[2024-12-01]

To be short - time-tested and famous for a reason book on the drawbacks of top-down decision-making. I’d say very relevant for people analyzing systems and policies.

It might be a pattern for me, but I recently found older and well-known books to be deeper - obvious bias, but why not leverage it?

The grounding in history, and reasoning - probably years and careers spent on the research do show itself quite favourably against more productive ‘authors’ covering something new every year or someone producing the book on the current thing discussion relevant for 3 months.

In a way - undoubtedly admirable skill, but it doesn’t beat a well-researched topic.

When reading the book one would probably find familiar themes (how tax policies affected the looks of houses), how the tax collection, something on forestry, agrarian policy, urbanism.

Many examples I’d say highlight the true complexity of the world:

• How the local knowledge get established and why it vanished (easier to collect taxes)
• How people got surnames (same reason)
• Why plain planning didn’t work exactly as intended (scientific forestry/agriculture)
• Which drawbacks planning from miniatures has (it doesn’t work on the ground)
• How easy it is to lessen the autonomy of people, even out of good intentions.