Model Mirage Beware the new Technocracy

With rumours that the recent dramatic drop in the market was triggered by fat fingers and computer based trading, I felt it might be time for a history lesson. Sometimes, remembering that some members of the technical community tend to over sell their worth and under sell the risks can provide a fresh perspective.

I recently stumbled among another group of engineers who promised to balance the market and eliminate risks. In the 1940's a group called Technocracy gained popularity in North America. The organization gave lecture tours, study courses, and held motorcades, where hundreds of official “Technocracy Grey Cars” travelled all over the United States and Canada.

Their founder Howard Scott basic idea was that all human endeavour could quantified in terms of energy expended. Whatever it took to make anything could be translated into pure ergs and joules. Their plan was to take a grand energy survey of all the nations industries. Once it was determined how much energy it took to make everything, the nation’s engineers could step in and eliminate the irrational “social motives” in business. That is, all the energy businessmen put into making luxury goods and profits.

Once quantified Scott believed the new rational system could be distributed on a perfectly equal basis to all U.S. citizens. To keep everything balanced and that pesky capital from accumulating, people would have to use up their “energy certificates” during the year or see them become worthless.

The result of the application of the Technocracy methods would be such abundance that no one would have to work more than four hours or so, four days a week.

Natually the hype around Technocracy died when their promise of amazing new technologies failed to appear. The lesson we all appear that progress tends to be more a drunken walk than a white knight riding in with all the answers.