Yeah, I was an executive assistant and editor there. As an editor, I got to read most of the research firsthand which was cool. I think we're saying flipsides of the same thing. I was impressed by their ability to do their work without being concerned that it would actually be implemented. The more you're around the politics of that world, the more you realize that the kind of honest, intellectually curious, and rigorous work they did has absolutely zero place in our current environment. That was what was disheartening. I don't want to be naive enough to think the political friction will change, so the reality is the planning always becomes less important than the politics.
Not familiar with Scott. My primary area of interest and study was the 19th century. Based on a quick Wiki reading, the thesis of The Art of Not Being Governed follows nicely from my studies of 19th century nationalisms and state building. The idea of evading the statebuilding project by being "barbaric by design" is quite interesting. Contrary to many peoples' notion of modernity, the modern state is based on conformity. The modern state only seeks to increase economic output, so if you are not centralized/industralized, you have nothing to offer it. Very smart of the Lao people!
My favorite professor used a similar texted called
Peasants into Frenchmen by Eugen Weber to make the point about nationalism in France:
Weber is associated with several important academic arguments. His book: Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 is a classic presentation of modernization theory. Although other historians such as Henri Mendras had put forward similar theories about the modernization of the French countryside, Weber's book was amongst the first to focus on changes in the period between 1870 and 1914. Weber emphasizes that well into the 19th century few French citizens regularly spoke French, but rather regional languages or dialects such as Breton, Gascon, Basque, Catalan, Flemish, Alsatian, and Corsican. Even in French-speaking areas provincial loyalties often transcended the putative bond of the nation. Between 1870 and 1914, Weber argued, a number of new forces penetrated the previously isolated countryside. These included the judicial and school systems, the army, the church, railways, roads, and a market economy. The result was the wholesale transformation of the population from "peasants," basically ignorant of the wider nation, to Frenchmen.
The fire-prevention issue is particularly important to me. In addition to indigenous practices, there are a lot of land managers who understand controlled burns are a critical element of our fire-prevention infrastructure, but fire prevention gets basically no funding! Trump turned it into a whole political issue with Newsom last year. Fire prevention is another issue where the long-term interests of communities has run up against the interests of wealthy property owners. Rich people living by forests and the general Western American tendency to put major cities right by tinderboxes. It's a problem with known solutions you could literally throw money at and get a great return on investment, but American doesn't do that. We let cities like Paradise, CA burn to the ground and tell people to get fucked.
There's a huge question of how to value local control while promoting progressive cultural values as well. I'd love to let Mississippi figure out their own when it comes to cleaning up lakes and streams, less so when it comes to setting up the polls. Federalism has some virtues.
Overall, I'm back where I started. I'm a planner at heart, but I fail to see how "long-term planning" fits in with our yo-yo political system and one party trying to destroy it from the inside. Do we keep the faith and try to build consensus for central planning? Or do we try a different strategy that doesn't rely so much on consensus to get things done? I'm still a statist, but increasingly think that American will never go down that route.
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