Recommendations from our site
“Scott’s book is very important for anybody who wants to have an understanding of how complex modern societies work, why things seem to fail predictably, and what you can do about them, to a limited extent. He doesn’t have many solutions and prescriptions but his analysis and diagnosis is spot on.” Read more...
The best books on How the World Works
Venkatesh Rao, Entrepreneurs & Business People
“This is a book that talks about the perils and limitations of policy wonk hubris – the idea that we are capable of large-scale top-down designs on society to have specific effects. It goes through a number of cases, such as urban planning, where the most well-intended thoughtful interventions don’t lead to the desired effect and sometimes have exactly the opposite effect. I would say an example would be global population policies, such as the Chinese one-child policy. It’s a good lesson for people thinking about climate change, whether to create a global policy for carbon dioxide emissions – we’ve seen that lead to corruption and mischievous accounting rather than emission reduction.” Read more...
The best books on Climate Change Innovation
Roger Pielke Jr, Environmentalist
“He thinks that the way that the state chooses to count, or the way it chooses to see, will inform how it behaves and what kind of animal it becomes. Scott explains, for example, how in France, in early modern times, the state decided to count two things. It decided to count how much salt there was and how many able-bodied men there were, because it wanted to tax the salt and send the able-bodied men off to war. Now perhaps the state decides to count other things, how many healthy people there are, how many well-educated people they are… So that what the state chooses to count determines the parameters of what the state chooses to do.” Read more...
The best books on Failed States
Clare Lockhart, Development & Aid Workers (see also Economists)
