Seeing Like a State: Best of the Blogs | Cato Unbound
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 about the actual social processes through which markets work, and in particular the forms of standardization that are necessary to make long-distance trade work. I imagine Scott’s counterblast going something like this: It is all very fine to say that markets provide a means to communicate tacit knowledge, and it is even true of many markets, especially small scale ones with participants who know each other, know the product and so on. But global markets do not rely on tacit knowledge. They rely on standardization — the homogenization of products so that they can be lumped under the appropriate heading within a