{"id":37772,"date":"2019-01-31T01:00:02","date_gmt":"2019-01-31T06:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37772"},"modified":"2019-01-01T12:39:24","modified_gmt":"2019-01-01T17:39:24","slug":"qotd-top-down-solutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/01\/31\/qotd-top-down-solutions\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Top-down solutions"},"content":{"rendered":"

The closest analogy I can think of right now \u2013 maybe because it\u2019s on my mind \u2013 is this story about check-cashing shops<\/a>. Professors of social science think these shops are evil because they charge the poor higher rates, so they should be regulated away so that poor people don\u2019t foolishly shoot themselves in the foot by going to them. But on closer inspection, they offer a better deal for the poor than banks do, for complicated reasons that aren\u2019t visible just by comparing the raw numbers. Poor people\u2019s understanding of this seems a lot like the metis<\/em> that helps them understand local agriculture. And progressives\u2019 desire to shift control to the big banks seems a lot like the High Modernists\u2019 desire to shift everything to a few big farms. Maybe this is a point in favor of something like libertarianism? Maybe especially a \u201clibertarianism of the poor\u201d focusing on things like occupational licensing, not shutting down various services to the poor because they don\u2019t meet rich-people standards, not shutting down various services to the poor because we think they\u2019re \u201cprice-gouging\u201d, et cetera?<\/p>\n

Maybe instead of concluding that Scott is too focused on peasant villages, we should conclude that he\u2019s focused on confrontations between a well-educated authoritarian overclass and a totally separate poor underclass. Most modern political issues don\u2019t exactly map on to that \u2013 even things like taxes where the rich and the poor are on separate sides don\u2019t have a bimodal distribution. But in cases there are literally about rich people trying to dictate to the poorest of the poor how they should live their lives, maybe this becomes more useful.<\/p>\n

Actually, one of the best things the book did to me was make me take cliches about \u201crich people need to defer to the poor on poverty-related policy ideas\u201d more seriously. This has become so overused that I roll my eyes at it. \u201cQuantitative easing could improve GDP growth\u2026but instead of asking macroeconomists, let\u2019s ask this 19-year old single mother in the Bronx!\u201d But Scott provides a lot of situations where that was exactly the sort of person they should have asked. He also points out that Tanzanian natives using their traditional farming practices were more productive than European colonists using scientific farming. I\u2019ve had to listen to so many people talk about how \u201cwe must respect native people\u2019s different ways of knowing\u201d and \u201cnative agriculturalists have a profound respect for the earth that goes beyond logocentric Western ideals\u201d and nobody had ever bothered to tell me before that they actually produced more crops per acre<\/em>, at least some of the time. That would have put all of the other stuff in a pretty different light.<\/p>\n

Finally, I understand Scott is an anarchist. He didn\u2019t really try to defend anarchism in this book. But I was struck by his description of peasant villages as this unit of government which were happily doing their own thing very effectively for millennia, with the central government\u2019s relevance being entirely negative \u2013 mostly demanding taxes or starting wars. They kind of reminded me of some pictures of hunter-gatherer tribes, in terms of being self-sufficient, informal, and just never encountering the sorts of economic and political problems that we take for granted. They make communism (the type with actual communes, not the type where you have huge military parades and kill everyone) look more attractive. I think Scott was trying to imply that this is the sort of thing we could have if not for governments demanding legibility and a world of universal formal rule codes accessible from the center? Since he never actually made the argument, it\u2019s hard for me to critique it. And I wish there had been more about cultural evolution as separate from the more individual idea of metis<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Overall, though, I did like this book. I\u2019m not really sure what I got from its thesis, but maybe that was appropriate. Seeing Like A State<\/em> was arranged kind of like the premodern forests and villages it describes; not especially well-organized, not really directed toward any clear predetermined goal, but full of interesting things and lovely to spend some time in.<\/p>\n

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2017-03-16.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The closest analogy I can think of right now \u2013 maybe because it\u2019s on my mind \u2013 is this story about check-cashing shops. Professors of social science think these shops are evil because they charge the poor higher rates, so they should be regulated away so that poor people don\u2019t foolishly shoot themselves in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,84,7,41],"tags":[756,712,86],"class_list":["post-37772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","tag-anarchy","tag-centralplanning","tag-criticism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9Pe","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37772"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37773,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37772\/revisions\/37773"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}