board could never succeed, because they could never create both the incentives and the flexibility for the people-on-the-spot to exercise what Scott calls metis. Today all economists--even those who are very hostile to Hayek's other arguments (that government regulation of the money supply lies at the root of the business cycle, that political attempts to reduce inequalities in the distribution of income lead to totalitarianism, that the competitive market is the "natural spontaneous order" of human society) -- agree that Hayek and company hit this particular nail squarely on the head. Looking back at the seventy-year trajectory of Communism, it seems very clear that Hayek (and Scott) are right: that its principal flaw is its attempt to concentrate knowledge, authority, and decision-making power at the center rather than pushing the power to act, the freedom to do so, and the incentive to act productively out to the periphery where the people-on-the-spot have the local knowledge to act effectively. In short, by the end of his book James Scott has argued himself into the intellectual positions adopted by Friedrich Hayek back before World War II. Yet throughout the book Scott appears to be ignorant that the intellectual terrain which he has reached has already been well-explored. This is quite distressing ... " J. Bradford De Long, "Not Seeing One's Intellectual Parents". Review of James Scott (1998), _Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed_. (New Haven: Yale University Press). 7/4/1998 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- References Peter Boettke (1990), The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers: 0792391004). Friedrich Hayek, ed. (1935), Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibility of Socialism (London: Routledge: 0678007659). Friedrich Hayek (1937), "Economics and Knowledge," Economica 4, pp. 33-54. Friedrich Hayek (1945), "The Use of Knowledge in Society," American Economic Review 35, pp. 519-30. Frank Knight (1936), "The Place of Marginal Economics in a Collectivist System," American Economic Review 26:2, pp. 255-6. Abba Lerner (1934), "Economic Theory and Socialist Economy," Review of Economic Studies 2, pp. 51-61. James Scott (1998), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press: 0300070160). Ludwig von Mises (1920), "Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen," Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik 47:1, pp. 86-121." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Professor of Economics J. Bradford De Long, 601 Evans Hall, #3880 University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 (510) 643-4027 phone (510) 642-6615 fax delong@econ.berkeley.edu http://econ161.berkeley.edu/ Hayek On The Web is a regular feature of the Hayek-L list. --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'