Constantly bewailing on Nostr: “Quantification gave us the nation-state and the Industrial Revolution. It made the ...

“Quantification gave us the nation-state and the Industrial Revolution. It made the world more predictable, allowing for scalability. Quantification empowered the government to become larger. A king without numbers can only see what his eyes can glimpse, and he can only vaguely know what his informants, similarly limited by the reach of their vision, tell him. Without knowledge of the size of the population and the resources being produced, large-scale military coordination and taxation were unfeasible.”