ABSTRACT
In Scott's (1998) classic account of government, Seeing like a State, he argues that state power is established through an administrative vision that enables government to track, monitor and record citizens, and engineer policies to enhance economic development. Increasingly, seeing like a state means ‘seeing like a market’ (a term used in reference to Foucault by Tellmann, 2009 and being developed by Fourcade and Healy, 2013). Markets have become dominant ways of resolving all kinds of policy problems, from CO2 to water supply, and from energy to healthcare. More fundamentally, the general epistemic warrant given to ‘the marketplace’ as the best adjudicator of expertise is a core trademark of neoliberal thinking. In the ‘marketplace of ideas’, the market delivers the best verified and established information, its raw information processing capacity far surpassing the ability of states or intelligent persons (Mirowski, 2011). Markets can be trusted to deliver solutions not simply because they may provide regulatory fixes for a wide range of problems, but because they have the ability to know better than a state could. As Mirowski (2012) somewhat bluntly states, a neoliberal agenda does not invest hope in state-funded science, but rather in the “day when all knowledge (and not just science) is comprehensively funded and coordinated by the market, which really means private corporations, and state-organized research is reduced to a pitiful insignificant remnant” (Mirowski, 2012: 306). If states see like markets, then there would be a withdrawal from state funding of science and state intervention into knowledge production. In line with this conclusion, a significant literature on the political economy of science has emerged particularly focusing on innovation, research and development as arenas in which marketization is increasing visible (and as chapters in this book demonstrate). But in Scott's (1998) account, data practices are central to seeing like a state whether through censuses, surveys or maps. Likewise in Mitchell's (2002) account of the formation of national economic management there is a reorganization and transformation of calculative practices (property titling, surveys and maps, national statistics) that is crucial to establishing ‘the economy’ as an object for development. Data are equally central therefore to seeing like a market.
