A fundamental need of a state is to make its population "legible."

A nice summary of Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a Taxman by Andrew P. Morriss.

Scott offers four big ideas that shape his analytical framework. First, he argues that a fundamental need of a state is to make its population "legible." In essence, a legible population is one in which the relevant characteristics for state purposes are defined and known. Second, he contends that by doing so, the state changes the nature of the activities the population carries on, the culture, and the society as a whole. In other words, you get more of what you measure. Third, he attributes social engineering projects in part to what he terms "high modernist ideology," in which scientific and technical models are uncritically applied to societies, encouraging government actors to believe they can significantly change societies through administrative fiat. Fourth, when this ideology is married to a state with significant coercive power and civil society lacks the capacity to resist, the state does considerable harm by forcing an agenda on society without considering all the costs.

Worth reading the whole thing.