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Note that according to Scott himself the best modern form of seeimg like a state was an invention of private corporations (Taylorism) from where it spread to states, including both US and USSR. Waterfall planning came out of corporations too. 5y plans have corporate origins.
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When I use the term “good bureaucracy” I mean it not in a moral sense but in the sense “true to its essential Taoist nature.” Good is merely all that has demonstrable persistence and can be perpetuated without undoing anything else.
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Accretion displaces arbitrary definitions of “Progress” made up by morally self-important types that are always Regress to an opposed breed of moralist. Bureaucracy does an end run around that.
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I’m not trying to troll friends or mint haters. If you have genuine criticism of my theory, please submit it via Form 42, in triplicate. We are an open, responsive bureaucracy in this thread. Appropriate Actions will be taken in response to all feedback
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The essay will also feature blockchains, and given recent experiences of Indian bureaucracy that inspired this thread, also what are known as babus (bureaucrats). We will discuss Blockchain Babus.
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There is definitely some sort of natural Indian bureaucrat gene. At the risk of culturally essentializing My People, the "Indian CEO" stage of a tech company is also the "bureaucratization" stage. Consolidate and entrench.
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I get the distinct sense that most efforts to essentialize India immediately surface significant and obvious exceptions, but it occurs to me that empires have recruited and supported clades of local management talent for long enough that an artificial origin might make sense.
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oh totally... migration also has a selection effect... the dropout entrepreneurs tend to stay in india and build empires there, the good academic types migrate on student visas... selection effect is strong there
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I only ever do it ironically... your sense is more true than you might think, but there's a definite weird cultural evolution nexus of hinduism being primarily a law-based religion, being colonized by 2 very legalistic cultures (islam and britain) and modern middle class dna
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I think also Persian leadership and presumably even that forgotten language-group-namer empire found it worthwhile to establish the occasional abstraction layer or ten between upper management and the day-to-day of such a complicated polity.
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