James C. Scott: Seeing Like a State

Don't get me wrong, but metis is YOLO. In 1932-33, Soviet collectivization destroyed local farming knowledge and produced a famine that killed somewhere between five and nine million people. It was one of the twentieth century’s great tragedies, and James Scott’s Seeing Like a State draws a straight line from the ideology that caused it - High Modernism, the belief that society can be rationally reorganized from above - to the disaster that followed. But here’s a number that doesn’t appear in Scott’s book. Eight billion.