Why am I passionate about this?
As a writer, I’m much more interested in characters who want to change the world than those who want to defend the status quo. In popular storytelling, villains are usually the ones who want to radically remake everything. But as we hurtle towards a climate catastrophe that threatens to undo so much of our growth as a species, it’s clear that we need heroes in favor of radical change now. And you can’t make good change without understanding what you’re changing. Despite all the books I’ve recommended here about the failures of our own cognition – I think our only chance to make a better world is to figure out how the world operates and where we’re going wrong.
Seth's book list on about how the world really works
Why did Seth love this book?
Have you ever wondered why we can’t just make the world better? Sure, we’ve made enormous strides in agriculture and medicine over the past few centuries. We can generate electricity and move around the world in a day. We can feed and heal people. But why haven’t we just sat down and figured out the right way to live? Planned it all out on a clean sheet, like an architect.
Seeing Like a State is a book about why it’s impossible for ambitious programs of top-down control to succeed, and why they so often end up with millions of people dead. The world is always more complicated than the maps you make of it, and in a lot of situations, it turns out that complexity matters. You can’t design and build the perfect city. You have to grow it.
This book matters to me as an artist because it…
2 authors picked Seeing Like a State as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
"One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades."-John Gray, New York Times Book Review
"A powerful, and in many insightful, explanation as to why grandiose programs of social reform, not to mention revolution, so often end in tragedy. . . . An important critique of visionary state planning."-Robert Heilbroner, Lingua Franca
Hailed as "a magisterial critique of top-down social planning" by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail-sometimes catastrophically-in grand efforts to engineer their society or their…