Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press.

This book has been longer in the making than I would care to admit. It would be nice to be able to claim that it just took that long to think it through. Nice, but not truthful. A nearly fatal combination of malinger­ ing and adm inistrative chores accounts for part of the delay. For the rest, the scope of the book simply expanded, in an academic version of Parkinsons Law, to fill all the space that I would give to it. Finally, I had to call an arbitrary halt or else start thinking of it as a life's work. The scope of the book together with the time it took to compl