The Technocratic Economy

“The price system, born of agrarian culture with handtools and human perspiration and all of its scarcity values, is incapable of managing affairs in a high-energy civilization.” — Arvid Petersen, member of Technocracy, Inc.

 

Lecture with Arvid Petersen, 1980.  Part 1 of 7.

 

In 1918, the Technical Alliance, a coalition of scientists, engineers, doctors and educators representing the academic community, the private sector and the federal government,  was founded with the key purpose of conducting the Energy Survey of North America.  This survey was conducted to measure and analyze the continent’s natural resources, manufacturing capabilities, and energy usage.  Based on this research, the Alliance concluded that the modern economy, which in the industrial and post-industrial economy had transformed the money system into a system based on debt and expansion rather on true supply and demand, contained and perpetuated enormous inefficiency and waste that could account for the majority of society’s problems.  

Based on these conclusions, an organization called Technocracy, Inc. was founded to proliferate their findings and advocate a new economic order, replacing the price system with a resource-based system, in which the supply meets the demands of the people by the standard of optimal energy use instead of optimal profit.  The currency of this system would be energy credits and therefore, the cheaper product would be the product that is most energy efficient.  The wealthiest system of production and consumption would be the system that reduced the amount of entropy generated and energy lost.

Technocracy as a viable alternative to the price system took popular hold as the Great Depression deepened and capitalism had a hardtime regaining its footing.  However, as World War II mobilized the country’s population and victory brought about an unprecedented expansion of consumer power, the ideas of technocracy were obscured and overshadowed.  

Today, we are in the midst of another failure of capitalism compounded by an imminent collapse of our ecosystems, a direct result of the inefficient and wasteful global economy.  Much of the alternative social ideology that engage people today focuses on reclaiming smaller decentralized community, local agriculture, self-sufficience based on the intentions of getting in touch with our human roots, unplugging ourselves from our screens and rediscovering a unity with other people and with nature.  At the same time, almost paradoxically, people depend on the benefits of technological acceleration, allowing a communicative reach that extends to the far corners of the globe, greater and more varied access to information and culture, and an ever-increasing amount of tools to facilitate self-expression.  

What if we found a way to make that vast amount of computational and informational processing power we’ve built truly work for us, to measure and analyze empirically the resources the world provides us and optimize the implementation of a new social order based solely on what is healthiest for our environment and for our society?

There is great idealism in science that exists on the fringes, but is the potential expressed in the philosophy of technocracy.  

I will be delving into this further.

 

Sources and Links:
History and Purpose of Technocracy, a pamphlet written by Howard Scott, the founder of Technocracy, Inc. in 1964
The North American Technate (TNAT)
Technocracy Study Course

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