I like the book quite a bit, and it's been formative in my politics.

That said, I am not sure if the take-away is that managers need to account for these factors by allowing for illegibility- I am not reading you claim that, but contextually that's how the discussion feels to me.

I do agree with Scott that enforcing perfect legibility is impossible and even attempting to do so can cause immense problems, and I agree with his analysis of these modernist efforts and have found that it's a useful lens for understanding a lot of human enterprise.

I find a lot of hope in that view: nothing actually gets done without some horizontal, anarchist cooperation.

But I also find hope in the fact that it's structurally a issue with authoritarian organizational strategies which can't be accounted for and surmounted.

Maybe I would have found the book more impactful if I had read it earlier in life. I felt like it put together various ideas and presented them well in a comprehensible manner. What I feel it omits is that the mechanisms of a state only have to be actionable, not rational. If you ask me how to mow a lawn and I come up with some byzantine process involving multiple steps that don't even contribute to the end goal I'm going to be labeled nuts or maybe "eccentric" if they want to be polite. The same scrutiny doesn't apply to the various bureaucratic processes of a state for whatever reason.

Only revisionist history tell tales of flourishing kingdoms under a just king. In reality, the reason feodality worked for so long was the anarchy and power struggle, the cavalcades (basically raids) and a honour based justice (basically don't kill fellow nobility during war, and avoid killing militantes during cavalcades and you'll be good). The anarchical nature of the system made it particularly susceptible to organised raids, but also extremely 'agile' in it's political responses. Once power was consolidated however, the clergy and the royalty pushed their law and hierarchical order onto the mostly aristocratic feodality, it broke and you get the crusade against Alby, the war between Plantagenet and capetiens, and probably a lot of other misery inflicted to the general population. Then once the hierarchical order is set, you need an administration, which will become inefficient by nature.

The question is if the Kingdom would then still be worth surviving if life for everyone there ends up being miserable.

> The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.

It "works" in the sense that it can be kept going by patching the damage it causes by throwing more money at it.

What it mostly does at scale is appear to work, to those high enough above it that they can't see any of the details: only the metrics that are being optimized for.

An MBA is a professional graduate degree, like a JD or MD. Criticizing professional degree programs for lack of humanities coursework rather misses the point. Students are supposed to have got that in undergraduate.