Transcript:

Amit Varma: Welcome to everything is everything. I'm Amit and this is my good friend Ajay. Ajay, have you heard a band called the Velvet Underground?

Ajay Shah: Lo Reed.

Amit Varma: Correct. The Velvet Revolution was named after them. Now, here's something to know about the Velvet Underground and it was once said of them that only 30 people bought their albums and all 30 of them became musicians. And today, in this episode, this might come as a surprise to you, we are going to talk about the Velvet Underground of writing of ideas of the intellectual world.

I think of James C. Scott a little bit like that. You take the name out in public to someone who's not really into reading or the intellectual life and they're like James who, Scott who, C what? Never heard of C. But, you know, James C. Scott is a profoundly influential writer. In fact, he is a dominant influence on many others who are dominant influences on the world at large.

And therefore I find them an inspiring figure. And my lament is like at one hand I celebrate this that he has this influence on the intellectual community and his ideas have spread far and wide, you know, beyond the people who read him initially. I celebrate that, but I also lament that he is not better known because his books are such masterpieces.

I mean, I've only read two of them, but they're I'll be reading the third one about floods now. And therefore, when we decided to once in a while do an episode that talks about a book, the one that absolutelyy had to be on the list and is on the list is seeing like a state by JC Scott, a book that profoundly changed Ajay's life, as he's going to talk about now.

And again, I think it's just a remarkable book. It's like, I mean, it's actually the biggest compliment I can give Lou Reed by saying that Velvet Underground is the James C. Scott of music. remarkable man.

Ajay Shah: Yeah. And this connects to the theory of change. Okay? So, we have an EIE episode on the long road to change. You don't have to shoot for B2C success in each thing that you do. Okay? The path to a better world runs through a journey of ideas.

And ideas emerge and ideas reshape the culture and the world gets better. And all of us have to appreciate that arc of change. Many short-termist people see that last mile that one runner gets across the race and they say, "Yay. But you have to see all the people that handed the baton upstream.

And nothing matters more than ideas in making this world a good place and people like JMC Scott are the heroes.

Amit Varma: I just thought of a quote and then I thought of another quote. And the quote I thought of is we all stand on the shoulders of giants. And the other quote, and the reason I'm laughing, the other quote is that I couldn't get anywhere because giants were standing on my shoulder.

Ajay Shah: I I think a version of that I've heard. So first of all, the original quote, I I I saw further than others because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. is by Newton and it's actually because Newton was a truly mean and unpleasant person. Okay? So have no illusions about it. The great man Newton was not a nice person.

He had a lifelong intellectual rivalry and conflict with Robert Hook. Robert Hook was a hunchback. Robert Hook implied that the ideas that Newton developed were built out of Hook's work. And this was Newton's put down.

Amit Varma: Beautiful. So my question for you therefore is you're a nice guy, how can you be a great thinker?

Ajay Shah: They're orthogonal. It didn't mean that they're negatively correlated. Also, there's a beautiful line which is a unique fortune. Uh it says that in computer something like in computer science, we stand on each other's shoulders.

Amit Varma: Beautiful. I love that. So, Ajay, I want you to give me a brief introduction to the book in this chapter. But before that, I want you to talk about what the book means to you, how did you discover it, did someone give it to you, did someone recommend it, and what has it come to mean to you over the years.

Ajay Shah: The book was released in 1998, and I frankly missed it completely. It was not on my radar. Now when we go and look back, I realize that Brad Delong wrote about it on his blog, which was in my RSS feed, but I failed to catch it there.

Then some years later, I seem to think 2004 after the UPA government came to power, Lance Richard moved to Delhi, and Lance Richard gave me this book, and he gave me one other book. The functions of the executive. And he said this book is really important, it will change the way you think about the world. I said, okay, great.

And I'm extremely embarrassed to say to you, I did not read it for a long time. It sat in my shelf for an unconsciously long time. I really got around to reading it in 2012. So from 2004 to 2012, it just sat in my shelf. Gentle reader, don't beat yourself up too much because there are all these great books sitting on your shelf.

It's a part of life. Our books are our companions. Okay? Their physical presence matters and it shapes the quirk of the day when you pull out this book and say today I'm going to do it. And these things are all shaped by the physicality of having a shelf.

So, it was there on my to-do for a long time and I finally read it and I just got absolutely blown. As an aside, I was a callow fool back in 2012. And like page after page of this book felt like an assault on me. Okay? Page after page, I thought he was taking me apart. He was fighting with the things that I thought.

And I just remember it was unputdownable. It's like I was breathlessly reading page after page and I was fighting with him. I was arguing back and it was really one of life's great experiences. I blew away all meetings. I just sat for a couple of days and only read this book. It's that kind of fundamental book.

So, uh, this is a book that spans many, many fields. JMC Scott wrote many books and he started out more narrow and he broade out. So, by the time you get to this book in 1998, he is a Renaissance thinker. He's all over the place. So, this book touches upon political philosophy, sociology, anthropology, urban policy, development studies. Okay? It's just all over the place.

Amit Varma: Because Because everything is everything.

Ajay Shah: And he was a big mind that thought about the world. And the world is complex, the world resists being slotted into simple bins. And by that time, he was putting together his whole life of knowledge and experience and weaving these stories together.

So, it's just a blockbuster exploration of big ideas. And it was like a bombshell when it came out and it because it touched upon so many fields, it went to so many people. So, if you were an urban person, you felt like reading saying like the state. If you were a development person, you felt like reading saying like a state. Okay?

Certainly sociology, anthropology, it's just field after field took to this book because it was connected to all of them. He was a deeply well- read person, he knew all these adjacent literatures. He waved stories about Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin and the history of Chandigarh and so on. It's just it's all over the place and you can see the richness of the mind.

And that's how it enabled the book actually to go into many many communities. And so it took from many many literatures and it gave back to all of them. I also think a lot about the date 1998. Okay? So, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. the USSR collapsed in 1991. And in a sense, you know, that grand misery of the 20th century came to an end. Okay?

From 1914 onwards, there was this great wrenching conflict running across the whole world about questions like militarism, nationalism, and the authoritarians. Okay? Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Matung. This was the grand question and in 1991 when the USSR collapsed, we felt that question was done.

When that happened, in my opinion, a lot of people in otherwise successful democracies had a bit of a flavor of, okay, you know what, we're done. Like we no longer have an ideological conflict against the communists, against the Nazis. We're now in a happy world. And so now, let's get back to a technocratic refashioning of the state and the society in ways that will take us to some happy paradise.

So, in a way, the respite that was offered by the fall of the USSR in the minds of some people was an opening to do social policy, to do social engineering. And I felt like a lot of people had lost their connections with the foundations. The foundations of the 20th century are in Friedman and Hayek and in their principled defense of freedom.

Ultimately freedom one. Okay? So whether it is the First World War or the Second World War or the Cold War or the collapse of the USSR, the hatred in Eastern Europe for any kind of Russian influence, it's one organizing idea, it's an idea of freedom.

And I don't see how the collapse of the USSR is an opportunity to get back into more social engineering and more technocratic success. But now again, you have to see that moment, 1998. This is deep inside the computer revolution. Okay? So the microprocessor was created in 1974. By 1998, we were at the beginnings of the internet revolution.

And there was this scientist, engineer, social planner, social engineer, welfarest, do gooder streak in the world, which was actually quite strong because in a way earlier it was felt that look, this is an ideological problem. We overemphasize the liberalism of the West because you want to contrast it with the behavior of the totalitarian regimes.

It almost felt like now that the USSR is gone, let's be a little bit more like the USSR. So I felt that through the 90s, these this strain of thinking was becoming more visible. And this is particularly so in many places where scientists and engineers have a disproportionate role in society and are treated with great respect and are given that presumption of wisdom and altruism.

So I felt like 1998, this book had an unusual influence in saying, whoa, wait. You get into a lot of difficulties when you go down the path of social engineering. And we talk about scientists, we talk about engineers. Okay? The irony is that all over the world, there have been many grand schemes. Okay, where a government, some leadership class, imagines a grand scheme, it can be diverting the rivers, it can be urban planning where you try to top down design a city.

There are many, many schemes in agriculture, in economic development. Some of the smartest people in the world have engaged in these grand schemes. And it is interesting and ironic how badly these things have worked out. So, you've got to wonder that in a way, these are very bright people. Okay?

PC Mahalbase is a truly smart guy. I mean, we love him. He was a great physicist, a great statistician. The Mahalbase distance metric, I mean, you know, who's to complain about his raw firepower? And yet, when it came to thinking about society, his stuff was phenomenally wrong.

So, I think we've got to grapple with this paradox that some of these smartest people were participants in monumental failures. And that takes us to the title of this book. Seeing like a state colon, why certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Okay? And that's the puzzle that some very bright people thought, I'll do social engineering. Okay?

And by the way, the citizen one in that roster of wonderful people that we love, who tried to lead grand schemes that would make the world a better place is Jawaharlal Nehru. Okay, when we talked about accidental politicians, you heard me talk about my love of the man. And you know, I'm very comfortable separating art and artist.

So, this is a great artist and his art was like pretty bad in some ways. So there was this scientific, technical social engineering instinct in the world and you know what? It's still there. We ain't remotely done. So this episode is important, this book is important because the instinct of trying to control has not gone away.

Amit Varma: So the remarkable thing about this book is that it's not a book about one thing. It's a book with multiple big ideas and each of them is just mind-blowing, it's a revelation. So, take us through some of them. Let's start.

Ajay Shah: Okay. So we start at legibility or state legibility as JC Scott put it. And he introduced this term into the world. Today all of us bandy around, so if you have to make a EIE t-shirt, the volume one number one will be make trade not war. Volume one number two will be state legibility schemes have unintended consequences.

Amit Varma: Gentle reader, promise me you'll turn this into a best seller. State legibility schemes have unintended consequences. And you'll have to you can only buy the t-shirt if you're a triple XL because how will the words fit? Continue.

Ajay Shah: Okay. So let's start at the problem of what the state sees. Okay, this is the title of the book, seeing like a state. We think of human beings, we think of seeing. I see you. Okay? I see that you have specs. I have an estimate of your shirt size. Okay? I'm a human being, I see.

As human beings we see, seeing is something instinctive and effortless. When you're a bureaucracy, when you are in a state, that is not how seeing works. See, in a state, a policy is a mapping from a state of nature to a state action. A bureaucrat, an official has to determine the state of nature.

So a bureaucrat has to see the world and write down something in a document. And then the policy kicks that I have seen the world, the number is 33, and because the number is 33, we will kick off these these these actions. Okay? So, it's not a human being who is seeing, it's a bureaucracy that is seeing.

And how bureaucracies can see the world is a very different problem from how humans can see the world. Okay? If you and I wander around, we see a person, we see the emotions on the face of a mob, we see the proclivity of a mob to violence, we see a house and judge the grandeur of the house, and we start making some instinctive judgments.

Do you think he should be paying so much income tax? Okay? It's one thing for all of us to do it. It's an entirely different thing for a state to see these things because a state is a bureaucracy. It's composed of a lot of people. Who will see what? How will we double check? How will we control the discretion? Okay?

We have an episode on metrics of complexity in state intervention. Okay? discretion, number of transactions, stakes, transparency. This is the nightmare of being a state. If a state has to write down on file that I have seen this situation and I have determined this. That's a very tricky matter because of all the incentives of persons and the opacity of the world.

So, the persons in the world don't want to be seen. So the persons in the world do everything they can to conceal themselves from the state because, you know, the state has designs on your life which are not entirely in your self-interest. So as JMC Scott emphasizes, there is a good good happy story about states.

We think of states as smallpox vaccination and building infrastructure and some other such good projects. Well, states have done many, many maligne things. Okay? States are not unvarnished good guys. Uh public choice theory teaches us that state personnel will use information about you against you in their self-interest.

So it's not efficient for any of us to be known by the state. And states through history have a grizzly story about taxation, conscription, enslavement, all kinds of misbehavior that has been done by states. So the people are not interested in being seen. Okay?

So James Scott goes after this phenomenon of seeing that how does a bureaucracy look at the world and determine what it saw in an objective way that it is willing to write down. Okay? And it's hard. So I rattled off our four metrics of complexity. They're all related to the problem of what a state sees. discretion.

So, if a policeman is supposed to see the house and write down some characteristics of the house, that policeman has discretion on what she chooses to write and then you start thinking of the principal agent problem. Why will the policeman work for the interests of the institution and not for her personal self-interest to get a promotion to get a bribe.

Okay, number of transactions. How will you build large complex bureaucracies that will see correctly all across the vastness of India. stakes. If seeing has consequences, then the civil servant will use that for a shakedown. Okay, that both of you will agree to write something wrong in the government's files and solve that problem outside the rules.

And finally opacity, when the civil servant has secrecy, they will use these things in ways that are not good for the interests of the people. So, we know that this stuff is very hard. So, this is part one. To appreciate that we as human beings think seeing is free. It's the technocratic illusion that I'll build a thousand man force and they'll walk around the country and they'll see. and they'll write down.

Why will they write down? Why will they be competent? Why will they be efficient? Why will they write down the truth? These are all very important challenges. So, it's a failure of knowledge to think that seeing is easy. And this is a sort of scientist engineer illusion that scientists engineers don't have the richness and complexity of understanding the world.

You know, in a lab, your instruments don't lie. So you think seeing is free. Actually seeing is very hard. So, it's a very difficult problem to see. Now comes stage two, that so the government decides, look, it's a pain, I'm having problems seeing, okay? The British have landed up in India, they're trying to walk around, understand the landscape, who owns what land?

It's very difficult. How do I collect taxes? It's very difficult. Okay? And that leads to state legibility projects. A state legibility project is a formal attempt by the state to coerce a certain territory to change in ways that make it more legible to the state. Okay?

So again, JC Scott was the first one to point to these schemes where a state starts saying, "Look, I'm sick and tired of dealing with the richness and complexity of the country. I will force you guys to live in a simpler cleaner way. I want everybody to have a first name and a last name. Okay? I want everybody to register, get a UID AI number. Okay?

I want everybody to submit this kind of data into this kind of system. Okay? And every day you see the state ratcheting up its information demands because it wants to render the world legible in a way that suits itself. And again, look around us in India, most people are very willing to go along. Yes, Sarkar, no, they're good guys. We should give them all the information.

We're very comfortable signing on to policies that steadily escalate the visibility of we the people in the eyes of the state and these are things to worry about. These are not things to take for free. Okay? So, at one extreme, let me strong man it. At one extreme, would you live in a panopticon? Would you have comprehensive mass surveillance by the government?

Would you give civil servants easy access to your email? Of course not. Okay, like nobody would do that. That's uncivilized. The idea that a civil servant can access my email, that the idea that a civil servant can read my phone is disgusting. I mean, only in disgusting countries do civil servants have that level of access to our lives.

So, we would never live in a panopticon and we would never give access to the state. Great, now you're talking. So, we're thinking about a government imposition about forcing our life to be lived in the open. It behooves us to think, is this a good idea? Is this in my interest?

Many state legibility schemes have had bad consequences from a couple of different directions. Sometimes states have managed to force the people to live in transparent ways, to basically live in glass windows. And then the state has abused that information. So, you don't necessarily want the state to know about the people.

It's something to think about that, is it wise? Is it efficient? Maybe it's not. We shouldn't sign up for a scientist engineer paradise that, oh yeah, government, Sarkar is a good guy, we should always give them more information. And it directly connects to, you know, taxation, conscription, these are the kind of things that the state does.

Further, the very flattening that is done by the state of forcing everybody into single, centralized, monolithic, simplistic systems that are designed from the top and imposed everywhere, actually are very harmful because life is complicated. So, in a burkian sense, there's a reason why many things are complicated.

So understanding land use is complicated. I own the land, but in the kharif crop, you have rights to grow a kharif crop on my land. And in the remainder of the year where it's fallow, she has a rights to graze her cattle on this land. And these are all land rights. And this is the way we evolved and there's a reason.

So this is like a burkian conservative that there's a reason why these traditional ways came up. Now if the state comes along and says no, it's black and white. Land rights is black and white. One person will own the land and have all the authority and nobody else has any rights. Well, you're you're being a bull in a China shop.

You're walking into some ancient communities and arrangements and forcing something one size fits all because it suits the interests of the state. Because the state wants to say, you have the land, I'll tax you. is the Domesday book. That if you have the land, I'll tax you and I want clarity on who has the land. That is consistent with the interests of the state.

It is not consistent with the interests of the people. And when such simplistic state legibility schemes are thrust down on the population through coercive power, it has many unintended consequences and we should be very, we should think twice. So, I'm not saying that states don't see the people. There is a reason why states should see the people.

James C. Scott is alerting us that state legibility is a complex and difficult journey. that when the state does a top down imposition of a way of life upon the people that forces the people to become legible to the state, then that has many unanticipated consequences and we should be cautious, we should think it through, we should think of the commensurate checks and balances.

It may not always be a good thing. It may be a good thing. Let's not give it a card blanche. Whereas the opposite is a scientist engineer view that, yeah, more data in my lab is always good. So yeah, let's force the people to fill in this form and submit this information and put in a spy cam in their bedrooms and so on.

Amit Varma: And many people have thought to normalise this. They think of state legibility as something that is desirable. Why not? You know, have a common user ID. Let everything be out in the open. And my exhortation gentle readers to you guys is, we shouldn't have normalized it and we should fight it for the simple reason that the way the world should be is the other way around.

The state exists to serve us and not to rule us. We don't need to be legible to them. The state needs to be legible to us. That's the direction in which the legibility flows. That government should be utterly transparent and accountable to us, not the other way around.

So, when we think of legibility in one direction that the state can see us, I'm like, no, I see no reason why that has to be the case. We should be able to see what's going on out there. And it is a deep perversion of the course of things that, you know, everything is upside down.

Ajay Shah: In our EIE episode on digital public goods, we talked about the endless massing and perpetual storage of data by the state. And you know, we would argue that, okay, there was a transaction. Okay, I paid toll somewhere. And so at that instant, you know, my car number and my payment of toll. So the state knows that at that instant, I traveled there.

But our default setting should be that within two seconds, that data should get deleted. So, data deletion should be the norm. that our baseline should be all data acquired by the state should be deleted within one second, except for some special cases. And the state should have to stand on bended knee and persuade the people that, you know what? I really need to store this for a year.

And please give me the authority to store this for the year. So, my thought for a better constitutionalism is just as we say for every act of state coercion, it's got to be authorized by the people. In similar fashion, every act of non-deletion of data should be authorized by the people. It's not a small thing. We take it lightly that the state keeps amassing information on us.

Amit Varma: So, Ajay, when I first heard the phrase high modernism, I thought it basically means that you wear shirt pant and you do drugs. High modernism. But but no, it's it's a revealing phrase and it has for me incredibly negative connotations. So, kindly explain.

Ajay Shah: Again, this is a phrase that was brought to prominence by James C. Scott. I believe the phrase had been around for some time, but it's really James C. Scott who woke us up to the importance and the power of this phrase. And we think modernity is a good thing. Okay? Modernity is a secular, individualistic identity and environment of freedom. Okay?

Modernity is a good thing. You're not superstitious. That's modernity. You have modern kinds of social relations with people. You are not embedded in kin and tribalism. Modernity is individuals engaging with individuals as full persons. High modernism on the other hand is a very different thing. So, we apologize, they're confusingly alike. But here we are, we're going to talk about high modernism.

Amit Varma: It's like popularity and populism. They're almost opposite things.

Ajay Shah: Yeah. Okay. So, what is high modernism? High modernism is the belief that scientists and engineers have a superior claim upon knowledge about society, that they should be given the power to reshape the society, and this would be done through centrally controlled top-down imposition of schemes upon the people, which would be backed by the coercive power of the state. Okay?

So, it stands for one India, one X. It stands for centralized imposition of a solution upon the whole country backed by state power and one that is surrounded by the nobility and the magic of science. Okay? So, I am behind nobody in this whole wide universe in my love and admiration of special relativity.

But to ask scientists and engineers to control the society like this is a tragic mistake. Okay? And James C. Scott goes after this in beautiful detail where he talks about all the difficulties. And partly it's an information problem. The scientists and the engineers don't have the information about what is going on in the country. How would they do top-down imposition of correct solutions?

And partly it is because people respond to incentives. So every time you try to come up with a top-down imposition, the people don't want it. Okay? So, the people hate the king and the people do everything they can to smirk and smile while quietly doing the things that completely undermine the grand scheme.

So, high modernism is this fantasy that there can be some centralized rule and they will tell the people what to do. And unfortunately, half of India is quite ready to buy into this kind of high modernism. And you know, you'd have thought that after the failure of Indian socialism by the 60s and 70s, people would have understood that this stuff doesn't work, but actually, we are in a second wave of this.

The rise of the internet, the creation of tech billionaires, the success of India in the world of software and a great regression of political philosophy and political science knowledge in India has given us a fresh attack upon high modernist approaches to public policy. And James C. Scott was one of the most eloquent people in showing us how these things fail.

And we'll come to some examples later, but in a way, this is all over EIE, that top-down central control works badly. In the high modernist approach, the policy maker, the leader, the great leader, the tyrant, the scientist, the engineer, views the past as an impediment. Because to sweep the old ways away and we're going to do something new. Okay?

And this is just a great instinct in the high modernist way of thinking. And you know, I would again argue for a Burkian approach of being humble. That be cautious about your knowledge. Make small moves, never sweep the world away. Apply decentralized principles, have local knowledge. There is no one single answer.

There will be many, many answers. They will be distributed. All of EIE is about how to think about the world without that high modernist streak.

Amit Varma: What's your next big idea?

Ajay Shah: The next big idea is a word from drawn from Greek that James C. Scott imported into English. In my knowledge, this was the first time it happened. Uh the word is Metis, M E T I S. He makes a distinction between relatively objective forms of universal knowledge, such as special relativity, as opposed to most knowledge about human society.

And he says that most knowledge about human society is characterized by Metis. What is Metis? Metis is deep experiential knowledge. It's not knowledge in a book. Okay? You have to be there, you have to do things, and out of that, you achieve certain knowledge that is tacit knowledge. You can't write it down.

So, once I acquire the knowledge, I can't write it in a book and give it to you. It's not readily transferable knowledge. It's the building of human wisdom and intuition on understanding the world, and it's relatively hard to transmit that knowledge. It is very local knowledge. You move 100 kilometers, the knowledge will change. So, it is extremely local kinds of knowledge.

It is authentically grounded knowledge about the world, and it is not a single objective book or manual which can be tossed from the above and everybody has to fall in line. And he emphasizes that the great thing in the world that we need is Metis. We need deep, local, experiential, tacit knowledge that has a sense of judgment about how the world works and is willing to be humble and respectful about how the world works, which is the exact opposite of high modernism, which is this top-down imposition based on some objective claims that we know this, we've read this book, we know how to do this. Now everybody fall in line, do it my way.

Amit Varma: So Ajay, make it concrete for me. uh give me an example that brings all of this to life.

Ajay Shah: Uh the example that he uses in the book is Prussian forestry management. It's equally British colonial forestry management in India. So he calls it Prussian but as you read it, you know this is exactly the Indian story around forests. Okay? So, what scientific forestry involves, first, is an abuse of the word science. Okay?

So I get offended when anybody says scientific. I'm like, dude, don't pull the science card on me. Okay? And at the end, I'm going to show you how wrong and dangerous the word science is. It's scientific forestry. What is scientific forestry? That the forest exists for only one purpose to give me timber.

So we are going to be reductionist and the entire purpose of the forest is how many cubic meters of timber does it generate for me per year? So, we will analyze all the trees and we'll choose the one tree which generates the highest volume of timber per year. We will plant a monoculture forest with clean orderly rows.

We will do scientific research that should the trees be 1 meter apart or 2 meters apart. Okay? They actually run experiments for 100 year time horizons. By the way, in India, Forest Research Institute, there are two FRI Dehradun is a grand British project around scientific forestry in India about how to exploit the forest.

And they would actually run experiments where they would plant trees 1 meter apart, 2 meters apart and wait 50 years and count the volume of the wood that is generated. Okay? So this is called scientific forestry. They basically want to destroy the forest and turn it into a farm where they've used standard methods from science to count which is a optimal tree and how should they be spaced apart, after how many years should the forest be killed? Okay?

This is the way Prussian scientific forestry works. Now the word science in this is abuse because this is a complete betrayal of everything that we know in ecology. This is ignorance. It's not science. When people in the world of policy use the word science, you should start getting suspicious. This is absolutely not science.

This is ignorance. This betrays zero knowledge of ecology. A forest is very complicated. A forest has many, many species that are richly interconnected in a web of life. They're all symbiotic upon each other and a forest is resilient. Now there can be an insect that shows up, there can be a fungus that shows up. It'll kill a few things, but basically the forest is fine.

The forest is a resilient system. These tree farms, the scientific forestry farms are not resilient. So you keep on growing one tree one twice, thrice, you cut it down. Now you have destroyed the micronutrients in the soil and the fifth time that you try to plant the tree, it's not going to work the same. Because your RCT only ran for 50 years. Okay?

Because nobody's there to think long enough for the long-term consequences. Actually, the richness of the micronutrients in the ground are made by the complex ecosystem. All the fungi in the ground, all the different things going on, make everything possible. If you start saying I'll have only one tree, then you are degrading the soil and in some generations, that forest goes barren.

A monoculture is vulnerable. One insect shows up, one fungus shows up, suddenly, you've destroyed the entire forest and you've actually ended up with something that is less interesting and less useful as compared to a genuine forest. This is a nice illustration. Scientific forestry is high modernism. It's a top-down imposition based on some simplistic claims of science.

And it imposes legibility because the trees are planted like rows of corn and you can count how many trees are there. So you're fully scientific that on this plot of land, we had planted 1,000 trees, in year 2035, we went to cut those 1,000 trees. Some inspector will be able to count that we got exactly 1,000 trees. Okay?

You have imposed your legibility, but in fact, you have destroyed the forest. Okay? It's like explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You can understand it, but it kills the frog. Like that. So, you set out on a scientific forestry concept, but when you bring in the tool chain of high modernism and state legibility, in fact, you end up destroying the forest and you end up with something weak and inferior.

And what you instead want is metis. You want the deep wisdom of an ecologist that understands the web of life, the fungi, the insects, the birds, the ephemerals, the shrubs, the small trees, the big trees, they're all together. They're all deeply interconnected to each other. For hundreds of millions of years, the angiosperms have all learned symbiotic relationships with each other.

And it is we who are fools if we use the word science and we try to get rid of all this and we claim that we've done something great.

Amit Varma: I'm a big fan of angiosperms and in a previous episode, we've actually discussed Mao's high modernism where he said all sparrows should be put to death because they are harming crops. And because sparrows ate locust, locust proliferated after sparrows were killed and actually destroyed all the crops and millions of people starve to death. And there are just so many examples of this from all across the world in India, sadly.

Ajay Shah: So gentle reader, I have a challenge for you. Okay? Take any EIE episode. Okay? Take any EIE episode. Then take the core of seeing like a state and write one comment on that episode about how that episode links to seeing like a state.

Amit Varma: Yeah, you can start with the cycling episode. We'll see where that gets you, but I'm sure there must be, yeah, I mean, what is a formation of cyclist and slip stream if not high modernism, Ajay Shah. But a true fan of cyclist also knows that when a sprint finish is approaching, there is a washing machine effect, which is much like spontaneous order in the chaos and complexity of society.

I didn't know this. Tell me. Uh so it's it's not for this episode. We'll we'll talk later. I'll explain I'll show it to you. In the book, James C. Scott says that things go wrong when you put together four things. Okay? So let's think of the four elements. The first element is a high modernist philosophy where you believe that there shall be top-down imposition.

The second element is the uh use of state power to render the world legible. So, remember, we are scientists and in order to do our forestry work, we have to have one tree which is grown in straight rows. So, when state legibility schemes are imposed around on the country. C, by an authoritarian state.

So, it is bad to have high modernism and it is bad to impose state legibility schemes, but things get really bad when it's an authoritarian state. Fourth, when there is no pushback against the state by the forces of civil society. So, when the civil society is prostrate and is just unable to fight back against the government.

When you get these four things together, you get absolutely bad outcomes. So, he says this is his four-part test. that look at the world, are you imbued with a high modernist philosophy that is leading to the imposition of state legibility schemes by an authoritarian state where the civil society is not able to push back.

Then that's where you're more likely to get into trouble. And he shows us many stories about how this combination of factors comes together to give you really bad outcomes. So that's again a nice intellectual toolkit that watch out for these things that if you are doing development advice in a country where there is an authoritarian government and a weak civil society, then be cautious about aiding, abating, or encouraging any latent high modernist tendencies and be cautious about improving state legibility.

Ajay Shah: So, let me talk through some examples, there are actually innumerable examples, but I'm going to do a few. Okay? So the first example, the Soviet collectivization. Okay? All of us roughly know the story that the communists decided that all land was going to be owned by the government and there would be these communes where a bunch of people would live together in social housing and they would all collaborate to do farming work.

It's a communist paradise. It's supposed to work very well. It's very interesting to see that Stalin did this because he was a complete ideologue. It is not a practical thing to do. It is not remotely a sensible thing to do. If you were a simple rational uh person that was here to get things done, you would not do this.

Stalin could be very pragmatic in some respects. Here he was just a bloody-minded ideologue. And the rich farmers who owned the land were horrified. They didn't want this. And Stalin crushed them with extreme brutality and violence. And this included the horrible events in Ukraine.

So, in a way, the seeds of the 1991 referendum where 90% of Ukraine voted to leave Russia was sowed in 1932 when Stalin crushed the opposition of Ukrainian farmers against the government grabbing their land and an estimated 4% or 10% of the population of Ukraine died in a man-made famine. Stalin blocked off food supply into Ukraine and the Soviets grabbed all the grain that was grown in Ukraine so that there was mass starvation in Ukraine and somewhere between 4% and 10% of the population of Ukraine died in that man-made famine that was imposed upon them by Stalin.

So that's sort of the backstory about why the descendant of Stalin is not well liked in Ukraine today. because that's an example of a nonsense scheme that this is a centralized top-down imposition of a vision of how agriculture should happen and it just doesn't work. Fast forward all the way into the mid 80s and the Soviet economy was a combination of exporting crude oil and importing grain.

And you had this tense balance between the world price of crude and the world price of grain. And when the world price of crude went down, thus hitting their resources, and the world price of grain went up, the USSR collapsed. So it's interesting to see that there's a direct line from the Soviet collectivization of that imposition of a single top-down scheme that this is how agriculture shall be done in the country.

And it was a terrible idea at so many levels, but it's an example of a grand scheme and it fits all the all these pieces and it fits the theory. My second example comes from urban policy. Okay? Again and again through world history, uh dreamers and tyrants have had fantasies about building brand new cities. Okay?

So, there was some block in Delhi who thought why don't we go to Dola and shift the capital closer to the center of gravity of India. And when you put up this kind of grand scheme, it just doesn't work. And this is just high modernism that you have decided there shall be a city. It shall be called Brazilia.

And after years and years of effort and effort, it just doesn't work because that's not how human society works. Humans don't respond to a centrally planned push to make a city. So, you need a far more humble approach in urban policy where there is no master plan and the government doesn't engage in central planning in telling the people what they want to do.

You need some basics. So, you know, Bimal Patel has long argued that 40% of the land should be streets and parks and beyond that the people should determine that is his land for a school, is his land for a commercial complex, is his land for an ice skating rink. This should be the choices of the people. You should not have central planners getting into it.

And on private land, people should be free to do what they want. You should not then be telling them that there should be this much setback and a private park and parking and all that. Just 40% of the land should be streets and parks, everything else the people should do what they want. So all through the history of urban policy is this one organizing fantasy of top down control and in most of India, urban thinking is primitive.

Urban thinking is top down control where one after another, an urban policy maker slips into central planning. I will tell you this, I will build this. Okay? So, it is to the tribute of the central planners, the urban planners of Bombay that you have a Bandra Kulla complex, supposedly a financial center, which doesn't have room for coffee shops and uh pavements where there can be establishments.

It's just a bunch of towers of corporations. That's not a financial center. A financial center is people. It is conversations over coffee that is a financial center. Everything else is small change. So, the entire phenomenon of centrally planned cities of brand new cities is just this fantasy. Every time somebody says to me that we should solve the Indian problem by starting 15 new cities.

I just roll my eyes that you haven't thought enough about human society. My next example is the green revolution. Okay? We in India are very used to loving and praising the green revolution and that is a very narrowly instrumental approach. We think of 64, 65, 65, 66, PL 480 and we think we got out of that.

But the green revolution has actually worked pretty badly. Okay? It is a high modernist scheme where there is MSP and there is a fertilizer subsidy and there will be free electricity to run your pumps and there will be certain cultivars of rice and wheat which are done on scale. And it has worked out very badly on the longer horizon.

So when you look around at the problems of Punjab and Haryana, you just look at everything that is going on. There is pesticide use that has gone into the groundwater and there are entire regions of Punjab and Haryana that are filled with cancer. There is a groundwater crisis because of the way these incentives work, you're just pumping the water.

In fact, the farmers in Punjab and Haryana are not doing too well for themselves. Uh we discussed uh an example of labor intensive exports. We said that the Netherlands is the area of Haryana and exports 140 billion dollars of food and in Punjab and Haryana, you basically have reasonably bad levels of success in uh making a living doing food.

And then you go one step further. What did we do with the green revolution? We filled up the bellies of the people of India with starch. And in any kind of modern health policy, that's a terrible idea. You should be doing much more protein, much more micronutrients, vegetables, fruits and all that.

All these things would have come out of an organic evolution of the food system. But this top down imposition of a high modernist scheme that C. Subramanyam, Indira Gandhi decided that we're going to solve the Indian food problem in a top-down state heavy way and it hasn't worked too well for anybody.

Amit Varma: So, Ajay, you know, one of the things that impressed me right at the start of this episode was you said that the book felt like an argument with you personally. That while reading it, you ended up changing your mind on many domains, which I think speaks really well for you because most people, once they have a view of the world which seems to explain everything, they get ossified there, they don't want their ideas challenged.

And these are ideas that challenge every instinctive notion of what this country should be like and how the state should behave. And we should all be open to that challenge and take this book seriously. So, give me a sense of now having made this journey, having changed your mind, having gained more legibility into affairs of the world as one might say, and embraced low modernity over high modernism.

What would you say is are the lessons that we can take away from this particularly with relevance to India?

Ajay Shah: I when I read the book, I felt like page after page he was slapping me in the face. Okay? And I was like indignantly fighting back with him like, you can't say this, this is not correct. Okay? Like that, I tried valiantly to push back at him because this stuff is just so uh breathtakingly powerful and like, look, I was stupid.

First, James C. Scott is not proposing a withering away of the state. His is a message of humility and caution. Okay? So we should do the basic script that we need a state, we need a monopoly of violence, we need some law and order, okay? We need some monetary policy. So, you know, like Kelkar and Shaw, there is market failure in this world and you need the state to do some things in the country.

But we should bring a great bias in favor of humility. that the state is not some lord who's going to tell us what to do. The state should be a humble participant. Coercive power should be used with the greatest care. We should not presume that scientists and engineers should be given the trigger of the gun to use the coercive power of the state in a variety of high modernist schemes.

So, like beware of grand schemes is a nice thing and be cautious. There is a chapter title from Kelkar and Shah which is from Dengping, cross the river by feeling the stones. So it makes small moves, do things that you can undo is from James C Scott and he has a footnote there which breaks your heart and he says, this is a reason, this is one of the many reasons I have for not having a death penalty.

The second idea in this is that let's place these things in the sweep of history. The pre-modern state actually knows very little. So if you go to emperor Aurangzeb or you go to the Peshwas, they actually know very little about the countryside and they're operating on a variety of thumb rules. We've generally assumed that every state legibility scheme is a good thing.

So more legibility for the state is good for state development. We equated it with modernity. We equated it with the emergence of state capability and state capability is always a good thing. I would like to always bring the word checks and balances into this that when the state sees more, what will he do with it? Okay?

So state legibility schemes have unintended consequences. The state has a lust for power. The state has a lust for arbitrary power exactly as firms have a lust for profit. So just like firms spread their hands in ceaseless striving for profit, the state spreads its hands in ceaseless striving for more arbitrary power. That doesn't mean that we should give it to them.

So you've got to always think of the commensurate checks and balances. So my uh way of thinking about this is I start at the Freedom House ranking of democracies, which gives a score to each country for the level of perfection of their democracy. So you basically go from Norway at the top to North Korea at the bottom.

And I think that the appropriate state legibility mechanisms should vary by the place of that country. That by the time you're Norway, you know, if you have an electronic payment system, you're reasonably safe because the rule of law and the checks and balances of Norway would be such that even if the state knew about my payment activities, they would not abuse that information and use that knowledge against me in various ways.

But in North Korea, electronic payments is a prison because the state is surveiling every single payment and they are watching what you do. So I feel that the most important ingredient that should be on the table in analyzing every change of state legitimacy is do we have the commensurate checks and balances. And that will immediately take you to the next question.

Like, imagine if you're discussing building Aadhaar in India and I was in those debates. Uh please note the first Aadhaar number was issued in 2009 and JMC Scott was slapping me around in 2012. Okay? So when we were doing Aadhaar, the idea was somebody's going to do a privacy law. We're good guys, nah?

A privacy law is going to come. Manmohan Singh's government was going to give us that privacy law and so in parallel we are building Aadhaar. Okay? Now I'm older and wiser that first you show me the privacy law. We're not going anywhere. We should not take the train of the station until you get a powerful privacy law that matches the dangers of a single number that can be traced to every person in the country.

Conversely, what is an appropriate level of state legibility has to vary with where you are in the Freedom House ranking. So, certain systems should not be in certain countries. Like, you know, for example, if you're India, would you want the government to know the medical records of everybody? I think not. If you're the UK, is it wise and safe for the government to have everybody's medical records?

The answer is yes. Okay? So it's not one size fits all. It's a fatal error to think that all state legibility systems are always good. It's a fatal error to think that every state legibility mechanism that is present in Norway or the UK is usefully rolled out in Sri Lanka. These are huge mistakes that are being made all around the world.

And it's interesting that if you pause to think about it, biometric ID systems only happen in poor, relatively authoritarian developing countries. They don't happen in advanced democracies. I wonder why. Okay? So, I feel that we should be locating the discussion of state legibility in the context of the level of democracy of each country.

And so you should start at the Freedom House list and I feel a great research question, a great research program that we need in the next 100 years is to start deriving these thumb rules that we should be making a list of state legibility mechanisms and then we should be starting to think that from rank 1 to 10, this kind of mechanism is safe.

By the time you get to rank 30 to 40, you know, it's really unwise that kind of mechanism should not be done. I think this is stage two of what we should be doing with James C. Scott's work. The next thing you take away from James C. Scott is the idea of local knowledge, authenticity, Metis. Okay? Don't do high modernism, don't do top down imposition.

India is a vast country. We are 3.3 million square kilometers. By the way, many times we say you can't take lessons from Singapore for India because Singapore is just a small city. I think this is the conceptual argument there. Singapore is just a small city. By dumb luck, they got a benevolent dictator and some decisions were made which worked for that one local.

But India is 1,000 such locals. So by definition, if you have one dictator who is instructing all of India, it's a recipe for trouble. So it is true that for a bigger country, you do need a profoundly different approach and that's a decentralized approach. So the constitution of India is way too centralizing and you and I did an episode on decentralization and it is always good to push subsidiarity principle that every function of government should be done at the lowest level of government at which it can possibly be done.

So can something be done at the state? then it's better done at the state than at the union. Can something be done at the city? then it's better done at the state or the union. Push things down. And then each city will be different. Each city will solve for its local conditions. The glory of Pune, the glory of Bombay, each will take off into different directions because these are different cities.

They have different contexts, they have different local expertise is different. Solving mass transport in Bombay is Bombay expertise. Solving mass transport in Pune is Pune expertise. You shouldn't think you're so arrogant that oh, I built a metro rail system in Delhi, so I'm ready to tell everybody in India how to build metro rail systems. That's really inappropriate.

if you were trying to use the coercive power of the state in pushing these kinds of messages on all the cities of India, it would be high modernism. So any one India one X scheme should be viewed with suspicion. I mean, you have one India, one Indian rupee because monetary policy is meaningfully a union subject. You have one India, one Indian military.

It makes sense because the union of India should have only one military. But in most other things, why do you have one single system? It's better to have many local systems. Let them be authentically responding to local pressure. Let them compete with each other. Let them understand what works, what doesn't work. You just get a thousand flowers to bloom.

So, I think directly flowing from this kind of critique of high modernism is the virtues of decentralization. that we are better off with more and more radical decentralization. In this sense, I really admire the European Union. The European Union is the lab of globalization. The people move freely, the goods move freely, the services move freely, the capital moves freely.

but actually they are very decentralized. abortion is illegal in one country, it is fully legal in another country. They all make their own rules and laws and if you don't like to live in Portugal, you go live in France. Okay? That's the way these things should be done. It's not a single government of Europe that will micro manage the entire continent.

Amit Varma: When you say one India is equal to one X is a bad thing, by and large, I agree with you, but there's one important exception, which is YouTube shows. One India, one YouTube show is an idea I can get behind. And gentle readers may now protest, but everything is everything is in English. How will the rest of India consume it?

Allow me to inform you that if you click on the settings tab, you will see that we are available in at least 10 languages. Uh and you can hear us in Italian, Spanish, um Hindi and Bengali will hopefully be there one day if it is not already. Right now, it's not in our voices with perfect lipsync, but give it a year that technology will also be there.

So, one India, one YouTube show, everything is

Ajay Shah: Everything. The day before yesterday, uh Susan asked me that show me the Malayalam dubbing because she wanted her stepmother to start watching these shows. And I looked and to my consternation, oh YouTube overlords, you are supporting Hindi, but you're not supporting Malayalam. If you keep going like this, you'll have serious problems.

Okay, so Amit, I'm at the end of this episode about the great book Seeing Like a State. I want to summarize at the end with an idea for the readers. Okay? So, look the toolkit is state legibility schemes, high modernism, metis. Okay? I feel these are great ideas and concepts and I would encourage everybody that start looking at the world around you and start wondering what these mean.

And they're actually there all over the place. So, by the way, now you will see uh how we invent YouTube content. See every YouTube creator should read seeing like a state. Do you remember we have one episode on firms and imperial firms versus adaptive firms. Okay? What is that? That is metis in firms.

So, basically once I took this toolkit into my brain and I applied it inside firms and I look at the arrogance of a giant national bank trying to run an entire bank through one process, one manual. And I just start becoming skeptical that you know, UP is not Maharashtra, you should be doing different things, different strokes for different situations.

And like that, it's a engine for thinking about the world and understanding things.

Amit Varma: So Ajay, do you have any recommendations?

Ajay Shah: No Amit, I do not.

Amit Varma: It's a sad, sad day. But I do. And really I didn't have recommendations before the episode started, but while you were speaking, sparks kept going off in my brain and I thought, huh, this book explains this and this book explains this and everything fits into place. High modernism. The book to get is a book I've recommended before on the show long ago in an early episode, The Power Broker by Robert Caro.

This is a masterpiece. It is really ostensibly a biography of one man called Robert Moses, but more than that, it is also the biography of the city of New York and it is a study of power, how power can be used and misused and how power corrupts. Robert Moses was a great city planner in New York who did a lot of the high modernism when it came to planning New York, that these are the bridges and parks and this is where they will be and I will design from the top down how they should be.

And the book is a masterpiece that takes you through all of that, just a great piece of writing. And an interesting piece of trivia about the book which is also a sad piece of trivia is while the book was about 800, 900,000 words, there was a 100,000 words section which was left out because it was originally more than a million words and the publisher just looked at the thinness paper and the grammage and said, "Beyond this, the book will fall apart."

So they took out 100,000 words on Jane Jacobs. Jane Jacobs is one of our heroes. An absolutely great lady and her book is my second recommendation for the day, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. And these are two opposing philosophies, the high modernism of Robert Moses and the organic appreciation for spontaneous order and for metis.

That Jane Jacobs embodied in her work. She is a great writer. Everyone has to absolutely read her. Maybe one day we'll do one of her books here as well, but just an absolute genius.

Ajay Shah: And by the way, in Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott intensively goes into the thinking and reasoning of Jane Jacobs.

Amit Varma: Absolutely great lady. I must also confess here by the way that I was born in a place that was designed by one of the villains of high modernism. I was born in Chandigarh, Le Corbusier himself made it. So I remember the last time I went to Chandigarh, I was with a couple of friends of ours and I was just saying that at one level, ya achcha lag raha hai, roads are wide, air is clean, this looks nice, what is the problem?

But deep but that is a scene. Deep down inside, I know the unseen, I know the cost. So

Ajay Shah: And also urbanism, a great modern living city is not Chandigarh.

Amit Varma: Exactly. And speaking of that, my next recommendation is again a book both of us love and we've recommended here, Order without Design by Alain Bertaud. Alain Bertaud is just a great, great thinker. Order without design is what happens when you have solid economic thinking brought to urban planning. When you look at cities through multiple lenses from multiple disciplines and start figuring out what works and what doesn't work.

And that is also a book that exposes the follies of high modernism and has great regard and respect for metis, for local knowledge, the way things are built, why are they built that way? Why do streets function in a particular way? Why are trees in a particular this thing? All of which you have to respect and you can't just come out there with no knowledge of all of that and just say, "I will design it to my will, I will make it a beautiful Prussian forest."

Ajay Shah: And the coolest thing about Alain Bertaud is he's not an economist.

Amit Varma: That's the coolest thing that you know, and these kind of men who come from adjacent fields who are Renaissance men who span different domains like James C. Scott and they are they are all my favorite thinkers because everything is everything. My fourth book comes from again when you were explaining Metis and you were talking about Prussian forest and the great folly of Prussian forest, I straight away thought of this wonderful book called The Hidden Life of Trees.

And the hidden life of trees is about how trees live with each other. It treats trees almost as living beings and it was an eye opening book for me because it made me realize that you can't just plant 40 trees together and think that it is an ecosystem. It is not when a natural forest grows up organically and has been there for hundreds of years, all the roots are talking to all the other roots.

They are communicating. If something bad happens to one tree, all the other trees immediately adjust. It's just incredible and miraculous and magical and all of us should read it because I think it tackles another form of hubris. The hubris that humans are super cool and we have figured everything out. And we are not super cool.

The natural world is so complicated, so beautiful and in ways that we cannot fathom, so advanced, uh achieving things that we possibly cannot and is beautiful and for that appreciation, the hidden life of trees is my fourth book. My fifth and last recommendation of the day, uh actually has to do with two people you mentioned.

One, you mentioned the shift to Daulatabad and all of that. So there is a great play called Tughlak by Girish Karnad. And when I was in college, when I was 19 years old or 18 years old, I forget which exactly, I actually tried to stage it. I got together with a friend of mine Rupesh and we tried to do a two man this thing of the play and but inevitably one of us was Bengali and hint it wasn't him and therefore the project went to hell and I procrastinated.

But here's the thing about the play. One, Tughlak in a sense was a high modernist where he said I will shift the capital, I will do this to the currency, etcetera, etcetera and all of it failed. But the reason Girish Karnad wrote the play is because in those days in the mid 60s, there was already a deep disillusionment setting in with Nehruvian socialism.

So as much as the play was about Tughlak, it was about Nehru and it was about this particular folly. Now, I do not know if Tughlak was a great man, but Nehru certainly was as you've pointed out and we've spoken about. This shows that people contain multitudes, great follies can be made by great men.

So, Tughlak is another fantastic book and I actually feel bad that I've only recommended one fiction book out of these five. You know, I I think that there is a world of revelation and a world of truth about the human condition in fiction. So promise to you dear reader, in the next episode, from the next episode onwards, I will recommend more fiction, more art, more cinema and so will Ajay Shah. Right?

A couple of episodes back you said in the next episode, I will give you seven recommendations. What have you to say for yourself?

Ajay Shah: In the next episode, I will give you nine recommendations.

Amit Varma: Satyanash.