2. Technocracy If Engineers Ruled the World

4. Technocracy 1.History 2.The Ideas 3.What Happened?

5. Forerunners of the Technocrats Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, UK, 1627

6. Forerunners of the Technocrats Saint-Simon, Du Systeme Industriel, France, 1802 `Industrial ability must replace feudal and military power; it is more important that administrators be competent than that they belong to a particular political party.’

7. Saint-Simon’s Three Chambers of Parliament 1.`Invention’: engineers and artists 2. `Examination’: scientists 3. `Execution’: industrialists

8. Prosper Enfantin, disciple of Saint-Simon

9. Technocracy in North America 1899: Bellamy publishes `Looking Backward’, a look ahead to the distant future (2000 AD) 1911: Taylor publishes `Principles of Scientific Management’. 1916: Gantt organises fifty engineers into `The New Machine’.

13. Technocracy in North America 1917: The US enters World War I 1921: Thorsten Veblen publishes `The Engineers and the Price System’. Hoover publishes the results of the Committee on the Elimination of Waste..

16. Technocracy in North America: 1919-1934 1919: Howard Scott, a disciple of Veblen, forms the Technical Alliance. The Alliance includes Charles Steinmetz, chief engineer of GE; Richard Tolman, later Dean of Physics at CalTech; and Veblen himself. 1921: The Alliance breaks up among accusations that Scott has mismanaged its funds. 1929: The Great Crash, followed by the Depression. 1931: Scott and Rautenstrauch form the Committee on technocracy.

22. Official and unofficial Technocratic publications from the 1930’s

23. Pre-Industrial Economy Most of an item’s value comes from the human energy expended to make it. So, given a society of N citizens, an individual can exchange a year’s labour for 1/N of the goods produced in the society that year. The institution of `money’ provides a way to ration scarce goods among the citizens.

24. Industrial Economy Most of the energy needed to produce an item is supplied by technology; human energy represents less than 2% of the total energy input. Thus a citizen can only exchange their labour for a tiny fraction of the goods produced by society. Money is no longer an efficient way to distribute abundant goods among the citizens.