openpolitics.com

Scott calls the thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high modernism,” but as we’ll see, the failure mode is not limited to the brief intellectual reign of high modernism (roughly, the first half of the twentieth century).

Here is the recipe:

• Look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
• Fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works
• Attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations
• Come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
• Argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality
• Use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
• Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly

Central to Scott’s thesis is the idea of legibility. He explains how he stumbled across the idea while researching efforts by nation states to settle or “sedentarize” nomads, pastoralists, gypsies and other peoples living non-mainstream lives:

.. The state is not actually interested in the rich functional structure and complex behavior of the very organic entities that it governs (and indeed, is part of, rather than “above”). It merely views them as resources that must be organized in order to yield optimal returns according to a centralized, narrow, and strictly utilitarian logic.

.. The book begins with an early example, “scientific” forestry (illustrated in the picture above). The early modern state, Germany in this case, was only interested in maximizing tax revenues from forestry. This meant that the acreage, yield and market value of a forest had to be measured, and only these obviously relevant variables were comprehended by the statist mental model. Traditional wild and unruly forests were literally illegible to the state surveyor’s eyes, and this gave birth to “scientific” forestry: the gradual transformation of forests with a rich diversity of species growing wildly and randomly into orderly stands of the highest-yielding varieties.

High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead tosimplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.”

.. If my conjecture is correct, then the High Modernist failure-through-legibility-seeking formula is a large scale effect of the rationalization of the fear of (apparent) chaos.

.. And no, the currently popular “pave the cowpaths” and behavioral-economic “choice architecture” design philosophies do not provide immunity against these failure modes. In fact paving the cowpaths in naive ways is an instanceof this failure mode (the way to avoid it would be to choose to not pave certain cowpaths).

.. For the technologists among you, a quick (and very crude) calibration point should help: we are talking about the big brother of waterfall planning here. The psychology is very similar to the urge to throw legacy software away. In fact Joel Spolsky’s post on the subject Things You Should Never Do, Part I, reads like a narrower version of Scott’s arguments. But Scott’s model is much deeper, more robust, more subtly argued, and more broadly applicable.  I haven’t yet thought it through, but I don’t think lean/agile software development can actually mitigate this failure mode anymore than choice architecture can mitigate it in public policy