A highly recommended review of James Scott's Seeing like a State which, not coincidentally, has also been reviewed by Yvain.

Sample:

I think this is helpful to understand why certain aesthetic ideals emerged. Many people maybe started on the more-empirical side, but then noticed that all of the research started looking the same. I’ve called this “quantification”. It probably looked geometric, “simple” (think Occam’s razor), etc. Much like you’d imagine scientific papers to look today. When confronted with a situation where they didn’t have data, but still knowing that in the past all the good data looked like “quantification”, there’s a pretty natural instinct to assume it should have a certain look. This is, of course, separate from the obsession with grids – what I’m really interested in here is why empirical data overlays metis in activities, not the preference for what a “clean city” would look like.

Where does this get us? From the perspective of early 20th century rationalists: global commerce and dazzling new technologies vs. peasants who insisted on setting their own crops on fire for a bizarre religious ritual. That’s not hyperbole, by the way, that’s an example from the book. The rationalists were maybe aware that they had spotty or incomplete data on growing practices, but the data they did have was quantified and supported by labs, whereas the villagers couldn’t explain their practice using any kind of data. The peasants, it turns out, were right, but would you have guessed that? More importantly: would you guess that now?