This Technocracy
By F. YEArs-BnoW-x.
EVERYONE was talking about Mr. Howard Scott and his " Energy Survey of North America " when I was in the Middle West of the United States six weeks ago. In New York, however, near Christmas- time, I found people tired-of-the subject : we discussed instead Beer and Debts and the coming of the Oxford Group. But I do not think that Technocracy will go the way of Mah-Jong or Yo-Yo : it may vanish. as a topic of conversation at dinner parties, but it will remain as a considerable political influence, not only because the President-Elect is reputed to be interested in it, but also because of the important statistical work being done by the " technocrats " at Columbia University.
Definitions are generally ' tedious, but as regards technocracy there is little to define. The word, of course, means the rule of technical experts. Mr. Scott's claim is that since machines have so largely replaced men in industry we have better slaves at our command now than at any other period of human history ; and that there is no reason why everyone in North America should not have plenty of money and leisure (f5,000 a year for a four-day week of four hours a day is the standard suggested) provided that our present price- system is changed in favour of a monetary system based on units of energy. In order to do this (and here is the catch, here is the inevitable entry of the supermen of Utopia-0 technical experts must control the Government.
• -Mr. Scott has contributed an article to this month's Harp er's Magazine which explains very well what is wrong with the world, but is not nearly so explicit about the means by which it can be put right. It is, moreover, pertinent to add that Mr. Scott's own ante- cedents do not in themselves give him any very impressive locus standi. He holds no degree of any kind, and he has not proven his ability by any practical success. Yet his friends at Columbia UniVersity regard him as little short of a genius and say that his knowledge of the physical sciences is amazing. Amongst his friends are men of the highest distinction in all walks of American life.
In the past, Mr. Scott is believed to have been what we would call in this country a Socialist -agitator ; but to-day he will have nothing to say to any of the old or new political parties : he asserts that Socialists, Com- munists, Fascists, as well as Democrats and Republicans, are all living in the dark ages, trying to make a system work which was all very well when the world depended on the muscles of men and domestic animals, but which became out of date when James Watt invented the steam engine, and which is now dangerously anachronistic.
" Not until the day of the machines arrived, machineS which could multiply the rate of using energy thousands of times over, did an absolutely new influence appear in human society. It is because we have not taken thought for this influence that we in America find ourselves where we are to-day, with ruin staring us in the face." Energy, says Mr. Scott, can be,mcasnred in units of work, the erg and the joule, or in the unit of b6.t, the -caloric. " The solution of the social problems of our time depends- on this fact.* A dollar may be worth so much to-day, and More or less to-morrow, but unit of work or heat is the same in 1900, 1929, or 1933. . . . A pound . of coal is always a pound of coal, but the weight of a dollar's worth of coal is seldom twice the. same."
Therefore, says the chief technocrat, we must abolish the dollar.. What we should substitute for it is not very clear, but " energy certificates " have been Mentioned; How these certificates would differ from Uncle Sam's present promises to pay is not clear to me (though, of course, I see that they might be based on something more theoretically satisfactory, but less generally understood, than gold), nor do I quite see why such certificates should have the power to abolish the present strange contrast between widespread poverty and great surplus of con- sumable wealth. Yet Mr. Scott impresses me when he says that our economics are those of scarcity, whereas modern mass-production should have brought plenty within the reach of everyone if our methods of exchange and distribution had been right.
Mr. Scott gives us many exciting and sinister instances of the conquest of men by machines, beginning with a rayon-silk factory at Newark, which is designed to run without any human labour except one man at a. switch- board. Then there is the telctypesetter which sets up type automatically in a number of places through a master keyboard, thereby sometimes ousting hundreds of linotype operators. I saw this machine in operation in the office of Time, high above New York on the sixtieth storey of the Chrysler Building : an operator was setting up last-minute news which in a few seconds would go to the waiting presses in Chicago. Again there is the photo-. electric cell which can open doors, catch thieves, detect imperfections in cloth, sort articles of almost any description. In Hollywood I was told that it was guarding Miss Marlene Dietrich's child from the danger of kidnappers ; and in New York I saw it opening a door for laden waiters in Child's Restaurant on Lexington Avenue : the robots electric eye misses very; little:
When I was staying in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin last August, I was told that the management had installed electrical tabulating machines that halved the number of book-keepers required. And as I write this I have before me a letter in Monday's News-Chronicle describing the transport of three thousand bricks from Bedfordshire to Middlesex in a monster truck. (Perhaps the truck was made in Milwaukee, at the famous Smith Plant, where 208 men can turn out 10;000 chassis-frames in a .day.) In the old days these bricks would have gone by rail, and would have been loaded and unloaded from six carts with six drivers. " Cannot we see,". the writer concludes, " how much unemployment and railway depression are thus caused ? And who gets the benefit ? "
* Mr. Scott quotes Lord Kelvin : If you can measure that of which you speak, you know something of your subject; but if you cannot measure it, your knowledge is meagre and unsatis. factory."
Who, indeed ? Alas, the chief product of our marvellous machines seems to be unemployment..
Can any dickering with currency alter this state of affairs ? " Technocracy, oh, yeah ? " was the comment of a wise friend. Yet Professor Soddy has been telling us ever since 1926 that " there is something very funny about our modern monetary systems." We may be on the eve of big changes. Mr. Scott may be a lever that will set men's minds to work constructively on these difficult problems, or he may be only a monkey wrench dropped into the delicate cogs of capitalism. I don't know. I don't think he is enunciating any n^w truths, but I believe he is inducing people to thin!: about them in a new way.
Previous page
