September, 2010

Some Replies on Markets, Languages, and Law

by James C. Scott
The Conversation
September 27th, 2010

I have been struck by both the quality and breadth of the responses to my essay and, it’s clear, to the argument in Seeing Like a State that lies behind it. In some cases, I am somewhat at a loss to reply inasmuch as I am not an economist, not a well-read libertarian, not a [...]

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Of Hayek and Rubber Tomatoes

by Timothy B. Lee
The Conversation
September 24th, 2010

Henry Farrell writes that “Hayek argues that markets are superior because they allow the ‘dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess’ to be aggregated in a useful way.” He then faults Hayek for failing to acknowledge a key limitation of the price mechanism: its tendency to “destroy” knowledge [...]

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Uncommonly Good Law

by Donald J. Boudreaux
The Conversation
September 22nd, 2010

Timothy Lee’s distinction between state-enforced standardization and spontaneously ordered standardization is crucial. And all that Lee says on this point (and in his earlier essay in this thread at Cato Unbound) has earned my sincere applause. Anyone who blogs at Café Hayek, as I do, can hardly question the marvelous reach and power of spontaneous [...]

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Coordination vs. Coercion

by Timothy B. Lee
The Conversation
September 20th, 2010

Don Boudreaux makes an interesting point about the way standardization facilitates social cooperation and the division of labor. But I think it’s important to remember that the distinctive feature of the state-building projects James Scott describes wasn’t just standardization, but coercion. People were compelled to adopt new surnames, geographical indicators, property boundaries, and the like [...]

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Letters Department: Jacob T. Levy on Seeing Like a State

Editors’ note: Political theorist Jacob T. Levy of McGill University sends us his thoughts on this month’s discussion, which we are pleased to share in full. I begin with a few words of unembarrassed admiration. James Scott’s Seeing Like a State, from which his essay is largely drawn, is one of the most important books [...]

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Seeing Like a State: Best of the Blogs

This month we’ve been fortunate to have some very astute outside commentary on the discussion. Henry Farrell suggests that Seeing Like a State undermines Hayekian economics. Briefly, we face a tradeoff between homogenization of products, bringing economies of scale — and local knowledge, supposedly the engine of a laissez-faire economy: [Friedrich] Hayek is remarkably incurious [...]

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Perhaps. And Sometimes.

by J. Bradford DeLong
Reaction Essay
September 16th, 2010

Brad DeLong sees both strengths and weaknesses in the state’s ability to survey civil society. With the help of an extended example from late Roman times, he argues that states can offer no protection against local disorder when they cannot see the localities and peoples they propose to protect.

Yet a legible civil society is also prey to the state’s own “fits of ideological terror, or even clumsy thumb-fingeredness,” he argues, suggesting that legibility may be orthogonal to liberty. Ultimately, a state that fosters a robust civil society, while contenting itself with simply watching its growth, may be best of all, even if it is unlikely.

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Seeing Like a Movie Mogul

by Timothy B. Lee
Reaction Essay
September 14th, 2010

Timothy B. Lee notes that many aspects of information technology policy are deeply implicated in the process of “seeing like a state.” Despite their rhetoric of private property, patents, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property can act largely as transfers of wealth from ordinary people (be they peasants or consumers of digital media) to those who are most closely aligned to the state. This is a deeply illiberal result and one that libertarians should be especially wary of.

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